On-Line Assignment Banks for Writing Teachers

The University of Massachusetts Assignment Bank:  This site has a stack of assignments of varying quality intended to support the Professional Writing program's teaching assistants.  Back-track to the home page to see links to sample syllabi etc., though these are of relatively limited usefulness for teachers of freshman composition.   The assignments apparently were automatically stacked into this long page by a program that was not free from bugs.  It's still legible, though, and some assignments are quite interesting and adaptable.  The left-side frame of this site does not appear to function correctly, but  it's not harmful.

The Writing Intensive Program at Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, U. Ga.: This site was set up in the Spring of 2000 but seems to have received little attention since then.  It's emphasis on helping instructors think about the "process model" of composition when designing assignments makes its discussion of assignments interesting.  Some of these seem not to be exactly time-tested, sure-fire assignments so much as applied thinking about how to make assignments.

The University Of North Carolina Assignment Bank:  Their range covers several non-English-Department disciplines, including social sciences, physical sciences, and popular culture.  The interface is not elegant but functionally far superior to anything I've found so far--it even can be sorted by activity, type, etc.  That requires that instructors submit their assignments according to a standardized set of descriptions, but the effects are well worth the shoe-horning of complex concepts that this produces.

Rebecca Moore Howard's Handout Series:  Professor Howard (Syracuse) has put together an eclectic mix of materials for classroom use and for teacher training for composition instruction, literacy, text theory, and a wealth of other subjects.  Some of these include materials from the Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines (1995) which she co-wrote with Sandra Jamieson. 

Charles Hannon's Multimedia Assignment Bank: Professor Hannon (Gettysburg College) developed this site to support Norton's anthologies of American and African American literature, and its questions are quite specifically tied to that text's readings.  However, its concept of using woodcuts and other visual (non-textual) stimulants for student writing suggests a number of issues all writing teachers ought to consider.  How much real-world writing actually involves text answering text with no reference to the visual dimension and real-world experience?  How much more creatively would a student with cultural or cognitive textual learning differences encounter an assignment that permitted or even encouraged drawing upon non-textual visual information?

The Kent State University Writing Center: Though it's not exactly a class or writing assignment bank, the material in their "Writer's Toolbox" page seemed useful and I'm using this as a marker until the Writing Center page gets up and running.