Co-Constructing a Class Lexicon: A Semester-Long Project

This lexicon is a semester-long examination into and expansion of course terms. There is an initial examination into multiplicities of knowledge, which takes place over two class days. Then, for the first half of the semester there are two “daily” assignments: At the end of every class period, students submit key words/phrases of that period to their instructor, and as part of homework, students submit three key words/phrases to their instructor—one of which they further describe. In the second half of the semester, students continue completing the first assignment but now homework asks that students expand upon one of the previously described words/phrases. At the conclusion of the semester, students work with the entire corpus of collected words/phrase—those submitted after class/as part of homework and those described/expanded—building word-clouds and discussing the word clouds’ implications.