Unit 1: Reading America

  • The Rhetorical Situation

    You may pair this with the handout “Questions to Ask When Conducting a Rhetorical Analysis.”

  • Analyze: Art to Start a Movement

    I recommend preceding this lesson with my introduction to analysis. Some of the “Intro to Analysis” slideshow is specific to essays, but you can bypass those parts.

  • Visual Analysis

    I was in graduate school before I read a rationale for literary analysis: that we “read the word” in order to “read the world” (Paulo Freire). When you master one form of analysis, whether it’s visual, textual, or auditory, you increase your ability to analyze in other modes as well.  I accompany the first lesson…

  • Analyze: Art to Change Perceptions

    I recommend preceding this lesson with my introduction to analysis. Some of the “Intro to Analysis” slideshow is specific to essays, but you can bypass those parts.

  • Introducing Multimodal Rhetoric

  • Analyze: Art to Commemorate

    I recommend preceding this lesson with my introduction to analysis. Some of the “Intro to Analysis” slideshow is specific to essays, but you can bypass those parts. To supplement the photo in these slides, I show the video “A Look at the 9/11 Memorial” from YouTube. I start the video 45 seconds in and end it…

  • Analyze: Art that Creates & Reflects Social Structures

    I recommend preceding this lesson with my introduction to analysis. Some of the “Intro to Analysis” slideshow is specific to essays, but you can bypass those parts.

  • Analyze: Art as Civil Disobedience

    I recommend preceding this lesson with my introduction to analysis. Some of the “Intro to Analysis” slideshow is specific to essays, but you can bypass those parts.

  • Jason Reynolds

  • Doubting & Believing Games

    Peter Elbow introduced the “doubting” and “believing games” in the 1970s to make critical thought conscious and easily practicable. As Elbow described it in his 2008 address to the CCCC, the doubting game is “the disciplined practice of trying to be as skeptical and analytic as possible with every idea we encounter. By trying hard…