Your grade for this course will be determined by a series of reflective evaluations and a portfolio of your work. This system, called the Learning Record, is a collaborative assessment that you, the student, and the instructor will create together. The Learning Record (LR) documents for this course were adapted from the originals, which can be found online at learningrecord.org.
After establishing your learning goals for this course, twice during the semester you will compose a text in which you request a specific grade based on the criteria below. In these texts, you will draw upon evidence from your own writing and research, class discussions, as well as your instructor’s and your peers’ comments on your work. This evidence should show learning and growth in the course themes across various dimensions of learning. As your instructor, I will review your texts and respond in agreement or by revising your evaluation and grade.
Course Themes: Rhetoric of Food, Literacy, Research, Conversation
These are the foci of RHE 309K and shape the goals for our class. Along with each description of the theme and learning objectives there is a list of guiding questions that serves as a starting point for your thinking. When you compose your LR Reflective Evaluations at the midterm and end of this course, you will explain and analyze how and what you have learned in each course theme.
Learning is a series of incredibly complex processes that unfold in dynamic environments and involve a host of individual actors. Traditional assessments are not capable of documenting the complexity of learning as it unfolds in multiple dimensions, but the LR is designed to do so. You will be looking across six different dimensions of learning, none of which can be completely separated from the others, to document your learning over time.
With your instructor, you will describe where you are starting out in these dimensions, then collect evidence of your growth as the course progress. Because this assessment is tailored to you, the learner, it requires your active engagement and reflection to reveal what you have learned. You will do this in writing through your LR Reflective Evaluations.