Hello!
Welcome to Week 10. Nice job on making it this far!
As we finish up the course, I just wanted to provide you with one last opportunity to talk with your group members and feel confident about the end of the quarter. Of course, you could obviously stay in touch with your group members (and I hope you do!), but it’s the last meeting within in the context of the course.
In addition to the actual tasks this week, I encourage you to let your group members know if you’ve found their conversations helpful. I often feel like we don’t take the time and energy to let people know when they’ve been a positive force in our lives, so if that’s true for your group, let them know. I’m not trying to get sappy here, but it can mean a lot to someone to know that they’re valued.
This week’s group tasks
Talk about final project and "presentation"
As I explained in class, you should post a link to your work-in-progress presentation to the dialectical journal in order to get feedback from multiple folks. That said, there is also an obvious benefit in talking with your group about the project and how you’re doing with it. Use this time to share drafts, concerns, anxieties, questions, successes, etc. Make the most of the opportunity to talk about it and get as much feedback as possible regarding the effectiveness of your rhetorical moment. In other words, you have an immediate audience available – use them.
Note that this is also an excellent time to take notes about your reflection, if you’re writing one, since you’ll necessarily be talking about what you think about your own work and being aware of others’ responses.
Talk about the material
This week, the material is other students’ presentations. I want to encourage you to talk about videos you watched and consider: what stood out to you? what did you find effective? what ideas do you think have traction? what might you take away from others’ approaches to help with your own project?
This can also be helpful in terms of you thinking about your reflective component of the final project. Consider what you would want explained about others’ projects; situate yourself as an audience member and think through what would be helpful for folks to explain in their reflections. Then do that for your own reflection. (Remember, the reflection is basically a rhetorical analysis of your own project. It can be written conversationally, informally, but it should establish the rhetorical concepts that you’re applying and how and why you chose to do so.)
