This article describes a gamified technical writing assignment inspired by the Hunt a Killer board games. Students solve a fictional mystery by analyzing AI-generated technical documents as an introduction to the most common deliverables and genres in the field and practice of Technical and Professional Communication. Grounded in research on gamification and AI, this activity fosters experiential learning by situating technical writing genres as both structured and dynamic tools. By combining genre analysis with collaborative problem-solving, the assignment offers a novel approach to teaching genre in technical writing, emphasizing flexibility and critical thinking.

This critical reflection, motivated by a comprehensive program review and the opportunity to teach a new course, explores issues of relevance and engagement in English Studies.  Arguing for instructional methods that meet our current challenges, the author shares her experience with case-based learning in a graduate level English Language Study course.   The course utilized real-life cases to teach advanced linguistics, encourage critical thinking, and show students the ways linguistics can be used to address everyday problems.  Feedback from students evidenced a high level of relevancy and engagement.  The article also highlights the importance of scaffolding and collaboration in implementing case-based learning successfully.

Fully anonymous peer review enhances students’ writing and feedback abilities, encourages professionalism and kindness, and transforms the teaching dynamic. This essay describes the use of the Peerceptiv platform for fully anonymous peer review assignments in law school courses. This platform is uniquely helpful in fostering professional identity formation while helping students improve their analytical writing skills. However, implementing this peer review platform comes with challenges such as student reluctance and discomfort. With strategic communication and investment of time, these challenges can be overcome to realize the potential of this innovative approach and provide formative assessment, regardless of class size. Ultimately, scalable peer review helps students strengthen skills while developing collaborative professional identities throughout the law school curriculum.

This article details a collaborative editing assignment that asks students to analyze and assess editorial contributions made to Wikipedia. This project not only provides students an opportunity to apply their understanding of grammar and style concepts to real-world editing situations, it also calls students' attention to the underlying ideological biases and rhetorical impact of subtle language choices used in specific Wikipedia articles. In explaining the rationale behind this assignment and discussing several student samples, this article demonstrates how designing writing assignments around the collaborative, multi-authored nature of Wikipedia can highlight the influence of cultural circumstances on both sentence-level stylistic choices and broader developmental editorial practices.

The Field Guide to Lost Futures is a collaborative digital humanities assignment created for an upper-year English and cultural studies seminar. The course engaged with the expansive and complex topic of the Anthropocene, from a humanities and specifically cultural studies perspective. To focus student’s engagements with the many catastrophes associated with the Anthropocene, the assignment asked them to profile a single, concrete example of loss related to ongoing environmental crises in a brief contribution to the Field Guide website. Designed with the isolation and dispersal of students due to COVID-19 virtual learning, the Field Guide assignment brought students together in a collective project without the pressures of group work. The assignment was organized as a portfolio of four low-stakes activities that led to the final Field Guide entry. The scaffolded design and experiential nature of the assignment emphasized the multi-stage nature of writing and revision, as well as editorial considerations unique to writing for an online audience.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

This article describes and reflects on a collaborative, in-class activity that asks students in a business writing course to analyze the intersection of language, values, and social justice through a rhetorical analysis of corporate mission statements. The activity looks at how mission statements, as a genre, work to construct an ethos of civic engagement targeting a specific audience. Students reflect on values embedded in mission statements and compare these values with corporate action. Students then work in groups to create their own mission statements that direct their research and teamwork for their other, collaborative course projects. I offer this activity focused on mission statements as a concrete way to discuss social justice, values, and civic engagement in a business writing course; specifically, students explore how language impacts social justice and structural (in)equality.

This essay reflects on a three-part assignment in which students plan, design, and reflect on a text-based videogame. Created originally for a composition course focused on rhetoric and videogames, the assignment lends itself to teaching about the writing process, especially invention and revision, teaching procedural rhetorics, and teaching technical communication concepts such as iterative design and usability. This essay is coauthored by the instructor with two students who took the course in different semesters, highlighting the collaborative nature of even solo-authored game design, as well as how making games can help students take up rhetorical concerns in other genres.

"Analyzing a Memoir of Disability" is a semester-long project that promotes learning about disability and culture through group reading and writing about a single memoir. Students in an Introduction to Rehabilitation and Human Services course completed a textual analysis by using a memoir and course textbook to contextualize one another. Writing was framed as a collaborative, multi-step process that cycles through writing, discussing, and writing again. Students were required to regularly integrate course concepts with their assigned memoir readings to prepare for their in-class book club meetings. The project culminated in a formal group paper of 5-7 pages. Despite some logistical challenges, the project was well received, highlighted by many students as their favorite part of the course, and appeared to ignite a passion for reading, writing, and the material under study in many students.

The following collaborative project is designed to encourage students to investigate how rhetoric functions in everyday locations. Specifically, this assignment prompts students to document, analyze, and present the physical design and makeup of "privately owned public spaces" (POPS), a unique categorization of community spaces that is promoted as simultaneously private and public. The benefits of completing this assignment are multifaceted: students are given the opportunity to experience learning beyond the confines of the classroom, and students are able to practice rhetorical analysis on physical locations, thereby learning how rhetoric functions beyond written or verbal discourse and attuning them to the social contexts of public spaces.

In creating and presenting a collaborative dramatic presentation of a literary text, composition students bring "The Yellow Wallpaper" to life through close reading, literary analysis and synthesis, recursive multi-modal writing, and group performance. This assignment fosters the development of transferrable reading, writing, and creative thinking skills within an active learning environment.

The policy brief assignment in my capstone course in professional writing was designed as a community-engaged project in partnership with a nonprofit organization whose mission is to grow Reading, Pennsylvania's economy. The assignment was intended to do real work in the world: the nonprofit's director, a city council member, and an outreach manager for the city of Reading plan to use the policy briefs to convince Reading's City Council to adopt the recommended policies to enhance citizen participation and representation in local governance and to address deficiencies identified through the STAR Community Rating System(r) (STAR), the nation's leading sustainability framework and certification program (STAR 2016). I welcomed the collaboration and designed the assignment with the goal that students would experience what writing faculty always tell them: fundamental concepts in composition and rhetoric/writing studies are operational in the workplace, and understanding writing and communication rhetorically opens up possibilities for them to enter diverse and unfamiliar writing contexts. Students successfully researched, synthesized, organized, and clearly communicated information in a content area and genre new to them. They presented their policy briefs in written and electronic form to the community partners and explained their work in oral presentations. It was an exciting, nerve-wracking, and challenging endeavor, and, as I will describe, the periods of dissonance led to the best learning experiences--for students and for me.

This essay describes a digital, collaboratively designed and interconnected series of essays that were the final project for a first-year class in media and anthropology. These essays were composed using a digital, publically accessible, scholarly publishing platform that allows students to experiment architecturally with arguing related ideas through non-linear text. The result is an intricate, flexible pathway of pages. The assignment is informed by, and attempts to experimentally enact, Fèlix Guattari's concept of the assemblage, emphasizing movement and process of argument and evidence over static, reified trajectories of traditional essay composition. By examining the periphery of their own ideas, students encounter the interpretations of their classmates and discover alternate readings of key themes, which they can then fold into their own writing networks, ultimately creating a textual flow which challenges the singularity of the author and the boundaries of disciplinary thinking.