This graduate level assignment requires students analyze rhetorical artifacts through an African American epistemology of rhetorical knowledge. The expectations of the assignment built on the concepts of Kemetic-rooted (Ancient Egyptian) rhetorical traditions that are common to the U.S.’s Black communities. The objective of the assignment was for learners demonstrate foundational declarative and procedural knowledge of the practices and frameworks within an African-American rhetorical tradition that would help them expand their understanding of rhetorical aims throughout the course and beyond. This assignment expanded the perception of the relationship between rhetoric, society, culture, and community both historically and contemporarily. For some students, working with a different rhetorical mindset allowed them to theorize about rhetorical communication in ways they feel they had not been able to articulate in previous courses or contexts.

This article looks at the practice of having first-year writing students write abstracts to prepare for drafting a research essay. Abstract writing grounds students at a moment when they may be struggling to identify a clear context for their object of analysis. The assignment asks them to read and critique sample abstracts, sourced from journals and their peers, and then write one of their own using the research assembled from an annotated bibliography. Through sharing the abstracts, students notice opportunities for expanding claims, applying evidence, and clarifying argument in their essays. In this way, the assignment enables students to develop more confidence in their ideas; it also sharpens their genre awareness, as they recognize how abstracts service both readers and writers during the research process.

This article describes a Pitch Assignment, designed by two journalists turned faculty, to increase support and self-efficacy for writing majors enrolled at a minority-serving institution (MSI). Pedagogical theory to support pitching processes and development is substantially undertheorized. Much of the extant literature focuses on academic writing and editing for undergraduate research; this article extends that discussion by focusing on the needs of underrepresented students seeking careers in nonacademic fields. Those needs include opportunities for increasing confidence and skill for such nonacademic work as freelance writing for newspapers and magazines. For this assignment, students write a pitch for a preview or review feature they will write later in the course. This assignment scaffolds how to analyze, prepare, and successfully pitch to target publications of students’ choosing while developing a sense of self-efficacy that will transfer into future professional writing contexts. The authors conclude by reflecting on how this assignment might be approached differently by other instructors and how support for diversity might be offered in other ways.

This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.

This assignment challenges students in an English Language Arts teacher education program to compose a proleptic autobiography—a genre of writing that transforms the customary retrospective autobiographical essay assignment as a way to encourage students to envision and create their future professional selves. The goal of the assignment is to support students’ development of realistic expectations of their imminent careers as educators and to foster a deeper appreciation of diverse learners. Composing such an imaginative narrative can help students develop stronger professional dispositions as they consider aspects of their future careers such as work/life balance, economic concerns, developing confidence, and providing support and encouragement to their students.

This research assignment invites students in a first-year writing preparation course to explore topics of social justice through protest art. The course is taught at a small, private liberal arts college in a course for “emerging writers.” I have taught this assignment at a predominantly White institution (PWI), in a course where the majority of students are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Students choose a work of protest art from the campus library special collections, frame the social justice issue it addresses in a local context using local sources, and then write an essay that puts that research in conversation with their own story. Finally, linking public history to civic engagement, students create their own protest art as a community call to action. The multimodal, local, and personal nature of this writing assignment creates opportunities for students to see the connections between their emerging identities as writers and civic actors. This assignment can create space for students to use their multilingual identities to speak back to the structural inequality within our institution, developing confidence in their own voices to call for meaningful change.

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

This assignment deploys place-based pedagogy in a basic writing course, and enacts it through first-person research in the form of a walking tour of a university campus. Students first read and discuss two texts about their campus: an article analyzing campus architecture and a philosophical treatise about the campus park. Students then marshal evidence gathered through a walking tour to argue with one of these texts. In addition to bolstering students’ confidence for contesting claims advanced by authorities, this assignment encourages students and teachers alike to cultivate a more deliberate awareness of their surroundings. Because this assignment is meant to be grounded in a specific locale, instructors adapting this prompt are encouraged to seek out texts addressing their own institutional settings.

The *Othello* staging project invites introductory literature students to imagine that they are directing a new production of *Othello*. Students create a production proposal and poster that illustrate their directorial choices, using their original interpretation of the play as a guiding philosophy. This assignment successfully addresses many of the challenges associated with teaching an introductory-level, required "core" course of non-English-majors, as well as the challenges of teaching drama in general and Shakespeare in particular. Creative response assignments like this prompt can foster student engagement, mitigate student writing anxiety, and deepen student understandings of plays as living documents open to artistic interpretation.