As their time with the DRC draws to a close, the 2020-2021 DRC Fellows offer reflections on their experiences, what they’ve learned, and where they go from here. This past year has continued to highlight challenges for justice, safety, teaching, researching, and living in the world, yet it has also provided opportunities for digital rhetoric to explore solutions and larger conversations around these challenges. Our blog carnivals explored how teachers and scholars have been navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s podcast series offered insights, challenges, and celebrations around Black sound. We also saw the beginnings of a new crowd-sourced syllabus…
Author: Jianfen Chen
Jianfen Chen
Jianfen Chen is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue. Her research interests include public rhetoric, digital rhetoric, risk communication, intercultural communication, and professional and technical communication.
Photo by Dan Barrett on Unsplash “The one-on-one sections were definitely my favorite to do because I was able to be comfortable enough to ask questions and get true help on assignments.” –An FYC student in my class When asked about my favorite part of teaching first-year composition (FYC) in the pandemic time, I would say having one-on-one conferences with my students. And my students might feel the same way based on their kind comments in my teaching evaluation. However, my first-time experience with one-on-one conferencing at the beginning of teaching FYC during the pandemic was not as…
Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash Most of us have faced the dreadful challenge of creating a new course prep with only a few weeks (or days!) to get ready. Even if you have enough time to prepare, it can still be difficult to gauge whether the syllabus is effective or not. A syllabus sets the tone of the course. It is more than just a checklist or collection of policies and procedures. It has activities, readings, and assignments, and preparing for all of those can seem like a daunting task and make you think, “if only I could…
Acknowledgements We are grateful for each of the contributors of Blog Carnival 18. Thank you for devoting time and energy towards this project during our continued pandemic living. In the CFP for this blog carnival, we invited contributors to reflect on how they saw themselves practicing empathy in their roles as students, researchers, and/or teachers during our sustained experience of academia in Covid times. The entries represent a range of responses to the pandemic and how to show empathy for self and for others in unprecedented times. There are many intersecting overlaps across these contributions. Here, we highlight a couple…