Bringing Cultural Rhetorics into the Classroom

Building on PWR’s exploration of cultural rhetorics during September Sessions, Program Meetings, and guest lectures this year, the Teaching and Tutoring Practices Committee is happy to showcase four teaching activities that provide ideas for how to integrate cultural rhetorics into our pedagogy.

• Samah Elbelazi considers the pedagogical promise and cultural richness of real-time research mixers between freshmen at different universities. [See activity]
• Erik Ellis suggests a way to help validate diverse voices in academic writing by putting a cultural rhetorics twist on sentence imitation. [See activity]
• Jennifer Johnson  asks students to take a reflexive researcher stance, understanding different relationships of power vis á vis researcher positionality through a sequence of free write memos. [See activity]
• Kathleen Tarr outlines a clever way to help students recognize their cultural biases by having them collaboratively select and translate an article from BBC Pidgin, a digital platform in English-based Pidgin for West and Central Africa. [See activity]

You can also find all of these activities on the Classroom Activities homepage on Teaching Writing.  Simply select "Cultural Rhetorics" from the "Browse" dropdown menu on the right sidebar and click "apply."

Have you developed successful activities that use a cultural rhetorics framework to introduce students to writing, speaking, argument, or research?  Send them to the Teaching Writing webteam to help our archive grow!