Course Projects | Spring 2020
Reading Reflections
Goal: In order to foster both depth and breadth of thinking/coverage in the course, students will be responsible for creating weekly reading reflection that connect concepts, issues, and ideas from readings to the contexts of writing classrooms (e.g., first-year writing, scientific writing, business writing); students are encouraged to use different modalities and genres that synthesize key issues from readings and propose significant questions/problems for the class to address each week during discussion.
Formatting: Because these may be completed in various modalities, I’d rather not suggest a particular ‘word count’ or limit, or suggest that they all need to look exactly alike. How will you know if you have done them well? Well, do you reference specific readings from the week? do you engaging them meaningfully, before jumping to something else? have you made connections between the reading(s) and a college writing course? If you have done these things, then you have probably met the expectations for this assignment.
Due Dates: Reading Reflections should be completed and posted each Tuesday by 5:00 pm so that members of the class can read them before class meets on Wednesday evenings.
Research Project Proposals
Goal: At midterm/Spring Break, students will submit a Research Project Proposal that suggests an original study connecting digital and cultural rhetorics in some way relevant to the field of Computers & Writing. While you are unlikely to have time during the semester to conceptualize and enact an original research project, this midterm proposal allows you to go through the steps of setting up and developing a project that you can then research at a later time. Perhaps there’s an element of your teaching that you’d like to study more in terms of digital and cultural rhetorics; perhaps there’s an element of your dissertation or thesis project that you had not originally thought of in terms of digital study but you can see how such a project might connect to or extend your current project idea(s); perhaps something we ready early in the semester sparks a new idea for you, one you’d want to think about for a bit and return to at a later date when you have more time. By providing a framework common to both the thesis/dissertation prospectus and/or a grant application, this project offers you some composing practice in genres common to our field.
Format: Based on peer and professor feedback, students will design a research study and create a research proposal of roughly 8 – 10 pages (MA students) and 10 – 15 pages (PhD students) that reviews the relevant literature on your topic in order to demonstrate a key gap in current research and to propose a study for addressing that gap. The difference in length suggests that doctoral students will likely review more research on their project and need more space for framing the proposal. Typically, a project proposal will 1) identify an issue/problem that needs to be better researched/understood or which has been historically ignored in a particular field (establishing exigency); 2) explain what we do know/think we know and highlight in that explanation what parts are missing/incomplete and thus why we need to pay attention to this problem (literature review); 3) suggest an intervention/propose a specific study to address the issues raised in 1 and 2 (argument); and 4) offer a plan for how that research will be conducted (method and methodology). This outline is typical of a thesis or dissertation prospectus and/or grant application, and is a longer version of what you would most likely submit as a conference abstract/proposal.
Due Dates: Drafts of the proposal are due the week before spring break (March 4) and then final drafts are due the week after spring break (March 18). You may share drafts and the final product through Microsoft’s OneDrive or Google Docs; remember to make the file readable to anyone with the link (Google) or to anyone in the ECU network (OneDrive) so that your peers and I can comment.
Writing Course Redesign Project
Goal: During the second half of the semester, students will use their reading reflections to redesign/develop an undergraduate writing course (e.g., writing foundations, scientific writing, business writing, technical writing) to focus on and make use of digital and cultural rhetorics/literacies. Literacies is included here as a framework because it is a concept that is common to undergraduate writing courses and might help you to think through how you’d want to engage some of the concepts we have studied this semester in a pedagogical/educational context. Regardless of the course or framework, graduate students seeking teaching positions after graduation will need to have various examples of syllabuses and materials that they have created, which are used by hiring committees as evidence of teaching philosophy in practice. Typically, as part of such a packet, applicants include courses they have designed but not necessarily taught, often as a way to showcase their creativity and inventiveness, as well as their pedagogical and research interests. This project provides you with a space to work on such a course (re)design that can be more fully your own project rather than merely a reflection of the program(s) you’ve taught in. This assignment offers you the chance to inventive and to think outside the parameters that might frame your work here as a student at ECU.
Format: For this project, students will create a syllabus, rough schedule, a set of major assignments, and at least two sample activities for in-class work students would be engaged in, as well as a short framing narrative/reflection that explains the course and the artifacts. As you curate this set of artifacts, keep in mind that you’re providing your reader with both a macro- and a micro- look into your visionary course: here are the big questions/issues and how I’ve scaffolded the course toward certain key goals (syllabus, major assignments), and here’s how that that works out at a more granular level (schedule, activities). As part of this project, students will do short, 10-minute presentations of their courses, much as you might during a job interview when discussing your teaching philosophy.
Due Dates: Presentations will be on April 22; these will serve as a whole-group peer review activity for providing feedback. Final drafts of course (re)designs will be due April 29. These may be turned in as Word/Google Docs, or as artifacts on our professional websites/teaching portfolios. We will discuss delivery options in class.
Student Self-Assessment
Goal: As a “final” or “summative” activity for the course, students will write self-assessments which demonstrate through examples from their work over the semester how they have met the course outcomes in order to receive they grade they have chosen for themselves based on the articulation of a grading contract in the course syllabus. Self-assessment involves students’ reviewing the materials they have worked on as part of the course (weekly reflections, research proposals, course designs, etc) and curating a selected few that point to key moments in their learning and development. The self-assessment document then provides a space for you as the learner to make connections and to show a reader-evaluator how you think/believe/feel you have engaged the course outcomes in meaningful ways.
Format: Self-assessments will be completed on the course website. You may choose to make the post “private” between just you and the professor or not, in which case anyone enrolled in the course can read it but no one outside our group will have access (as with all other student-created course content). You may choose your own privacy settings for this document. However, the document should contain links embedded in the writing itself that connects your self-assessment to other documents/materials you reference as evidence of your claims/assertions.
Due Date: April 29, 2020 by 5:00 pm.