A few reflections on the "Rhetorics in Contact" course

Back in August, I wrote about my plans for the new course I was going to be teaching, "Rhetorics in Contact." Now that the course is over, I want to reflect on the course and think about what I might do better next time. In no particular order:

• I think the readings worked well. As we read and responded to them, we actually started finding connections that I hadn't noticed before. Shimabukuro's book was particularly good for bringing together a lot of points that we had discussed earlier, though often she would use different language for talking about similar kinds of concepts. I personally gained a lot from reading through her book again for the course.
• We used Perusall for "socially annotating" the readings. It made things nice generally, but in the case of Shimabukuro, I was a little annoyed that the Perusall edition of the book didn't have any page numbers. It made it harder to cite the book when we were working on final papers. Haven't yet figured out a workaround for the next time, so any suggestions are welcome!
• Maybe because we were using Perusall and doing social annotation (and maybe for some other reasons, as well), class discussions weren't as active as I had hoped. I think I have to work harder next time on making sure class time is better used, and I'm not just doing most of the talking.
• We did a few informal writing assignments that I liked. I think I want to keep most of them and perhaps do a few more. After we read Garrett and Xiao's "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited," for instance, I asked students to write about any discourse traditions in their families or cultures. Their responses were interesting. (And I had fun writing my own response, too!) We also did some practice analysis of materials in NU's Digital Collections. I also had them write some reflections on their class trips to the archives. 
• I think I need to do a bit more with helping them on the archival projects. (One student suggested starting earlier, but I have to think about that. Maybe we could go to the archives earlier.) More class time devoted to them bringing in archival materials and challenges they were facing would be useful, perhaps. And more work with citing archival documents. 
• I also should do a bit more with helping them think about connections between the readings and the archival collections they were working on. One student in their final reflection pointed out how working on the archives helped them better understand the concepts from the readings, but I think I could do a bit more to help in that direction. 

Anyway, overall the course went well (aside from problems with class discussions or lack thereof), so I'm encouraged to try teaching this again if I get the chance!