Student Learning Objectives

All of the activities and assignments that we engage in over the course of this semester are designed to achieve certain learning objectives, which are listed below under 5 different categories. This list of learning objectives has been developed in accordance with the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition as revised and adopted in 2014 (v. 3.0) and with the learning outcomes statement developed by the Emory Writing Program and Domain of One’s Own @ Emory.

You will be reading, analyzing, and writing about a number of comics over the course of the semester. You will also be producing a variety of your own comics, along with a few other types of visual writing (like infographics). Most of these different types of visual and textual writing will take place in online environments, including on your own domains, in collaborative writing spaces, and elsewhere. I’ve chosen comics as both subject and vehicle for your activities in part because they are by definition multimodal, collaborative, and focused on a number of different design elements, and should therefore lend themselves especially well to achieving these outcomes.

 

Students compose texts in multiple genres, using multiple modes with attention to rhetorical situations. Through composing a variety texts and using a number of composing technologies, students demonstrate understanding of audience, purpose, and constraints. They use and adapt generic  conventions, including organization, development, and style.

As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others. Students may encounter the ideas of others in a variety of texts generated both inside and outside the classroom: print, visual, aural, oral, spatial. Students learn accepted and ethical ways to integrate other texts into their work, rightly handling citation and adaptation. Students use writing  as a critical thinking tool.

Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection. In learning about their own writing process and doing guided reflective writing about that process, students learn to critique their own and others’ works. They also become aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.

 By the end of this course, students will:

  • acquire, design, and administer a web presence using free or open-source tools.
  • conduct inquiry, research, critique, and publication in electronic environments.
  • explain and practice digital citizenship, which includes utilizing the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright).
  • reflect on learning as part of a deliberately constructed digital identity.