ifp.12writing.comInvestigation, Freewriting, and Poetics

Writing represents a complex interplay between author, audience, and artifact. As a teacher, my goals are to help students identify their personal writing goals, illustrate the importance of social and cultural considerations that affect genres, and then guide them in preparing works that will resonate with readers. The lesson plans shared here represent several years of my teaching. Pages Home About IFP English 101 Fiction Literary Terms Contact Ryan Monday, July 24, 2023 Universal Design for Learning for Heartland Community College Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Strategies and Reflection for Heartland Community College The goal of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is to design curricula that will engage each student with a wide variety of information and activities. Rather than simply rely on lectures or texts, UDL urges instructors to use combinations of visual and audible modes to convey information, and then provide students with options for how best to show their learning. Developing this website was possible through the UDL training grant I received through Heartland Community College. Unfortunately, much of the development for this website was interrupted by Covid-19, so I haven’t had a chance to fully update it with the courses I teach at Heartland. However, the site does have helpful tips about how to build a course following UDL guidelines, and hopefully that can provide instructors with ideas they can use in their classrooms. Posted by Ryan Edel at 4:58 PM 3 comments Labels: Heartland Community College , Universal Design for Learning English Language Arts for YouthBuild McLean County It’s been a few years since I’ve updated the IFP page here, but I’ve been very busy with teaching in the meantime. Currently, I’m developing two online teaching resources. The fun part about developing new websites is figuring just how best to convey information, but it’s also a major challenge trying to make everything work together coherently. This is especially a challenge when building lesson plans — it’s difficult trying to scaffold the material in a way that students will easily understand the content so they can apply new skills toward their assignments. Here’s a look at the main curriculum page I’m building right now as part of my teaching position at YouthBuild McLean County (YBMC) : English Language Arts Curriculum On this website, I’m building the core curriculum for high school students attending a vocational charter school. Given the nontraditional and asynchronous approaches we take toward education, it can be difficult finding common interests among our students. We have new students entering our program four times a year, and each student arrives with different needs and expectations, so I’m putting together a wide variety of courses that follow a modular format. With the modular format, students can enter a course at any point, learn a key skill, and then apply that skill to a given task. This way, we can have workshops with groups of students who may be at very different points in their learning. Posted by Ryan Edel at 4:54 PM 4 comments Labels: English Language Arts , online presence , YouthBuild McLean County Tuesday, August 22, 2017 English 101 and 099 - Fall 2017 Syllabus Links: English 101 - Illinois State University English 101 - Heartland Community College English 099 - Heartland Community College Braided Approach Richard A. Gale describes "braided practice" as work that combines pedagogy with scholarship to produce not only excellence in teaching, but a systematic contribution to the institutional understanding of learning. "For when disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical expertise and scholarly inquiry are combined, not just in tandem but entwined, connected with and reinforcing each other, they become a braided practice that is stronger, more coherent and more likely to lead to the kind of teaching that will in turn lead to significantly improved student learning" (from "Chapter 2: Braided Practice" in International Perspectives on Teaching Excellence in Higher Education , ed. Alan Skelton, 2007). He describes a "cycle of inquiry," wherein instructors follow up their questions about student learning with investigations that often cross the lines of disciplines. For a long time, I’ve been working on a pedagogy that I considered as the "braided syllabus," but I was unfamiliar with works by Gale and others. My conception of "braiding" has been very different, less centered on a cycle of research and more centered upon the pragmatics of instructional goals: assembling a syllabus that would weave together lessons on grammar and style with lessons about research and lessons on cultural issues. I like using the term "braided" to describe this interweaving of lesson goals, but I hesitate to use this term given its established meaning in prior scholarship. Posted by Ryan Edel at 10:59 PM 28 comments Labels: braided practice , braided syllabus , ENG 101 , English 099 , English 101 , Heartland Community College , Illinois State University Friday, May 6, 2016 English 101 and 145 - Spring 2016 Click for Fullscreen Click for Fullscreen Posted by Ryan Edel at 10:48 AM 21 comments Labels: composition , Composition as Critical Inquiry , ENG 101 , ENG 145 , learning outcomes Wednesday, February 24, 2016 Initial Research: Project 1 One of the most important parts of researching any topic is deciding what exactly you’ll research. For this, you’ll want to start with an open-ended approach, and then use your initial research to narrow-down your topic and your genre . Read more » Posted by Ryan Edel at 2:44 PM 17 comments Labels: Project 1 , research , sources , writing research Thursday, August 20, 2015 ENG 101 - Fall 2015 - Composition as Critical Inquiry ENG 101 - Fall 2015 Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Outcomes - Assignment Types One of the most difficult challenges facing student writers today is the need to reconcile the literate skills learned through social media with the formal demands of academic genres such as essays and term papers. Often, neither the social nor academic genres prove very helpful in occupational settings - you can’t learn resume writing from the five-paragraph essay any more than you can learn it from Facebook. This becomes still more complicated as you factor in the variety of disciplines represented in English 101 - I frequently teach students in business, nursing, the humanities, and other majors, and each academic field has it’s own demands for "good" writing. Read More Read more » Posted by Ryan Edel at 12:16 PM 11 comments Labels: composition , Composition as Critical Inquiry , ENG 101 , learning outcomes , lesson plan , Syllabus Dr. Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" and Copyright Dr. Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" provided a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement, and the message of his speech continues to resonate with the longstanding issues of race and racism in America. As a text, the speech and its video footage offer an important example of how CHAT applies to writing in the real world. However, another issue is the copyrighted nature of the speech, which can limit it’s Distribution while also reflecting the economic Ecology of the Civil Rights Movement. Transcript of "I Have a Dream" Speech Link to "I Have a Dream" Video on YouTube NPR Discussion Regarding "I Have a Dream" Copyright Group Quiz Links Quiz Submission Form Feedback on Quiz Scoring Read More Read More Read more » Posted by Ryan Edel at 11:56 AM 11 comments Labels: "I Have a Dream" , CHAT , civil rights , collaboration , genre , group projects , Martin Luther King , news , racism , representation , video Friday, August 14, 2015 Fostering Relationships in the Classroom Read More Read more » Posted by Ryan Edel at 8:53 AM 12 comments Labels: collaboration , discussions , group projects , teaching Monday, July 20, 2015 Menominee Indian Tribe: Creating Genres with Social Purpose One of the most important aspects of writing...