At the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in New Orleans, I chaired and presented on a panel about using Infographics in the Composition Classroom. My presentation focused on using infographics as supplemental materials for assignment sheets and I discussed how students used these infographics throughout the semester. The other two panelists discussed how using infographics as an assignment lead to students changing their writing process and conceiving writing in new ways. All in all it was a very successful panel that lead to a very good discussion about using visual texts in the composition classroom and how to navigate students’ expectations regarding non-traditional writing assignments. My fellow panelists and I discussed the possibility of exploring these ideas further and collaborating on an article, and, after a suggestion from an audience member, collecting our infographic resources on a website for other instructors interested in utilizing infographics in the classroom. In this panel and the others I attended, I learned a lot about the variety of teaching practices others are incorporating into their classes and ways to relate information to this current generation of students.
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Colleen Thorndike Presents at PCA about Using Infographics in the Composition Classroom
2014 Kramer Award Presented to Andrew Davis
DWR instructional designer and composition instructor Mr. Andrew Davis is the recipient of the X. A. Kramer, Jr., award for outstanding teacher for 2014. In presenting the award to Mr. Davis, department chair Dr. Bob Cummings noted that Andrew was outstanding in his teaching, which students often comment on in their teaching evaluations of the courses that he teaches. Additionally, Mr. Davis supports many students during his visits to classrooms each semester to help students engage more thoughtfully with reflective writing, how to set up and work with e-portfolios, and how to work with and understand the affordances and challenges of multimodal composing.Mr. Davis’s influence in DWR classrooms is far-reaching: through his work one-on-one with writing instructors in DWR courses, he helps them to think through the requirements of writing assignments, and to effectively respond to student writing. Both faculty and students in the DWR are fortunate to have Mr. Davis and welcome him as the recipient of this year’s Kramer award.
2014 Krieser Award Presented to Kelsey Lock
This year’s Cynthia Krieser Award for Outstanding Freshman Writing was presented to pharmacy student, Kelsey Lock, by Dr. Robert Cummings, chair of Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Kelsey’s essay, “Gatorade: The Modern Day Water,” written during Shanna Flaschka’s WRIT 102 class, beat out many other entries for the award.
The Cynthia Krieser Award for Outstanding Freshman Writing is made possible by an endowment fund known as the Cynthia Krieser English Award Endowment fund, the purpose of which is to honor in perpetuity the late Cynthia Krieser and at the same time recognize outstanding first-year composition writing