I was wondering what I had entered into my search box last week, because I remember at one point only having results concerning educational remediation (as in intervention, taking a step back) come back to me. I don’t think the “visualizing a text” search I mentioned in my last post was the combination that brought me there. At any rate, I was looking to explore remediation again this week as I work on finishing up my philosophy remediation, and using “remediating composition assignments” With this combination, I found relevant results much more easily this week. This search brought me to Remediation by Becca Tarsa on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. Tarsa gives us the “who” “what” why’s” of remediation, and she also includes a brief interview with Dr. Lori Beth de Hertogh from Washington State University. Dr. de Hertogh relates her experiences with using remediation in her classroom for the first time.

One aspect of assessment that de Hertogh used in her application of the assignment was the SOGC – Statement of Goals and Choices (borrowed from Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole). Shipka’s call to ask student to “detail how, why, and under what conditions they made their rhetorical, technological, and methodological choices” is relevant in comparing their text product to their remediation, but may also be useful in exploring the composition of  a text alone. I have made it through a round of a major composition in my FYC course now, and I see students aren’t all intentionally considering the rhetorical situation in which we are writing. While Tarsa, de Hertogh and Shipka all offer pieces for consideration concerning remediation, and they have got me thinking of how to tie that activity to my class rather than just how to navigate it for myself, the SOGC calls to me in particular. I think this may be a way to address some of what I see lacking in many of the first full compositions I am seeing from my students this semester. I think we are still missing (in some cases) that rhetoric is a series of intentional choices with a goal of persuasion. Too many students are still looking at assignments as hitting all the criteria the teacher has listed, without ever looking at the process of how they are writing, without ever asking why they are doing it one way (i.e. the fastest, easiest way – which is the answer in most cases) or how they could be doing it more effectively.