Karon Jones, James Stevens, Makayla Woods, & Charles Woods (East Texas A&M University)

Introduction

In Summer, 2025, Dr. Charles Woods taught the first offering of ENG 612: Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics. Graduate students in Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics interrogated the rhetorical implications of the privacy-surveillance spectrum throughout local and global culture(s) and focused on the inherent intertwining of rhetoric and ethics through the lens of privacy and surveillance. We triangulated with well-established and emerging topics in rhetoric and composition, including literacy and genre studies, language and identity, comparative and cultural rhetorics, and digital rhetorics.

One of the assignments in Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics was called the DRPC Pedagogy Remix Assignment. It tasked students with taking one of their existing pedagogical or teaching artifacts and remixing it to focus on issues related to privacy and surveillance. Graduate students had to think through their own professional context, learning outcomes and programmatic directives, and student needs. They had a lot of freedom in what they completed and how they competed it but had to be able to articulate justifications for their remix decisions. They were encouraged to review the DRPC website to review the resources offered and brainstorm ideas for remixing their artifact.

Some of the graduate students enrolled in Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics decided to submit their artifacts together as part of a blog post for publication on the Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective (DRPC) website. Our intention is to display what we produced in Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics. Below are our explanations provided by us, Karon Jones, James Stevens, and Makayla Woods from East Texas A&M University, that provide snapshots of how educators and instructors at the secondary level and in higher education are remixing their pedagogy to account privacy and surveillance in ways which are effective for their own professional and educational contexts. Each is followed by the artifact the graduate student remixed as part of the DRPC Pedagogy Remix Assignment in Privacy-Surveillance Rhetorics.

Karon Jones: Using The Test by Neuvel to Explore Technocratic Surveillance

I am Karon Jones, a doctoral student focusing on AI and secondary education. The following lesson plan was initially designed as an argumentative podcast about the criminal justice system following a class reading of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Because the goal of learning about surveillance is to promote awareness and elicit change, it felt natural to remix this in order to explore real-world concerns, use a novel for context, understand rhetoric as a means of persuasion, produce a podcast. The remix asks students to observe surveillance strategies in the novel The Test by Neuvel, where the main character, an applicant for new immigration status, is surveilled by the government although that is not clear to the applicant.  After establishing this context, students create a persuasive rhetorical podcast addressing a real-world surveillance concern, considering ethos, pathos, logos in order to become more aware of surveillance and to create  suggestions or solutions for combating surveillance in their lives.

James Stevens: Shaping Digital Experiences In Secondary: Students Exploring Supermarket Surveillance

I’m James Stevens, an educator focusing on disability studies and digital rhetoric. This assignment remixes a released State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test for 8th graders. Traditionally, teachers might use the released text to focus on assessing student ability to analyze a text as an efferent response. Without losing the rigor of the traditional use, the remix adds aesthetic response as a way of students relating with the content. By intertwining the efferent and the aesthetic responses, students engage with the text in rigorous and relevant way. After creating a written constructed response, students would create a visual and aural representation of their response; therefore, showing mastery in either modality. Without unjustly burdening students with limited access to technology, this assignment allows teachers to examine and reinforce areas of academics and ethics like, establishing background knowledge, reading comprehension, writing, oral  language fluency, digital literacy, and privacy.

Makayla Woods: Algorithms Within the Workplace

My name is Makayla Woods, and my research interests include digital media literacy, linguistics, and children’s literature. Using an original linguistics lesson, I chose not to focus on language structure but instead created a lesson around applying for jobs (Words Within the Workplace). I shifted the focus from analyzing text to examining how our digital personas are judged. My first activity was inspired by Noah Wason’s “Card Discrimination” from the Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collection, which reminded me of a childhood game. I then decided to use the “I’m Going on a Picnic” activity to demonstrate how algorithms operate. For my second activity, I researched traits algorithms prioritized in job candidates and had students compare those traits to their own fictional résumés. Finally, I incorporated a real-world application component by having students brainstorm actionable ways to address algorithmic bias and apply those ideas to their daily lives.