Student Learning Outcomes
for Composition 1 with Emily Graves
Project 1: Memoir
Given the rhetorical situation of making a presentation for a family event it seemed only natural for me to write about SLAP, and annual event that brings people from all around the world with a shared love and interest for skating. Out of the presentation choices, a digital story book and a video presentation were the only two that seemed capable of fully covering how I feel towards this event, I found it is difficult to show skateboarding without video or pictures.
The skate community is global, from free riders and downhill skaters in Europe, dance longboarding in Korea and parts of Europe, bowl and park skating in the United States, to the all-inclusive cruising that every skater starts with. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are some of the best places I have found to not only watch videos on different tricks, styles, and training, but also to virtually meet and get to know the skater you are watching. I personally use Instagram for posting my own work and watch videos and instructional on YouTube when I am feeling lost learning a skill.
For this presentation I decided to use Premier Pro to create a video on my progression of being a skater. In order to clearly document going from what I describe as the feeling of “a poser and uncomfortable” to being able to skate a ditch in nice even lines took a lot of looking through old devices and accounts in order to find footage. A good portion of my footage in this video came off my Instagram and a little bit off my Facebook from before I learned how to skate. I originally planned on using Windows Media Editor, but it lacked sufficient transition software to make the presentation flow seamlessly, all in all I made five rough drafts composed of text, video, images, and music. It was interesting having to piece everything together, brought back a lot of memories as I sifted through to data.
Project 2: Smithing Discourse Community
The social nature of composing, particularly within a discourse community, has a requirement to being social and getting out in the world. If I had never gone to this one event, I likely would not have had such a close friendship with my teacher, or connection to the community of smiths. We met at a local event, though the SCA (event host) is a national organization and introduced me to the society of smiths which has been a global community (though not always connected) through out the ages.
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Within the smithing community we use normal everyday language, but with smith jargon mixed in there. Some of the Jargon involved includes not only words, but phrases as well. You will hear us say things like, ‘chinkers’ which is left over silicon from used coal and metal fragments from past work, the ‘pot’ is the literal pan that holds the coals within the forge. To clarify, you cannot simply call the entire smithing shop a ‘forge’, a forge is the specific tool that is made up of the pot, blower, and ventilation system that is used to heat metal. The shop is to be referred to as either ‘the shop’ or ‘the smithy’.
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A common phrase is ‘strike while the metal is hot’, referring to the fact that you should not waste time. While within this community there becomes a certain point that you forget most people do not realize or understand this specialty jargon, it becomes natural. There are a great many other words and phrases that smiths use though in the matter of distinguishing them I have learned that I use them when appropriate, not realizing that I have codeswitched to new terminology.
Project 3: Creative Revision Project
The social nature of composing is the same as Project 2 because they are based in the same community, for this point I just quote myself above
"The social nature of composing is, particularly within a discourse community, has a requirement to being social and getting out in the world. If I had never gone to this one event, I likely would not have had such a close friendship with my teacher, or connection to the community of smiths. We met at a local event, though the SCA (event host) is a national organization and introduced me to the society of smiths which has been a global community (though not always connected) through out the ages."
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My writing has improved slightly during this project, primarily from the use of having to structure short sentences/blurbs of words in a way that makes sense in a story line. I needed to do this because of the limited space on the comic book for text blocks without blocking the descriptive pictures. I would also like to comment on the importance of grammar in such small blocks of words, making sure ‘we’ll’ isn’t ‘well’ for example, can make a big difference on what the energy is within the comic. Also understanding placement of words, remembering that people read left to right in English was an important part of this project to make sure it was clear and flowed through the story without hiccups.
In many communities there is a specific dialect or part of language that is unique to that group, the smithing community is no different in this statement. In the smithing community we have specialty tools that you may never hear about outside the community, and special phrases such as ‘strike the iron while it’s hot’. I find that it is important to pay attention the these ‘specialty words’ as they are a symbol of what is unique within this community, and they usually exist for a reason. This is valuable because you cannot just call every hammer a hammer, if you need a peen hammer and someone hands you a sledge you will not be able to get the work done.
Final Outcomes for ENGL 1110
Outcome F- Evaluating my development as a writer:
Over the course of this semester we have delved into more than I expected of an English class. I was fully prepared to read books, write essays and do assignments as such, though I was a little side swept by what happened. Rather than being put in the same loop of read, write about it, repeat, E. Graves (our instructor) went feet first into multimodal content. This was particularly fun and interesting for a class that I thought would not be so interesting. Because of this new look and fun individualized approach, I felt more connected to my work and paid more attention to what I was doing in class. I learned how to shape one story, then change it for a new setting (you can see this from my Discourse Community Project to my Creative Revision Project). With both projects rooting from somewhere special to me, the smithing community, both came out drastically different and aimed towards different yet similar audiences. I have noticed I am somewhat passive and gentle in how I present the information, but that does not hold me back from being clear and exact in my work or from stating what is important to me. I try to keep things well rounded and to use a multi-point, multimodal presentation style. A lot of these things I did prior to class in my previous employment endeavors so it all came naturally to me, though the reinforcement and peer reviews were extremely helpful to making my work polished and ready to go.
Outcome D- fluency of written standard American English: I feel that I have met this student outcome in several ways, and I would hope with some style. I have used simple sentence structure in my Memoir Project with text boxes to give context, short sentences, and short paragraphs in the Creative Revision Project (in comical text boxes giving context, sound, and conversation). As far as fully structured paragraphs, sentence structure and documentation, you can see this throughout my work in each project through my reflections and in my student learning outcomes. I would say the best place to view this though would be in the build up and reflections of each project. While doing the projects I took the time to not only pull from my own memory or information, but also to research, fact check, and give some basic background for those who have never been introduced to the social world that I am presenting.
Interested in checking it out? All three projects are linked above for your convenience.