The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington
5. Local Heroes, Local Voices
The College Writing Toolkit - Tried and Tested Ideas for Teaching College Writing - Martha C. Pennington
Pauline Burton [+]
Community College of City University, Hong Kong
Description
In her chapter, “Local Heroes, Local Voices”, Pauline Burton presents a first-year composition activity in which students read a variety of texts (fiction and non-fiction) about courage and discuss the nature of heroism, and then identify and select their own choice of “heroes” on the university campus and in surrounding communities. Students contact their potential interviewees to secure an interview, formulate the questions they plan to ask, and carry out background research. They then conduct and record the interviews, working in pairs, and later craft magazine articles from the interviews with a student audience in mind, representing the “voice” of their interviewees as faithfully as they can. Burton’s project is designed to engage first-year college/university students’ interest through a theme rooted in personal experience and to facilitate discovery of new understandings that they can gain through the process of research and writing.