10 Sample Syllabus 2: Communicating your Research/Learning with Genre Translation
Our second sample syllabus is an excellent choice if you want to give students the opportunity to engage with a concept or line of inquiry in a sustained way over the quarter, often by spending time with and returning to a core theoretical or conceptual text that is capacious enough for students to approach from numerous angles connected to their own interests and motivations. In the syllabus materials developed by Matthew Hitchman (which overlap with some aspects of Megan’s syllabus–the two of them talked together as they co-developed these sample syllabi), he uses Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” a complex theoretical essay that forms the foundation for both MP1 and MP2 (though in different ways). Matthew intentionally plans multiple entry points into Hall’s essay and multiple opportunities for students to revisit the text as they develop their writing projects over the quarter.
In PWR we talk often about creating contexts for students’ writing. Each assignment sequence is an opportunity for you to design a meaningful space for students to work through their thinking and share that thinking with audiences that matter to them. In Matthew’s class, as students start to navigate Hall’s concepts, they put them to work on media texts of their choosing, allowing a wide range of student interests and types of media to inform class conversations and students’ composing. After working as a class to collectively apply Hall’s concepts to a piece of media (here, an essay by Hanif Abdurraqib) as a precursor to identifying a text of their own that they’d like to explore and analyze.
In the second assignment sequence, students adapt their MP1, which is a written essay drawing on research and secondary source material, into another genre, working to understand a new context in which what they’ve learned may be relevant or might be communicated to an audience or set of audiences. Matthew scaffolds students’ work here by having them think about differences between consuming and producing genres and developing a “genre study.” He then asks students to work to translate what they’re learning into a different genre of their choosing.
You’re welcome to take up any of Matthew’s activities and exercises below and there are many ways you can adapt or iterate this syllabus according to topics or center of gravity texts that you want to work with; you can also think about the ways that you might narrow or widen students’ decision space: do you want to invite them to all compose videos or podcasts, or do you want to give them free choice in thinking about a genre they might move their MP1 into? You may also want to consider the relationships between genres, audiences, and how texts circulate in encouraging students to think about genre selection(s).
