Maria Kioussis
"Know your world."- Thomas Anstett
Classroom Happenings
In an attempt to help students understand and contribute to the world around them, I work to design meaninful assignments that develop skills and apply beyond the classroom. Following with current research in best pratices, student choice is incorporated as an essential part in many of these projects. These are not busy work or time fillers, but rather opportunities to develop and apply skills are concepts relates to content.
Combining PBL and Service Learning
As part of my Communications class, students have completed an 8-week service learning project.In this project, students reasearched and gave speeched on social issues they were passionate about, voted on an issue to work towards impacting as a class, launched an awareness campaign, raised money, and hosted events. In the end, all of their efforts benefitted Special Olympics Michigan, as well as themselves.
Throughout the 8 weeks, students completed individual and self evaluations, reflections, and engaged in discussions that showed explicit connections between the communacative experiences they were having while acheiving project goals and the content we learned about while it was being complete. A group of students even presented the project to the School Board on behalf of the class (group pictured above). Content connections included: verbal and nonverbal communication, mediated communication, small group and organizational communication, listening, and conflict management.
Multigenre Research Project
Incorporating Nancy Atwell's concept of real world genres, I recently piloted a multigenre research project with my students. The assignment guidelines were a collaborative efforst between of of my college professors, Dr. Elizabeth Brockman, and my host teacher, Ms. Cynthia Gigowski.
The project called for students to incorporate narrative, and informative, and persuasive writing styles in a magazine-like layout. This called for students to conduct interviews, article research, follow models, and incorporated multimodal rhetoric. Below is the model I wrote alongside my students as a sample.
"Shakesbook" Pages
Using a CalShakes Template and applying our knowledge of dramatic characters and character traits. Students created "Shakesbook" pages for characters from Romeo and Juliet. In addition to their own pages, they also wrote on the walls of other characters. While this assignment may seem simple at first, it motivated a close reading of the text, allowed for an application of multimodal rhetoric, and encouraged students to think critically about the language and style of expression used in social media.
