Participation Notebooks
How Participation Works in This Class
At the beginning of the quarter I’ll be sorting people into small discussion groups. (There should be 3-5 people in each group.) You’ll be meeting with your group once a week, ideally at a regular time, in some synchronous environment – either in person or over Zoom (or Skype, Discord, Slack, FaceTime, WeChat, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, etc.). The important thing about these meetings is that they will involve everyone in the group meeting together for an hour or so, and that you’ll be able to hear (and ideally see) each other and talk in real time.
What Happens in Discussion Groups
As the name implies, you’ll primarily be using these discussion groups to discuss things – mainly the course content, including readings. Sometimes I’ll also ask you to do specific things during your group meetings, like talk about assignment prompts, workshop drafts, and so on. Mostly, however, you’ll just be working with your group members to talk about the course material, workshop writing, and help each other understand and make connections (both as writers and as people).
Your success in any course (and more generally, with anything in life) depends upon your active participation. Participation can take many forms, though, and we all learn (and thus participate) in unique ways. For instance, making space for every participant in a conversation to speak can sometimes be more valuable than taking the lead yourself. Participation in dialogue means not just speaking up often but also listening to and talking directly with your peers (asking them questions, extending their ideas, reconsidering your own point of view in terms of what they say, helping create an environment where everyone feels empowered to learn from one another).
Writing the Participation Notebook
Once a week, after you meet with your group, you will write a short reflection on your meeting. In this document, you will always respond to the following two questions:
- What was your most meaningful moment of participation in your group this week? Why?
- What questions or concerns do you have that you didn’t get to share, if any? (No need to answer this question if you don’t have anything you didn’t get a chance to discuss.)
If you address the two questions above with evidence of good-faith effort (writing roughly 250 words that demonstrates you actually talked with your group about course material and then thought about that conversation) and complete any additional work for the week (initial thoughts activities, proposals, peer review, etc.), your participation notebook is considered “complete” each week.
How to Submit this Work
We’ll be using a class Shared Google Drive this quarter, where you’ll create an individual folder with your name (i.e., I would create a folder and name it “Kevin Rutherford”). In that folder, you can create a single document labeled “Participation Notebook” that you add to on a weekly basis. As long as it is in your individual folder in our class Shared Drive, you should be good to go. (If you would like a more private option for your Participation Notebook, please just let me know.)
Participation notebooks are due every week by 11:59PM Pacific time Friday.
(adapted from Palmeri and Dubisar’s “Participation as Reflective Practice“)
