The following renewable assignments are easily adaptable to any primary source(s) that students are assigned to read, analyze, and interpret. In fact, these could essentially work with just a little adaptation in just about any course.

Compiling a Course Wiki

Overview

Students choose a work, literary concept, and/or critical approach (or are assigned one) and compose a contribution to a course wiki page. Contributions are focused on specific learning objectives. Impressive contributions are included, with students’ permission, in a content page that becomes part of the course moving forward and is shared under a Creative Commons license. This is useful in creating examples of interpretation and analysis for future students.

Any platform could work for this that allows multiple contributors to add to a shared document. In Canvas, set the page editing option to “teachers and students.” Alternatively, editor access to a Google Document or simple website would work, too.

Student-Facing Overview and Instructions

[Originally used in a course about Banned Books and Censorship using Canvas as LMS, but easily adaptable]

Overview

This wiki page will include student contributions to a compendium of current and recent books bans/challenges in the United States. Please note that your assignment requires that you submit your work in the text box in the assignment itself. Copying your work onto this page is optional and means that it may be included as course material in future classes and, eventually, shared with the public. If you would like your contribution to be made anonymously, simply copy your material over and leave your name off of the list of contributors.

As anarchic as this may seem at first glance, there are, in fact, very specific guidelines, so please read the instructions carefully! 

Finally, please know that the overall structure of this wiki is up for discussion. If you have suggestions about how it might be better organized or focused, please make your thoughts known via journal posts or direct communication with your instructor.

Notes for Contributors (Must Read)

Please note all of the following:

• You are strongly advised to compose your contributions in a separate document and then paste them into this wiki (and of course the text box where you submit the assignment) after revision and proofreading. You don’t want to write a bunch of stuff and then accidentally hit “backspace” at the wrong time and leave the page without saving.
• This page’s content will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License (like what Wikipedia uses), which means that your contributions must either be original (your own words and examples) or derived from appropriately-licensed existing sources.  If you are analyzing a text you found out there on the wild, wild web, be sure to link to it unless it’s clearly giving you permissions to reproduce it in whole or part.
• If you are reproducing any content you found elsewhere, be sure to include an appropriate attribution, including (at least) the name of the author and the title of the source. A hyperlink is also encouraged.
• If you would like your contribution to this wiki to be permanently noted, add your name (alphabetically) and a brief description of your contribution to the “List of Contributors” section at the bottom of the page. This is optional. If you would not like your name to be associated with your contributions (beyond the grade that you get for them in this class), please do not add your name to the contributors list at the bottom.
• Be responsible. You are adding to a renewable resource that will eventually be shared with the public, so please follow all guidelines for content accuracy and formatting. Also note that your activity on the page is tracked by Canvas, so don’t be getting any ideas about Wiki-vandalism…  Similarly, note that I can also restore any previously-saved version of the page, so if you accidentally delete something or feel like you’re screwed things up, do not fear! I can fix it.
• Please know that you should not get too frustrated if you’re having issues with formatting your contribution. There is a bit of a learning curve there, and I understand. Do your best and let me know if you’ve had formatting problems. As someone once said, “If you’re having formatting problems, I feel bad for you, Son. I got 99 problems and formatting isn’t one of them.” (Who said that?  Citation needed.)
• Be sure to follow the formatting for entries: Your added content will usually need to be in the normal “paragraph” style, but when you add a new section, please use “header 3” as modeled below. Any sub-headings or section headers you want to add should be in “header 4.”
• Feel free to include hyperlinks to appropriate Wikipedia pages. We all know that one of the great things about Wikipedia is how easily you can discover new concepts by clicking on the links in an article. Someday soon, your contributions to this wiki may even end up on Wikipedia.
• When you add your contributions, please separate your contribution from those above you (if applicable) with a line break (that is, hit enter to make a space between what’s already there and what you’re adding).
• Title your section interestingly and specifically, including at least the location and one of the books or authors involved.
  

Cover Redesign Project

Overview

Students choose a work (or are assigned one) and produce a cover design of their own based on theme, symbolism, or other literary concept. They provide a brief artist’s statement about why they designed it the way they did. Redesigns are invited to be licensed under Creative Commons so that they can be shared with future students and the public.

Student-Facing Overview and Instructions

Overview

This first project, like most of the projects in this course, is both creative and analytical.  It also may be your last project.  I know–that sounds crazy–but please hear me out.  I want to give you as much time as possible to “make it nice,” so know that what you submit for this first iteration of the cover redesign is not terminal  (see adjective definition #3).  This first version is due relatively soon, but you will have the rest of the semester to respond to my feedback and improve your work as you see fit.  If you look at the course syllabus, you’ll see that there is no “final exam.”  Instead, at the end of the semester, you’ll either stick with what you’ve submitted here or submit a revised version.  It’s possible that, in the meantime, your appreciation for a certain “banned” book may have changed.  Whether it does or not, know that whatever points you didn’t get on this first round can be reclaimed at the end.

The purpose here is to follow up on our initial discussions by giving us all the chance to do a little creative work that will in some way or another reflect the interaction we’ve had in the past with a banned and/or challenged book.  Another purpose is to explore the impact that a text may have on an individual reader despite some controversy or other.

This project is both visual and verbal.  You will

• select a banned/challenged book that you’ve already read,
• do a bit of informal research to discover some circumstance(s) in which it was banned/challenged,
• create a unique cover design for the book, and then
• provide a brief overview of the book’s controversial history along with an explanation of your design.

For this project, you will produce two pages:

The first page will be a book cover that you’ve creatively redesigned (and it must fit the standard 8.5×11 inch page format).  You may create it yourself (e.g. draw a picture) or manipulate an image or images from the web.

The second page will contain some basic information about the book, its controversial history, and your reasons for designing the cover as you did.  You’ll need to be succinct–brief and clear.  The cover is expressive and creative, and though this second page is informative it should be easily comprehensible to a basic audience.

Project Specifications

• Select one work of literature
• Design a new cover for the work based on theme, symbolism, or other literary approach/concept
• Create the first page by redesigning the book’s cover.  Stick to a standard 8.5×11 inch document frame.  Be creative.  If you don’t think you’re creative, be creative anyway.  Mash up found images or draw a picture.  Anything–stick figures, manipulation of digital images, complete abstraction–will suffice, as long as you can provide some reasoning for the design.  Everyone’s creative in some way or another (at least that’s my opinion).  Whatever you make, it will need to occupy the frame provided in the template, whether that means scanning or snapping an image of a drawing or doing digital manipulation to an image.  Note that you’re not going to be evaluated based on how nice-looking your cover is.  There are some specific guidelines, of course:
  • Your cover needs to include the title of the book and the author
  • Your cover must be one of the following:
    • your own original work
    • a modification of an openly-licensed work (or mashup of works)
    • a mixture of the two.
    • NOTE: If you use any existing works discovered online, you must provide proper attribution according to Creative Commons licensing in the Cover Image section of page two of the template (see below).
  • Design the cover in whatever creative way you want with the idea that maybe the book would be published with your design on the front cover.

• On the template provided for the second page, include the following information where prompted:

                       Book: Title and author

                       Historical Context: In your own words, briefly describe the book‘s relevant historical or literary context. You only have a single sentence, so choose your words carefully.

                       Cover Artist:  Your name

                       Cover Artist’s Statement: Explain why you chose this book and how the re-designed cover represents the book in a meaningful way.  This is focused on why you designed the cover the way you did.  Again, stick to no more than 150 words.

Cover Image: If your cover is your original work (whether a photo or a drawing), simply put “Original work.”  If you used an existing work for your cover, provide an attribution for the image(s) you used.  For example, “Adapted from a public domain image accessed from Pixabay.”  If you use Wikimedia Commons to find an image, use the attribution provided by the site when you go to download the image.

Resources for Openly-Licensed Materials

Should you choose to mash up or otherwise digitally alter an existing image in the redesign of your cover, you need to work with material that is openly-licensed.  It is in our interests to know how to use/remix digital works that we find on the internet so that we don’t find ourselves subject to lawsuit for infringement of intellectual property rights.

There are many ways to find openly-licensed content on the web, but here are sites that are relatively easy to use:

• Openverse
• Unsplash 
• Wikimedia Commons 

To reiterate, using content from the web in this project is optional.  If your cover is your own original work, you don’t need to worry about these sites (for now).