In this move, students learn to identify, describe, and interact with (engage) an intellectual conversation. This conversation need not feature “academic” (scholarly) voices necessarily, but it should feature a complex issue of critical importance. In this move, students synthesize what one or more authors has articulated and make a conversation about the issue visible to their audience. They may begin situating themselves in relationship to a conversation the author or speaker is investigating, but they are not necessarily intervening into it. They may respond to a text or texts (of varying media), and they may situate their own experiences in relationship to that text or those texts, but they aren't offering a theory that explains a pattern, or opening up new areas of inquiry.
Engaging Learning Objectives
Link to Engaging Learning Objectives PDF
Information Literacy Threshold Concepts
- Authority is constructed and contextual
- Scholarship as conversation
Habits of Mind
- Openness
- Persistence
- Responsibility
- Metacognition
- Engagement
Examples
| Assignment | Writing Goals | Engage Conversation |
| "Frame and Case" Analysis | Utilize a text’s project as a framework to examine an artifact or event | Apply the terms, methods, and/or aims of a text to a new situation |
| Annotated bibliography | Make a conversation visible - understand authority as constructed | Describe each source and its relationship to each other |
| Podcast | Consider affordances of podcasts for a conversation | “Moderating” a panel of authors/sources |
| Response Essay | Understand authority as constructed - engage with texts responsibly - determine a text’s rhetorical situation | Situate oneself in conversation with a particular text |
Resources
Scholarly Bibliography
Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7286.
Howard, Rebecca Moore, et al. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 177–192.
Salvatori, Mariolina. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition.” College English, vol. 58, no. 4, 1996, pp. 440–54.
Sommers, Nancy, and Saltz, Laura. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 1, 2004, pp. 124–149.