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Course Projects | Fall 2018

Reading Blogs

Central to work in graduate school is the process of reading and reflection, of engaging with the thoughts of others and trying to distill those thoughts in such a way as to engage with them yourself. But reading and reflection are also about connecting with others, especially your classmates, who serve as live sounding boards for your emerging/evolving thoughts on the complex texts and ideas you’re experiencing in graduate school. To that end, and because this class is being taught face-to-face, Reading Blogs for this class will serve as classroom discussion starters. To that end, students’s responses should meet the following criteria:

  • Responses should be primarily in the form of questions and/or assertions for the class to discuss at length and centered on the texts being discussed each week, though it may take a few sentences or a paragraph in order to set up the question(s) and/or claim(s) for others in the class;
  • Response questions should synthesize ideas from readings and, after we’ve read more than a couple of texts, should attempt to make thematic or theoretical connections between/among the authors/texts we’re reading; likewise, response questions should, when possible, make connections between current readings and the ideas that other class members have been/are raising in their reading responses — remember, however, that “synthesize” does NOT mean “summarize”;
  • Responses should, in format, reflect one of the following modalities: 1) writing, 2) image, 3) audio, 4) video, or 5) multimodal. Student should engage each modality at least once during the semester; the remaining responses can be in whatever format seems most relevant to the student.

Effective Reading Blogs avoid the trap of merely summarizing the readings of the week — after all, we’ve all read the texts themselves — rather, well-crafted responses tease out a core issue, problem, or possibility that’s there in the reading and raises additional questions about it, perhaps by putting it in conversation with other ideas (from the class, from other classes, from lived experience).

Because this course is focused on changing notions of literacy, responses should make use of different modalities. Each week, students may choose among the five listed above which modality they would like to use for that week’s response blog; they should use each of them at least once but may then choose which modalities feel right for that week’s response blog. For each modality, keep the following suggestions in mind:

  • Written/alphabetic response blogs should not exceed 300 words. Students may compose these in a wordprocessor like Microsoft Word but the text should be copied and pasted to the blog. Do not upload documents for purely written/alphabetic text responses.
  • Visual responses can take many forms and may include some words within the images (e.g., an infographic), but the primary goal of the visual response is to evoke questions/concerns through the use of images (typically, that will involve some sort of metaphorical thinking). Visual responses should include a brief statement in words of no more than 150 words that explains the visual. Consider free online options like Easel.ly, Canva, Adobe Spark, or other sites that the class might not know of yet.
  • Audio responses should be no longer than 60 seconds in length. Consider a free online option like Vocaroo, Clyp (also a free iPhone app), which allows you to easily post your voice note to your Reading Blog.
  • Video responses should be no longer than 120 seconds in length. Video responses may use a combination of live action and still images with voice/sound overlay and should be uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, or a similar site that allows you to embed the video in your Reading Blog. You might try your hand at an RSA Animate-style response.
  • Multimodal responses should use at least two of the above modalities, but may use more. As students create responses, it may become clear very quickly that single-modality creations are increasingly rare.

Reading Blogs should be posted each Monday by Noon EST to allow the class to view the responses. Each class meeting will begin by reviewing the Reading Blogs and collaboratively establishing a discussion agenda for the evening.

Seminar Project: Literacy 3.0: Literacies of Activism/Social Justice

As a graduate seminar, this class is built around the assumption that students will engage in a sophisticated, original research project around the course topic. Specifically, students will propose and enact a 20 – 25 page seminar paper that explores some current or recent social or restorative justice / activist project in order to better understand how contemporary literacy practices are central to the work of social change. At midterm, students will propose their projects in order to receive feedback from peers and the professor. On the last night of class, students will provide a 10 minute conference-style presentation of their research and findings to the rest of the class and will take questions for 5 minutes. Final drafts of the seminar papers are due later that week for evaluation. Students may use either ECU OneDrive or Google Docs to share their project drafts and presentation materials; students are responsible for making sure that “sharing” settings are correct so that peers and the instructor can review and comment on the documents.

Project Proposal: At midterm, students will write a proposal for an empirical research project and post it to the course website. This proposal is a short, one-page (200-300 word) explanation of the issue they are interested in, why they are interested, what they already know and what they hope to learn through research, as well as a starter bibliography of 10 – 15 articles or book chapters that they plan to read/investigate as part of the project.

Review Draft: Just before the November holiday, students will share drafts of their projects for peer review/feedback to the course website. Drafts should be at least 10 pages in length and include a method/ology section and at least part of the analysis of the data set so that reviewers can understand what the data set consists of and what initial analysis looks like. Writers will include a brief Writer’s Reflection with this draft so that readers know how best to provide useful feedback. These reflections should include responses to the following questions: 1) Why did you write about this topic/subject? What excites you about it and/or what are you hoping to learn? 2) What are you struggling with most with the current draft? What areas of the project are you finding most difficult? 3) What questions about this draft do you want your readers to answer as they respond to your project?

Presentation: On the last night of class, students will present their original research in a conference-style setting. Presentations should run between 8 – 10 minutes in length so that there is time afterward for questions from peers and the professor. Toward the end of the semester, the class will discuss successful presentation strategies and models for how to organize an effective conference presentation. Presentations will be evaluated based on their clear focus, effective organization of information, and engaging delivery, as well as the usefulness of presentation handout and PowerPoint / Prezi (if included).

Final Draft: The final draft of the seminar paper is due by noon on December 5, 2018. Students will provide an abstract for their final projects on the course website and a link to their final drafts. Abstracts will include Title, Author, and Keywords (5-8), as well as 100-150 word paragraph that summarizes the research project.