Theory (Method) Sources
Picture Prompts for Online Classes
Instructors may want to use visual prompts to foster discussion, help unify remote and on-campus students, and create a classroom community. Picture prompts can be varied to connect with the course theme. Activity Review the New York Times Learning Network‘s “Picture Prompts” series, “144 Picture Prompts to Inspire Student Writing.” On the landing page, there’s […]
Strategies for Engaging with Critics
In this exercise, students practice engaging with critics (argument and theory sources in the BEAM/BEAT framework). The templates provided scaffold students’ responses to the critics before students need to engage more deeply with critics in an essay. This exercise can be done individually or in pairs. Objective To use templates to practice different strategies for […]
Use a Text as a Theory Source
The goal of this exercise is to teach students how to use theory sources to complicate and deepen their claims. Start by reviewing a sample paragraph that draws on a theory source in the service of making a claim about an exhibit source. Then, have students create their own paragraph in small groups. Because this […]
BEAM/BEAT: Rhetorical Ways of Thinking About Sources
Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. This lesson helps students consider four different ways they might use a source: they might rely on it for information, analyze it as evidence, […]
Summary & Analysis
Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. Students develop the closely related skills of reading and writing through sustained instruction in summary and analysis, where these skills meet. This lesson outlines […]
Using Different Kinds of Sources to Analyze an Exhibit
In this exercise, students first interpret an exhibit source without any supplementary sources and then reinterpret it in light of background and/or theory sources. Assembling a set of short, relatively accessible sources is key to this exercise’s success. The result is that students come to appreciate how background and theory sources can deepen their interpretation […]