ERWC

Weekly Assignments

Weekly agendas will be posted on Monday mornings on Google Classroom to update students on the work for the week. Parents/Guardians and students can also access our weekly agendas by clicking on the linktree link.

All assignments can be found and completed in Google Classroom. For excused absences, students have as many days as they were absent to complete missing assignments. For late work, students can complete assignments only for the current quarter up until two weeks before the quarter grading period. 

ERWC Modules

First Semester:

1. Full Length Unit: What's Happening Next? / Personal Insight Questions

This module supports students as they confront choices they have to make about life after high school. It provides students with an opportunity to consider not just what they wish to do after high school, or what options they have available to them, but also how well prepared they are for that next phase of life. The readings in the module serve to promote self-reflection—making the student and his or her future the main text of this module—and they provide information about various choices students have after high school. 

2. Mini Module: Introducing Ethos, Pathos, Logos

To introduce the three appeals and the practice using those concepts for rhetorical analysis and persuasion  

3. Full Length Unit: Gun Violence as  Public Health Issue

This module is designed to interrupt the political debate around guns and gun violence and reframe it as a public health concern. Students are invited to explore how positionality shapes what we know about the world and how we approach problem solving.

5. Full Length Unit: Othello, by William Shakespeare 

This module provides students with rich opportunities to consider the ways characters’ interactions in Othello are shaped by elements of the rhetorical situation, including the speaker, occasion, purpose, and audience. The purpose of the module is for students to understand and enjoy Othello through careful reading, through using writing as a tool for thinking, through performance, and through discussion with classmates. 

Portfolio Module 1: ERWC Portfolio 

The purpose of the portfolio module is to introduce eleventh grade students to ERWC 12; give them an opportunity to reflect upon and write about their reading, writing, thinking, and goal setting processes; review the importance of establishing and maintaining a portfolio; and learn about metacognitive processes while reading in order to improve comprehension. 

Second Semester:

7. Mini Module Introducing Rhetorical Situations

This module is designed to introduce students to the concept of rhetorical situation and to its component parts of audience, purpose, and occasion. Rhetorical situation is a transformative concept that can change how students read, write, listen, speak, and think. Becoming attentive to the concept of a rhetorical situation means making deliberate choices about communication, recognizing the relationships among context (or occasion), audience, and purpose. A deep understanding of rhetorical situations helps students transfer their literacy skills to new situations because they learn how to make decisions in those new situations. By engaging in a small-group problem-solving activity that requires students to attend to two different rhetorical situations related to the same events, the module draws on students’ experiential knowledge of rhetorical situations and helps them to make that understanding explicit. This mini-module is based on material developed by Thomas M. McCann for the English Journal in 2010.

8. Mini Module: Introducing Genre as Rhetoric

Genre awareness is an important practice for students to learn. Genres, from a rhetorical perspective, pay attention to communication patterns in writing and use those patterns to reimagine and address new rhetorical situations (since every time we communicate or write we create a new rhetorical situation). Key to teaching genre awareness to students is to help them pay attention to the constraints of a genre (the patterns that are part of any genre) while also supporting them in seeing the rhetorical possibilities and creativity of the communication situation. 

9. Full Length Unit:1984 by George Orwell

This module will help students read a significant novel and engage with its ideas. 

10. Full Length Unit: Ready to Launch 

This module presents a deceptively simple rhetorical situation and genre, the high school graduation speech. In working through the arc of the module students are asked to reflect and draw on past learning, selecting skills they will apply to an authentic opportunity for authorship. Just as the challenge of how to address the writing task requires that students recall and apply many of the concepts and practices of the ERWC, the genre features of the farewell speech demand thoughtful reflection and careful, self-directed writing and presentation. Students independently seek solutions to the problems they encounter, reflecting on the ways that this practice will benefit them in the future. 

Portfolio Module 2: ERWC Final Portfolio 

The purpose of this portfolio mini-module is to engage students in a thorough, evidence-based examination of their work throughout grade twelve in ERWC and to write a portfolio reflection letter based on that examination so that they learn more about what they have learned and how they have learned it. 

Curriculum Review:

Sensitivity of Content Disclaimer:

Throughout this course, students will be examining multiple perspectives and complex views to help them research and analyze how writers use rhetoric to persuade their audience; therefore, some of the content students will read will push their thinking and at times may make them uncomfortable. At all times, students must exhibit mature behavior, respect for the opposing side, and a willingness to learn and grow as an individual. Bullying or mean-spirited behavior will not be tolerated. The classroom environment is meant to be open to an exchange of dialogue from all sides therefore personal attacks, judgmental remarks aimed at specific groups or individuals, and/or discriminatory statements are not only inappropriate, they will not be tolerated. Keeping this in mind, class discussions, assignments, and behavior will be composed and academic.  

*Information on this website is subject to change at school, department, or instructor’s discretion.