Participedia in course assignments

Getting students to write or edit articles for Participedia can be a great assignment for courses that deal with political participation, democratic innovation, or deliberation.

In the course of selecting, researching, and writing up a case, method, or organization, students will learn about the substance of participation, finding secondary sources, properly citing them, and developing Internet skills for posting on wikis. Students may find it rewarding to have their work posted on Participedia, where it will potentially be read and used by many people.

While on faculty at the University of Washington, John Gastil assigned Participedia article writing in his course on Political Deliberation in the Spring 2010 semester. That assignment generated some excellent articles, and since then, other scholars have followed suit, including Graham Smith of the University of Southampton and Rodolfo Lewanski of the University of Bologna. We are working to provide support for teaching faculty who wish to assign Participedia article writing in their courses.

So far, we have produced a couple of documents to help you get started.

• Sample Assignment 1 is an assignment template for writing a case. Please feel free to copy and adapt this template for your own courses.
   
• Grading Rubric is the grading rubric for this assignment. It is adapted from John Gastil's Spring 2010 grading rubric.

If you do assign Participedia article writing in a course, please let us know how it goes. We would very much like to develop Participedia in ways that respond to teaching needs.