A World Bound by Language: General-Education Requirements and English Courses

Abstract:In our response as teachers to the changing way students engage with media, we must rethink our pedagogical “best practices” at the general-education level. For example, students can develop scripts to underpin video delivery of their ideas; likewise, they can prepare brief video-based presentations of their written work. Leon Cruickshank and Martyn Evans comment that these kinds of options also provide students a peer-review experience based on verbal and visual texts (83). The overall approach would thus put students through a process that involves multiple types of texts and offer substantive, real-world ways of evaluating one’s own work and the work of one’s peers by considering how one’s thoughts are communicated in traditional and less-traditional formats.