Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Purpose of Exercise: To show students how they might consider audience in how they choose to write. Also, to help students see how communicating in different modes might offer them affordances or constrain them.
Description: Students will complete this activity twice, once to focus on audience and once to focus on modes and genres of communication. They need to be in small groups and have pens/pencils and paper or a computer.
Suggested Time: full class period
Procedure:
First, group students (3-4) and tell them their job is to explain how to make a PB&J sandwich to a specific audience and situation.
As a class, brainstorm how audience might impact what we write (writing style, what they care about, what constraints they have, etc).
Assign each group one of the following scenarios
A 3 year old making 1 sandwich
Cafeteria workers making 400 sandwiches
Ad interns making 1 sandwich for a magazine cover
An alien who just landed on Earth and is hungry
A person who is deathly allergic to peanuts making a sandwich for a friend
A chef making a sandwich to test for a new fusion restaurant menu
Give students 10 minutes to create their explanations and then have them share aloud.
Reflect on how our audience might constrain us in an academic writing situation and how we might consider them.
Second round: students can stay in the same group or move into new groups of 3-4. They will have the same job but students will have to use a certain mode and genre to communicate. This is to replicate how we might operate differently when these kinds of constraints are placed upon us.
Assign each group one of the following scenarios:
Only visuals (mode)
Only acted out gestures (mode)
Memes (genre)
Instruction manual (genre)
Comic strip (genre)
Twitter account (genre)
Again, reflect on how students utilized genre/modal affordances and how they felt constrained. Talk about how genres and modes might have a role in how we communicate in this class.