Week 7--Dylan Nice

 

As both Remington and the Bedford Guide point out, the lack of back-and-forth between tutor and student in the asynchronous format strikes me as the highest hurdle, especially as it pertains to fully understanding what the student is being asked to do in an assignment. My current WC students often bring in very complex assignments that require a lot of discussion to pin down exactly what the instructor expectations are. For instance, one of my enrollment students is working on a speech for her Greek History class in which she is supposed to argue that the Persian War had more positive outcomes than the Peloponnesian War—and she is to make this argument from the perspective of a poet living on the island of Lesbos 100 years after both conflicts had ended. We spent much of a session thinking about how to approach the assignment: how might we think about “positive outcomes?” How could we compare outcomes? How would her being a poet inform her argument? What about her being from Lesbos?

Many emails would have needed to be composed to have the kind of productive (and necessary!) conversation we had over the WC video platform.

My instinct is that given the limitations of asynchronous tutoring, tutors often must respond to student work without the kind of clear contextual knowledge that a real time conversation brings. But I also agree with Remington and the Bedford Guide’s observations that the asynchronous format brings new opportunities. While I haven’t done any asynchronous tutoring yet, I have instinctually arrived at similar strategies for making the most out of written feedback for my rhetoric students, like modeling clear writing, providing written examples (including memetic ones), and just having more time to consider the writing before having to respond with criticism.

Lastly, I’m interested in hearing other teacher’s strategies for teaching students to evaluate their sources, as this is an area of my own teaching that I could pay more mind in the future. Right now, I have them begin their research via the Perch: a collection of undergraduate-friendly sources in the library that was put together by librarian Katie Hassman, and rhetoric lecturers Brittany Borghi, and Colin Kostelecky. The Perch highlights magazines and journals like the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. These magazines offer approachable, well-researched and expertly crafted longform journalism and are especially useful in topic generation. Once they have their topics for research, I encourage them to use Academic Search Elite instead of Google as I have more confidence that library database will provide them with credible, peer-reviewed sourcing. The Perch is unfortunately closed due to the pandemic, but I still have my students browse its collection online: https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/theperch

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