9 Applying High Structure Renewable Assignments to your Context

I’m convinced we can design structured renewable assignments that work in any context – however, different assignments will work differently in different situations. Co-constructing a question bank may be out of place in an art studio (though there’s probably some clever person out there figuring out exactly how to make that work) and an open poetry assignment is probably out of place in a political science course (though there’s more than enough great rap, protest songs, and Saul Williams to prove that wrong too).

Perhaps what matters most is not your subject matter, but the context you want to create in your course. Not just what do you want learners who trust you with their time and knowledge to know – but how do you want them to know, and how do you want them to practice knowing?

In the end, that’s what a lot of structured renewable assignments are – opportunities to practice knowing, in public, in a way that guides students towards particular ways of knowing. You may want them to practice particular ways of knowing important in your field, like peer review, vocabulary through glossaries, or experiments in labs. You may also want them to practice other ways of knowing, like poetry, song, dance.

I dream of a structure where learners of all stripes could contribute to remixing, and revising massive repositories of knowing, so anyone could look up ‘Axiology’ or any of a thousand other things, and see other students express accurate, reviewed and revised knowledge of it – through words, or dance, or a video, or quiz questions.

You may want to throw the doors open, and tell your students you don’t care what they create – so long as they create, and contribute, and respond well to suggestions for revision.

I invite you to take some time, and write a reflection on how you want to apply, or modify, these ideas to your context. I hope you’ve found some useful principles, even if you use them very differently than I have. The invitation is an open one.