Music

A fun way to teach students the power of rhetorical pathos using multiple media. Students create Spotify playlists to accompany a short persuasive essay on a topic of their choice.

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.

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

During a discussion of proper citation guidelines, I play for my class a collection of rather infamous examples of musical plagiarism, illustrating for the students the nuances of knowing when to attribute to a source and when not.

This assignment encourges students to think about how they can read and piece together primary sources to create a descriptive narrative.