Presentation Paths and Guidelines

Please prepare a 7-10 minute focused and textually engaged presentation that engages in multimodal composing. That is, prepare a project that makes use of multiple modes and media such as PowerPoint or Prezi (for example, with sound files and visuals embedded in the slides) (320). If you have other ideas, run them by me beforehand. In order to practice ethical scholarship, your presentation should include in-text citations when you present material from course texts and a Works Cited entry at the end. Your presentation should work with our most current course text. If were reading more than one text at the moment, you may choose one of two texts or attempt to work with both of them. PLEASE NO BIOGRAPHY!

Here are some paths to choose among (see note at the bottom as well):

1. Select a passage that you find interesting or difficult in a current reading and lead us through a process of coming to terms with what it might mean and/or suggest in terms of your own reading, thinking, and/or writing project. Why do you think this passage should be brought to our attention? What might our discussion be missing if we didnt pay attention to this passage? In effect, make a case for why others in the class might find this passage equally compelling. 

2. Present a site or object of inquiry (an experience, a place, a text, test case, case study, a demonstration, an institution, a disciplinary practice, a cultural work, anomalies, etc.) in analytical relation to one of our current course texts. Given the conceptual framework and critical vocabulary you are working with in the course reading, how does your selected site or object of inquiry help us to see the usefulness or importance of the course text?

3. Select a passage (or two that you think are linked) from one of our current course readings that you think demonstrates authority. That is, what does the author do on the page that gets your attention or that makes you listen up? How do they command your attention or get you focus on an idea or appeal to your sense of credibility? Why does this moment of authority in the text matter to you as a reader? And why do you think it should matter to all of us and our current work?

4. Help us consider the potential audience to one of our current course readings. Select a passage and lead us through a process of what the writers rhetorical choices suggest about whom they are writing for. Why do you think so? How might the rhetorical choices in your passage suggest an affinity with a particular audience? How do you think the writer reflects a sense of what the audience might already know or think? Does the writer give any indication of how they imagine a readers position or attitude before they have read the text? Why do you think its important to understand your selected passage in relation to audience? Whats the impact? How might this passage connect to your current work?

5. Select a passage from a current course text that you think demonstrates contribution. That is, lead us through a process that helps us to see how your selected passage shows us what the writer wants you take away from their text. Given your passage of focus, what are you being invited or persuaded to do differently or see differently? Why do you find this passage persuasive, compelling, important, helpful, or practical? How might you go out into the community and rethink your own actions or social relations? How might it be useful to your current work?

6. Work analytically with a particular part of one of our course readings in relation to the whole piece. Discuss the contribution a part of one of our texts makes to the text as a whole. That is, how does this part help us to better understand the writers larger project or objectives? This path is asking you to think about how a text is composed of parts that add up to a whole. While texts function as a kind of ecosystem, we can also usefully isolate moments/parts that can help us to better understand what kind of thinking a writer is trying to shape or represent.

7. Invent or coin a new concept that that arises from our current course reading and projects. Define your concept, lead us through a rigorous process of how you came up with it, what inspired you to create it, as well as showing us what moment/part of our current course text got you thinking. What problems, concerns, or questions does your new concept help to address? That is, how might your new concept be useful or practical or interesting to others? How might your concept be used to solve a problem were currently thinking about?

8. Create a new concept using cross-fertilization. That is, select, braid, and combine at least two concepts from our current course readings to invent your own new concept that helps you to examine, analyze, and represent some question or problem you are currently working on. Define your new concept. How will your term work? What are its parts? What kind of action does it foreground? What kind of thinking or analysis does it allow? What questions does your new term allow you to pose? How might our classroom community, given our current explorations, benefit from this new concept?

9. Introduce us to a piece of outside knowledge (particularly from another field or discipline) that you can connect to our current course texts and discussions. Explain what kind of contribution this outside knowledge (it might take the form of a conceptual framework) makes to what were currently exploring or attempting to address.

Note: One of the goals of these presentations is to invite you to practice locating and articulating your area of interest and purpose for writing and to help you involve the class community in that work. These discussions are meant to be flexible and open-ended, but also substantive and challenging. If you have an idea for a presentation that isnt represented here, please run it by me first and pursue it upon approval.