Adapting Multimedia, Rhetoric and the Arts to Our Courses (Patrick McDonnell, Megan Nicely)
Rhetoric 202 is a course at the University of San Francisco that approaches composition and communication through a range of artistic genres, including visual and performing arts, music, film, and architecture. Using a multi-modal framework for speaking, writing, and other language forms, students engage in creative and scholarly research, curatorial inquiry, and sustained dialogue across academic, civic, and professional contexts.
The course emphasizes critical thinking, observation, research, and written and oral communication as they relate to artistic discourses and practices. By examining rhetoric and the arts as distinct yet intersecting fields, students explore how each employs specific vocabularies, perspectives, and modes of persuasion. Academic and professional writing, close reading, visual and performance analysis, and comprehensive research methods—including community and civic engagement—support the interpretation and articulation of key ideas. The course also foregrounds revision, editing, and peer evaluation, while examining the arts as vital rhetorical practices that contribute to social justice and political action.
This one-hour workshop introduces Multimedia, Rhetoric, and the Arts, a Rhetoric course at the University of San Francisco that integrates multi-modal composition with artistic practice. The session will outline the course’s pedagogical framework, key learning outcomes, and major assignments, situating the curriculum within current scholarship on rhetoric, multi-modality, and the arts. Participants will examine how visual, sonic, spatial, and performative modes function rhetorically across academic, civic, and professional contexts. Through short, scaffolded writing, digital, and speaking activities, attendees will actively engage with course pedagogy and explore adaptable strategies for incorporating multi-modal and arts-based approaches into their own teaching and institutional contexts.
Navigating the Digital Commons: Academic Literacy and Social Justice in the 21st Century (Angela Birts)
This workshop explores the intersection of digital fluency, metacognition, and social justice within the context of JRLC 1: Academic Literacy and Ethos at UC Santa Cruz. As students enter the university, they are often tasked with navigating complex social phenomena, such as race, class, and environmental justice, while simultaneously mastering new digital ecosystems. My presentation outlines a practical framework for using Canvas not merely as a submission portal, but as a site for transformative critical engagement and community building. At UCSC, we focus on translating the course’s eight Learning Outcomes (CLOs) into actionable digital tasks. We begin by redefining "metacognition" through the lens of digital reflection; rather than writing traditional essays, students utilize Canvas Discussion Threads and Peer Review tools to facilitate writing and collaborative dialogue.
Teaching Secondary Students the Cognitive and Critical Thinking Structures for Engaging AI (Lanette Jimerson, Sherene Randle )
This hourlong presentation demonstrates how student misuse of Notebook LM, an AI tool in Google Classroom, created a learning opportunity to teach the cognitive structures and critical thinking skills that are central to ethically using AI.
Leveraging artifacts from a 10th grade English class, the workshop will guide participants through a lesson which explicitly teaches students how to plan, iterate and execute directions for AI to move them from simply copying and pasting an AI response to co-creating new knowledge with AI. Through the lesson participants will learn the framework for ethical AI use, key AI literacy terms, and key markers for identifying student misuse of AI.
Participants will leave the workshop with the ability to teach students how to identify, generate, and ethically use the language structures that are essential to AI literacy. This workshop is applicable across all AI tools educators engage.
Paper, Pencil, Poem: Give Every Writer a Formula for Success (Charmaine Phipps)
Tested in a prison classroom and ready for any setting, these simple, paper-and-pencil poetry activities offer something low-tech and immediate: a room full of people who didn't think they were poets, discovering they had something to say all along.
In this 60-minute participatory workshop, you'll move through the same sequence your students would. We start with formula-based poem frames that produce a real, satisfying poem in minutes. From there, the formula becomes a framework, something writers can return to and keep generating from. Along the way we'll try step by step limericks, metaphor games, a childhood memory exercise, and even fold a quick zine. No apps or prior poetry experience is required.
The goal is simple: get writers to the page and give them a win before doubt kicks in. Each activity is designed to deliver that moment early, before uncertainty has time to settle back in. When writers experience success right away, they want to keep going.
These exercises were developed over many years in my prison classroom where skepticism is high and time is limited. They work because they are simple and playful and failsafe. They give writers a way in, and then a reason to keep going.
Come ready to write. Leave with a complete, ready-to-use sequence and a framework you can adapt for any level, any discipline, and any room full of people who swear they aren't poets.
Cultivating Critical Consciousness Across Digital, GenAI, and Information Literacies (Joy Ok)
Today’s First-Year Composition classrooms are filled with expectations for supporting students’ growth in digital, GenAI, and information literacy. However, approaches to incorporating critical consciousness into these literacies vary across activities and practices, with instructors also navigating students’ diverse digital competencies as they engage with emerging technologies. This teaching workshop brings together three graduate students from different areas of higher education, from interdisciplinary, ethnic studies, and writing studies perspectives. Together, they will share how Mike Caulfield’s SIFT method can help students distinguish between credible sources and misinformation generated by GenAI platforms. Thereby, supporting students’ holistic digital growth, from evaluating credible sources to cultivating critical consciousness about how digital tools, such as GenAI and civic media, shape knowledge, power, and participation. Drawing on works ranging from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, we consider how composition classrooms can foster more critical, reflective engagement with digital spaces. This workshop will also share students' reflections on how this strategy can help build a more critically conscious classroom in the university setting. Attendees will leave with practical strategies to help students question whose interests technologies serve and make more informed, agentive choices as readers, writers, and participants in public discourse.