Participation
Your participation will include all daily preparations for class including completion of course readings, preparing responses to discussion questions, and creating an entry in your critical reading collection on assigned days. All class members should be prepared to discuss questions and offer their own interpretations of the significance of class readings to the field of rhetoric and composition.

I encourage you to do outside reading and bring your own administrative, scholarly, and teacherly experiences to bear on our class discussions. I anticipate vigorous exchanges and intellectual challenge for all of us. Healthy disagreement on readings is not discouraged but lack of engagement or dismissal of one another's ideas is.

Attendance
You may miss only one course session of our weekly meetings. Please be advised that I make no distinction between excused and unexcused absences. In the event of a family emergency, serious illness, or other situation, please speak with me as soon as possible.

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The apprentice's role is to both learn about graduate teaching and develop his or her own expertise in a specific research area. Sue will be attending all of our class sessions, completing all course readings, leading 2 class sessions, and developing her own project related to the course and her apprenticeship. Sue and I will consult on class matters, but she will not be evaluating your work.

Sue and I welcome any feedback, comments, or questions you might have about the graduate student apprenticeship. Since this apprenticeship is in the testing stage, we both will be reporting to the RCTE faculty and graduate student representatives on our impressions of the graduate student apprenticeship and its viability as a continued aspect of the RCTE program.

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Discussion Questions
You will create discussion questions for our course readings. These collaboratively developed discussion questions will be shared with the class and offer us a way of contextualizing the course readings to class member concerns and interests. You will not necessarily be working with the same class members each time you develop your questions. Instead, you will be "signing up" to participate in the development of questions. Then, you and your assigned peers will collaboratively complete this assignment.

Critical Reading Collection
Your critical reading collection is an on-going, semester-long project comprised of 10 "units". In this project, you are required to articulate your own perceptions of the course readings and their relationship to your own teaching philosophy, research agenda, and intellectual curiosity. Your collection can include position statements, visual interpretations, narratives of your own teaching and research related to issues raised in the readings, or any other critical interpretation that you are willing to share with other members of the class. You also are encouraged to use a range of media in your collection and to challenge your own ways of thinking in relationship to the spatial and visual theorists we are reading.

Spatial & Visual Rhetorics Project & Presentation
To encourage you to inquire into specific areas of spatial and visual rhetorics, you will be required to select 1 of 11 possible spatial and visual rhetorics projects, produce the project, and share it with your peers. The course project page lists the 11 options which attempt to run the gamet from more traditional academic projects to less conventional, yet still critical, projects. I advice you to select the project that will allow you to either develop an ongoing research or teaching project or contribute to your researched seminar paper for our class. After completing the project, you will present your work in a 10-12 minute presentation to our class, offering you a way of receiving further feedback.

Researched Seminar Paper
The researched seminar paper will target a specific membership and forum within the rhetoric and composition community. This researched seminar paper can be, but is not limited to, the development of a conference presentation or scholarly article. You will articulate and gain approval for this project through the submission of a project plan outlining the audience, purpose, goals, rationale, and working bibliography. This one- to two-page project plan will be due well in advance of the seminar paper. Upon completion of a substantial draft of your seminar paper, you will share it with a peer for evaluation of your work-in-progress.

These projects and grading of them is discussed in more detail on the course projects page. I hope you take these projects as an opportunity to learn more about spatial and visual rhetorics and to contribute to the development of that area of rhetoric and composition. I am amenable to different interpretations of these assignments as long as those interpretations follow these general guidelines and those provided on the course projects page. If at any point you would like to discuss your ideas for project development, please don't hesitate to make an appointment.

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