Possible Levels of Symposium Student Involvement
Less-than-minimal
(zero days of classtime)
Encourage and reward optional student attendance at a panel/roundtable
or 50-minute visit to the poster session area. Give students
instruction on the kinds of things to
look/listen for at the symposium (audience issues, claims, evidence,
use of scholarship, issues of public presentation, etc., tailored to
issues you are dealing with in your course at that point). Ask
them to
write a response, either to you or,
better yet, to their peers via Blackboard or email.
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Minimal
(one day of classtime)
Require the above as a non-graded assignment.
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Medium
(one or two days of classtime)
My most detailed example here, for some reason: using the
symposium to raise issues of audience—from the perspective of students
as an audience.
- First, have class meet at the symposium as an audience,
attending whatever panel (or a choice of concurrent panels) happens to
be scheduled during your class slot.
- Or, if panel times (plus transportation time) make this
unworkable, then meet in the poster session room (if open all day).
- Then assign them to post some reactions to your class's
Blackboard forum and/or to prepare for classroom work on these
issues—either in discussion, or, better yet, through a revision
exercise in class.
- Have them comb a draft (their own or a peer's) looking for
the same audience issues they picked up on in the symposium.
You could set this up in the week or so beforehand by having students
working with issues of audience in their own work (tone,
specificity/informality of language, level of detail, etc.), in
whatever way your normally do that. Then, before the session,
give them instructions on what to pay
attention to in their reactions as audience members at the
symposium. Instruct them to take notes during or at least
immediately after the session, and to be ready to use those in class.
Or, perhaps more obviously, use it to have your students practice the
same critical reading they've been doing on their own and peers'
essays: what is the presenter's project and most important or
contentious claims? do they make clear why they think this topic
and their point of view are important? do they anticipate and
respond to other points of view? how do they use evidence and
other scholars' work? Again, you can follow-up with in-class work
on their drafts, attending to any/all of these same issues.
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Medium-high
(two to three days of classtime):
As above, but with sessions in which your students are
presenting. Assuming you keep the editorial selection phase to
minimum student involvement (selecting submissions yourself, for
example), you could focus class time on preparation,
anticipating and responding to
audience responses, and issues of revision:
- One day for presentation run-through and feedback from
peers.
- One or more sessions of classroom or peer-group followup,
using symposium audience responses to re-address issues in all your
students' drafts (presumably on similar topics and with similar
categories of writing issues to deal with).
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Maximal
Well, the sky's the limit. And I'm only scratching the surface
here. Consider using the symposium to have students participate
in multiple angles/levels of preparing academic work for public
presentation and dialogue (I'll give less detail here):
Students as editorial readers:
- Have students decide whether or not to submit proposals for
their peers to consider, perhaps in consultation with you and/or with
their peers.
- Have students comprise an editorial board within each
section to select submissions to pass on up to the symposium editorial
committee.
- Have each section comprise an editorial board for the other
section—either among your own sections or trading with another prof's
sections.
- (In each case above, consider whether you'd do this w/
papers anonymous or not—raise this as an editorial/writing issue with
your students and let them decide?)
Students as audience, as above.
Students as symposium editorial board members.
.
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