Beyond the Traditional Essay: Increasing Student Agency in a Diverse Classroom with Nondisposable Assignments

This volume offers a range of responses to the problem of "disposable assignments," essays written just for a grade and then thrown away. The scholars collected here explore how renewable assignments can contribute to public knowledge, eliciting student work that is shared across networks of learning, that does something, that transcends the teachers grade. Although there is significant interest in such innovative teaching practices, particularly in this year of pedagogical experimentation, there are few resources for teachers that collect in one place both scholarly context and practical advice for implementing renewable assignments in the classroom. The essays in this volume range widely, from demonstrating how digital tools engage and empower reluctant learners, to raising theoretical questions around intellectual property, to measuring the success of renewable assignments through outcomes assessment.