The Case Study Project: Building A Community/workplace Writing Opportunity For Students (1)

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We have found the Case Study Project to be useful in helping students to understand, in a more hands-on way, what it means to take a rhetorical approach to workplace and community writing. The project serves as a culminating activity for lessons on rhetoric, the importance of genre, audience, purpose, the differences between workplace and academic writing, and the elements Omega Replica Watches of visual design. Depending on class time and other curricular obligations, we devote from four weeks to a full semester to the Case Study Project.

The Case Study Project allows students to apply class discussions on rhetorical intentions and visual design to a denned task for a denned audience. As part of the project, students work in collaborative writing teams to create a document for a nonprofit or student organization that the teacher has contacted prior to beginning the project. Through this project, students gain experience with the benefits and challenges of collaborative writing—seeing how their words and ideas blend and having to negotiate differences of ...
... opinion as they arise; students also have the opportunity to see how other writing teams interpret this same assignment, analyze the differences in each version of the document, and provide feedback to one another as part of the drafting process. Overall, the three main objectives of the Case Study Project are to provide students with the experience of writing collaboratively, the opportunity to work with an actual "client"' (or audience beyond the classroom setting), and the opportunity to apply the knowledge that they have gained in earlier discussions about workplace writing.

Phase One: Teacher Preparation

To begin this project, we looked for a nonprofit or a student organization that would be interested in working with us and our students. In the past, we have worked with organizations such as the Red Cross, a literacy program, a student literary magazine, a public library, the university writing center, and an Upward Bound program. We have sought organizations that we already have contact with and that have a readily available set of documents that can be shared with the students. The commitment for this organization typically includes meeting or corresponding with the teacher before and during the project and selecting a document that needs to be reinvented in some way, perhaps because it hasn't been effective in the past, because it needs to reach a different audience, or because it could benefit from a new design and approach.

In our experience, the document should be one that is not too difficult or complicated to construct, such as a flyer or poster, so that the students can focus on both the visual design and writing that will be included in the document and so that there is ample time for other students in the class to pro-vide feedback before the final draft is sent to the client.

We also ask the representative from the organization to come to class at the beginning and the end of the project, first to talk with students about the organization's mission and the purpose and audience for the document to be redesigned and then to discuss what worked well in each of the teams' documents and, potentially, which document or which elements from each document will Breitling Replica be used by the organization and why. If a representative from the organization isn't able to come to class at the beginning and at the end of the project, a letter or email to the class can provide the context for the class to begin the project or the closure that they need at the end of the project.

Ideally, though, it is best for the representative to come to both class meetings so that students can ask questions about the organization's mission, the purpose and audience (and history) of the document they're working on, and, at the end of the project, to talk about what worked well in each document and why the organization selected the version of the document that they did.