Audio

The aim of this lesson is to provide students with an accessible and engaging introduction to rhetorical analysis. Students will view four brief texts—three thirty-second videos and one print advertisement—and try to identify the audience, the speaker, and the argument contained in each.

Students will look at a series of popular, “sad” advertisements and discuss the ways in which certain commercials have successfully tapped into elements of rhetoric specific to viral videos.

In this assignment, students learn to identify the objective musical elements that make up their favorite songs — and then become personal Pandoras for their peers.

Like many things, visual rhetoric is often best learnt by doing. This lesson plan introduces students to video editing using Popcorn Maker, a web-based tool for mashing up online texts.

This lesson plan uses album covers and music to help students (1) utilize vocabulary and (2) consider the importance of context in rhetorical analysis.

Using various records of the Hindenburg disaster, this assignment encourages students to engage with medium over content, especially in terms of literary studies.  

I have my students complete their first major assignment in two forms: (1) An individual 3-page paper and (2) a 5-6 minute group podcast. In both, they describe a text and situate it in historical context.

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce the students to screen reader software, so that they will be aware of the challenges that blind people face in using web sites, and so that they can adjust their own sites to accomodate access for the visually challenged.

Using the extremely user-friendly online video creation tool, Animoto, students create short commercials pitching (potentially) odd combinations of products to target audiences (pianos to businessmen, running shoes to retirees, etc.)

During the workshop-style lesson, students will learn about the literary and rhetorical aspects of selection and juxtaposition. This assignment introduces students to ways of finding public domain music and audio clips of literary and rhetorical value.

Students conduct oral history interviews, write papers narrating the interviews, and then work in groups to create a multi-segment “radio show."