Why a Common Assignment?

The Benefits of a Common Assignment

1)  It will help connect students to one another. 

As you well know, one of the goals of Foundations is to build community among students. Having a common assignment that is taught in all of the Foundations courses, will give them something, well, in common. It is an experience students will share across classes, and that can continue to connect them as they move through their time at the university. It is something they can all look back on from their Foundations experience and discuss with one another, knowing that they all worked on it. This increases their sense of belonging 

2) The assignment benefits faculty. 

Faculty in Foundations have often told us that they can feel challenged by the program goals that focus on skill development and the connection to campus resources, rather than course content. Many faculty have even asked for a "plug and play" assignment that they can adapt for their course to make these elements of the program goals easier for them  to implement. This assignment is not quite plug-and-play, but it is pretty close. It can be customized as much as faculty would like it to be, or it can be deployed pretty much as it is. It teaches media and information literacy literacy  and critical thinking skills that will be valuable to them throughout their time at the university, which is one of the program goals for Foundations, and connects students to the Mardigian library, another program goal. 

The Benefits of Curate and SIFT

1) New skills for a new era

The benefit of this specific common assignment is that it will introduce students to cutting edge information literacy strategies that are crucial for our unprecedented media landscape. It does so in an intense political environment, when information literacy has never been more important and intense technological environment where information has never been more manipulatable. 

2) It is timely and relevant

This year is the perfect year to roll out this assignment. It is an election year so students will find media literacy immediately relevant and necessary. It also connects to the community read for the 2024-2025 academic year, which is the book Verified written by the designer of the SIFT media literacy method. All first year students are being asked to read Verified in the 2024-25 academic year, so they will already be learning about this method and why it is important.