Arts & Composition

As a way of studying design principles related to composition I have my students complete an exercise that evaluates the compositional strategy employed in a great work of painting from art history.  The students create two diagrams that chart the way the artist uses design principles like scale, line, color, rhythm, unity, emphasis and balance to control the way the eye moves, additionally they map they way the artist uses value (light and dark) to create emphasis and illusions of depth.

In the online ENG 081 Basic Writing Skills, students participate in peer review.  However, in my first attempt, I found that students purposely skipped the assignment, even stating that they were skipping because they were "too nervous," or "didn't trust what their classmates would say and just wanted my feedback instead." In Spring 2014, my goal was to increase participation and to help students to have a positive experience. I added two discussion board posts.

Dance can be very deceptive; how a movement feels or looks in a mirror rarely provides a clear indication of what is happening in the body. To help students acquire an accurate perception and develop a self-directed process for improving their dance training, I combine a Goals and Assessment Sheet with videotaping at the Midterm and Final. In the Fall of 2013, when it was clear that students didn’t understand how to choose a movement assessment, I added descriptive language and included examples on the Goals and Assessment Sheet for Spring of 2014.

Using unobtrusive and obtrusive assessment throughout linked ENG101/102 courses, I hope to learn whether an emphasis on learning about types of writing (analysis, cause and effect, etc.) in the ENG101 course will carry over to help students as they work on more complex papers in ENG102.

Typically, students who are enrolled in developmental English classes (ENG 081, 091) bring with them a host of issues that may inhibit academic success, namely the lack of preparedness for academic/college-level writing.  What often appears as a more direct issue is a need for college-going behaviors and skills that will ensure their success in college.  I've been fortunate to have had student peer mentors from the EMCC Peer Mentor Program in my ENG 081 classes for the past three years.  In Spring 2014, a peer mentor was assigned to one of my two ENG 091 classes.  While

This assignment is for the online version of STO/HUM292 that has not been launched yet.

This is a performance-based class, so students are required to perform a story for their final exam. Students will record themsevles and then upload for grading. There is a set rubric students are to follow in order to demonstrate effective storytelling techniques and best practices. 

This assignment is for the online version of HUM108 that has not been launched yet. 

After learning about murals, the students are to demonstrate what they learned by creating their own mural. The mural must mimic the murals we learned about in the unit; it should be aesthetically pleasing, colorful, crowded and have a political, religious and/or personal message to impart. This assignment will allow students to demonstrate and solidify what they have learned by doing a kinesthetic and personally meaningful activity. 

 After viewing a powerpoint on scale as a design principle, and an in class discussion students are asked to create collages that explore the relationship between scale and meaning. The resulting collages should be representational but illustrate a world in which the normal relationships between things have been altered through changes in scale. The resulting collages are often whimsical, but capable of illustrating a more sophisticated understanding of the way we use scale daily to navigate the world, create systems of order, and define self.

Reading quizzes account for 20% of the final grade in my ENH 254 ( Literature and Film) class. I decided last spring to change up my quizzes for each novel my students read in class.

In order to compare the performance of those students who had placed directly into ENG101 (placers) with students who had completed ENG091 in order to get into ENG101 (completers), we completed an ENG101 common assignment and assessed an equal number of each group.  We used most of the EMCC Writing Rubric (Focus, Support, Organization, Language Use, and Mechanics--scale of 1 - 4.)  All nine residential ENG faculty took part in the assessment on January 7, 2013 -- we particiapted in norming and then scored papers.