Wanda Crawford and Her Interview Assignment

I had a really intersting conversation with my boss, Wanda Crawford of the NKU Learning Assistance Center, today about her unique ENG090 Interview Assignment.

I was drawn to Wanda's assignment in particular because of it's subtly difference instruction and end results for her students' papers. Students from her courses were encouraged to interview a relative or friend and then create something of a transcript of the interview (though they weren't necessarily trying to "transcribe" verbatim the interview so much as convey facsimile of the spirit of the speakers' words) and additionally to include editorializations in the forms of an introduction, conclusion, and some parenthetical interjections when applicable. As an ENG080 instructor, I've been in a position to see some extraordinary feedback from the students regarding Wanda's assignments.

Being interested in multimodal composition and literacies and seeing in the assignment something of a mediated form of a traditional academic interview, I was curious to find out from Wanda what her inspiration in developing the assignment was. During a brief discussion this morning, Wanda explained that she is a frequent NPR listener and developed the assigment after listening to several on-air episodes of StoryCorps and its corresponding book, Listening is an Act of Love. According to its website,


"StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. It is a project of Sound
Portraits Productions in partnership with the Library of Congress, NPR, and
public radio stations nationwide."


Wanda also spoke to the fact that by asking her students to editorialize and thus contextualize their interviews, they are forced to begin to address the rhetorical nature of the assignment in different ways than a traditional interview format. She said that she was also driven to develop the assignment as a means of trying to make the material fresh for herself. She noted that, possibly at some point, the assignment could incorporate some sort of audiotaping component or something more akin to a complex rhetorical event but at this time she feels more comfortable investing class time to developing a broader range of expertise in her students.

On the whole, my talk with Wanda was excellent though short. I intend on incorporating her interview assignment anecdotally into both my pedagogical class work as well as into my ongoing thesis work.