Roosevelt University - Writing Program - LIBS 201 (Writing Social Justice in the Academy)
LIBS 201: Writing Social Justice
in the Academy
Instructor Resource Packet
Developed by Priscilla Perkins
Roosevelt University Composition Program
Revised July 2005
Working with Student Writing 31
Sample Research Areas 35
Research Project Guides 36
“Bookless Draft” Guidelines 40
Problem Checklist 41
Course Description and Grading Rubric 42
WAC/WID Annotated Bibliography 44
Like most universities, Roosevelt has tried multiple strategies for addressing its students’ needs for writing instruction at the sophomore level and beyond. During the 1990s, our General Education curriculum included a 200-level requirement for transfer students who needed additional writing practice (ENG 219: Review of Composition), as well as a 300-level, interdisciplinary “Senior Seminar” course for students in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Education, and Performing Arts. For a few years, students also took at least one “writing intensive” course in their major disciplines, a requirement that proved hard to administer and was eventually discontinued.
In the late 1990s, assessment data collected by the Composition Program and General Education committee revealed problems with both ENG 219 and the Senior Seminar. ENG 219, which presented the learning activities of ENG 101 (Introduction to Composition) and ENG 102 (Argumentation, Analysis, Research) in condensed form, did provide a “review” of those courses for some transfer students. For most students, however, simply reinforcing the skills emphasized in ENG 101 and 102 did not make an appreciable difference in the writing they did in 200- and 300-level classes beyond the Composition Program. More problematic, perhaps, was our discovery (based on data drawn from post-testing ENG 102 students) that Roosevelt’s “native” students–those who had taken ENG 101 and 102 at Roosevelt–placed into ENG 219, the transfer-only course, at rates that were often higher than those of actual transfer students. This information motivated the Composition Program and General Education committee to develop a 219 alternative that would reach more than just our transfer students. LIBS 201 was one result of our assessment; at the same time, we made ENG 100, 101, and 102 significantly more rigorous than they had been before that point.
Our assessment data for the Senior Seminar also showed that these courses–offered in a number of Arts and Sciences disciplines and open to students from any major–were not fulfilling their most important goals. The absence of an appropriate “bridge” between students’100-level and 300-level writing experiences meant that many students enrolled in Senior Seminar courses lacked both the discipline-specific knowledge base and the writing skills to successfully complete the main course requirement: a 15-20 page research project on a topic related to the course topic (which could be anything from the history of mathematics, to social and public health policies regarding AIDS, to relationships between literature and technology). Independent of its assessment of ENG 219, the General Education committee decided to discontinue the Senior Seminar requirement and give individual academic units the option of requiring their own 300-level capstone courses for students in their majors.
The Rationale for LIBS 201: Writing Social Justice in the Academy
Though it’s clear that Roosevelt had a strong incentive to improve upon post-100 writing courses that didn’t deliver the learning outcomes we sought, the rationale for LIBS 201 went far beyond an attempt to “fix” a broken system. In keeping with national developments in writing pedagogy, the Composition Program developed a “writing-in-the-disciplines” (or WID) requirement that would allow mid-stream students to continue practicing basic critical reading skills, argumentative strategies, and documentation conventions within the context of specific fields of inquiry like biology, history, music, psychology, and political science (among others). As it has developed, LIBS 201 emphasizes self-reflexive thinking and draws attention to the epistemological boundaries between related disciplines; it invites students to participate in the knowledge-making practices of their major fields rather than simply observe or read about them second-hand.
LIBS 201 is a General Education WID course that integrates the university’s stated mission of social justice into the learning program of every undergraduate in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences and Education (as well as selected majors in the Chicago College of Performing Arts’ music program). Because we already understood the role of advanced literacy skills in extending social justice to disadvantaged groups–a basic rationale for the University Writing Requirement itself–we looked for a way to help students connect their writing practices metacognitively to the social justice issues that, in many cases, motivated their choices of college majors. In situations in which students have trouble seeing the social justice implications of their specialized studies (math is a great example), LIBS 201 helps students draw out those implications through their reading and writing, so that they can approach their major coursework in a more self-aware spirit.
After looking at WID courses at other universities, RU’s Composition Program (in collaboration with the General Education committee) developed a course that is administratively housed in the university’s General Education program but staffed largely by Composition Program faculty. The course is offered in three versions–Arts/Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences/ Mathematics–in order to prepare students from various fields for the specific kinds of reading, thinking, and writing activities in their majors. Any student, however, can take any version of LIBS 201 to fulfill the General Education requirement. Each of the three versions of LIBS 201 also includes attention to arts, social sciences, or natural science/math issues in the fields of business and education.
Even though faculty across the university generally do not teach sections of LIBS 201 (with a relatively small full-time faculty, Roosevelt needs instructors in the disciplines to teach mainly within their home programs), a central goal of LIBS 201 was to involve teachers from many disciplines in articulating both the central social justice issues and discourse conventions of their fields. In the spring and summer of 2002, full-time faculty nominated readings that they believed best exemplified the topical concerns and thinking practices of their disciplines. The nomination process asked faculty to describe, at some length, how the texts they recommended were typical of the argumentation styles and research strategies of practitioners and scholars in their fields. Because of high permissions costs, some of the most interesting texts nominated by faculty had to be excluded from the three custom-published reading anthologies that emerged from this process. The insights offered by every faculty participant, however, were taken into consideration wherever possible, and have been incorporated into this packet of instructor resources. The collections of readings that all LIBS 201 students use include a lively mix of topics and writing styles; some are highly accessible, while others emphasize writing styles or concepts that require more time and attention from students.
The use of common course readings–chosen specifically for Roosevelt students by Roosevelt faculty–for all sections of LIBS 201 enables the university to achieve several important learning goals. First, in keeping with the university’s longstanding efforts to boost student retention, we believe that a mission-related course experience shared by a large group of students has the potential to increase students’ sense of identification with the unique history and commitments of Roosevelt University. Research suggests that increased student identification with the institution–especially insofar as it grows out of shared social and intellectual concerns rather than enthusiasm for sports teams (which Roosevelt doesn’t have, anyway!)–generally leads to higher student morale and, in turn, to better retention.
Second, because LIBS 201 instructors tend not to be specialists in the fields that LIBS 201 emphasizes and are, moreover, usually drawn from the university’s pool of skilled contingent faculty (meaning that these instructors may sometimes need to prepare to teach a course with little lead time), the General Education committee and Composition Program needed to develop a curriculum and pedagogy that would draw on instructors’ strengths as teachers of careful reading, responsible argumentation, and open-minded revision—without requiring them to research and compile a large group of highly specialized readings from fields that may be relatively unfamiliar to them. By using common course readers, the university allows LIBS 201 instructors to perform the important role of learning facilitators whose expertise lies in identifying and working with discourse conventions.
Finally, using common readings makes the daunting process of course assessment–a crucial part of administration in the current educational climate–much more manageable. While instructors have leeway in the readings and learning activities they assign (see below), the course curriculum builds in a degree of uniformity that enables the Composition Program, the General Education committee, and the university at large to see more easily whether the course is meeting the goals outlined above. By recounting their experiences teaching particular readings, by contributing class-tested assignments to a growing “bank” of teacher resources (included here), and by helping to norm samples of writing produced by LIBS 201 students, LIBS 201 instructors will play a central role in the “feedback loop” that will help determine the success of this course.
As any teacher who has worked with a multi-section course syllabus or reading anthology can attest, there are clear challenges and satisfactions associated with this kind of collaborative instruction. While teachers who have not worked with a common curriculum before may worry that shared course materials may limit instructors’ flexibility and creativity in the classroom, once they’ve tried this kind of teaching, most instructors agree that the opportunities for cooperation created by a common curriculum outweigh the potential disadvantages. Especially during the first few semesters of a multi-semester course, being able to share assignments and classroom strategies with colleagues makes the difficult work of preparation somewhat less wearing. The isolation that teachers can feel when a discussion or writing assignment doesn’t go as planned decreases when they relate their experiences to those of other teachers working with the same materials.
Before discussing effective ways of constructing a LIBS 201 syllabus, a few words about useful first-week activities are in order. During the first class meeting, once you’ve reviewed your syllabus with students, you can set the appropriate tone for the semester’s work by having students produce an approximately 40-minute writing sample in response to any of several reading passages chosen for the three versions of LIBS 201. A few of these passages are included at the end of this training booklet; instructors are also encouraged to submit appropriate reading passages for inclusion in the “assignment bank” that we continue to develop. As in other writing courses, a first-day writing sample gives you information about students’ reading skills, their familiarity with the conventions of university-level academic discourse (including diction, procedures for establishing common ground and possible grounds for critique, the use of textual examples, etc.), as well as patterns of mechanical difficulty related to second-language learning or dialect. In some cases, a first-day writing sample may enable you to refer students for early-semester tutoring–before these students are having problems with their graded assignments. In general, comments on first-day writing samples should be brief and should stick mostly to the content of the students’ responses: teachers may choose to ask a friendly question or make a specific (and supportive) observation about what students have written. If a particular pattern of error is already obvious, you may choose to note it in your comments as something that you and the student will work to overcome during the semester.
During the second class meeting, discussing the Preface to the course reader can help students articulate questions that they may have about LIBS 201. In addition, when you hand back the first-day writing samples, you may wish to distribute a sheet with short, anonymous excerpts from individual students’ responses to the reading passage. Pointing out one or two intriguing (or provocative) ideas in these excerpts, and inviting students to do the same, shows students that you already respect them as thinkers; this activity can help students get to know each other and can prepare the way for lively, open-minded discussions throughout the term.
Each of the LIBS 201 readers includes 18-20 readings of different lengths; some can be discussed in a single class meeting, while others may require two or even three discussion periods. When you put together your schedule of reading assignments, you may choose to organize your choices around a general issue (for example, access to economic capital, health care, or educational opportunity), strategies for knowledge-gathering in different disciplines (such as the differences between research designs in psychology and sociology), or the special rhetorical or discourse features of different academic writing styles (perhaps the different ways of managing “voice” in theoretically- and experimentally-oriented science writing). By grouping three or four readings into self-contained assignment sequences (see below for sample assignment sequences), teachers can present multiple ways of working with the course materials; because each writing assignment in a sequence requires students to work with more than one reading at a time, teachers can increase the amount of reading students complete during the term without sacrificing their sense of continuity and coherence.
During the last third of the semester, students in LIBS 201 should produce a multi-drafted, 8-10 page researched project that grows out of issues in the readings or class discussions. In the early part of the semester, then, each writing assignment should help students recognize research possibilities that they can independently pursue during the research phase of the course.
The first LIBS 201A syllabus includes the basic policy information that should be included on every syllabus for every version of the course (instructor contact info and office hours, required texts, course description, breakdown of grade values, grading standards, and other policies). Many instructors also choose to give students the official LIBS 201 assessment rubric (included in this packet) so that everyone is aware of the kinds of development instructors look for over the semester. When you look carefully at these sample syllabi, you’ll see that some include required participation in Blackboard discussion forums, field trips, or other activities. The grade values for these activities are usually small, but can help diligent students “bump up” their grades for the course—an important motivator for many students, especially given how challenging the writing assignments are in LIBS 201.
LIBS 201A: Writing Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities
Professor Eleanor Roosevelt Spring 2005
Office hours: T/Th 11:30-12:30 Class meetings: T/Th 10-11:15
Voice mail: 312 341-3730 Email: eroosevelt@roosevelt.edu
Required texts (available at RU bookstore): Perkins, ed. Writing Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities
Hacker, A Writer’s Reference (5th ed.)
Merriam-Webster dictionary (or another college dictionary)
Students in LIBS 201 practice the advanced reading and writing skills needed in their majors (and in graduate school) as they explore contemporary, discipline-specific social justice issues. The arts and humanities version of LIBS 201 emphasizes the following academic disciplines: art/art history, history, literacy education, literature, philosophy, religion, music/music history, theatre (though the readings we’ll use this semester won’t cover all of these fields, you are welcome to focus on any of these areas in your research project). The first nine weeks of the term involve lots of reading in our class textbook, as well as three short (4-5 pp.) essays in response to those readings. The third portion of the class is structured as a research/writing/reading workshop, during which you’ll carry out an 8-10 pp. research project that you have designed in consultation with me. In order to leave yourself enough time to develop questions and strategies, find sources, and write, you should start thinking about your project now.
Breakdown of grade values: Essay 1: 10%
Essays 2 & 3: 15% each
Blackboard radio listening forum: 10%
Research proposal and annotated bibliography: 10%
Research project: 40%
(Keep in mind that each essay grade is based on the quality of the final draft as well as the quality of the feedback you offer to your classmates during revision sessions. Students who do not have a complete draft on revision days will lose 10% of their grade for that essay assignment.)
Information about assignments:
As the schedule indicates, I’ll give you detailed assignment sheets for essays 1-3, and I’ll also give you specific guidelines for the research proposal/annotated bibliography and research project. The Blackboard radio listening foruml, which is worth 10% of your final grade, is intended to give you ongoing exposure to arts and humanities programming on WBEZ (91.5 fm), our local National Public Radio station and an extremely important source of information about culture, politics, economics, and other social justice issues. In order to participate in the radio listening journal, please be sure that your RU Blackboard account is set up and that you have a functioning password. There will be a link to the WBEZ schedule on our class Blackboard site, as well as specific instructions for how to participate.
Grading standards for research project:
A (91-100 points): Reserved for work that is highly insightful and original, extensively researched and carefully argued, substantively revised, very clearly written, containing a minimal number of surface errors and highly accurate documentation.
B (81-90 points): Reserved for work that reveals some originality in developing a research area and curiosity in exploring the ideas that grow out of that focus, that shows significant familiarity with and understanding of relevant published work, that has fruitfully used peer and instructor feedback, that is easy to read and contains relatively few surface errors, and which includes mostly accurate documentation.
C (71-80 points): Reserved for work that relies more on other researchers’ ideas than on the writer’s own insights and analysis of relevant publications, that is insufficiently researched and sometimes illogically or inadequately argued, that would benefit noticeably from more extensive revision, that has a hard-to-read style or disruptive patterns of surface error, and that reveals a writer’s problems understanding or carrying out correct documentation.
D and below (70 or fewer points): Work that lacks a coherent focus, that is seriously under-researched and insufficiently developed, that has not gone through the in-class and out-of-class revision process, that is very difficult to read, and/or lacks appropriate documentation is not passing work in this class. D is not a passing grade in LIBS 201.
Keep in mind that “plus” and “minus” grades are possible on your work for this course (though the University allows only “straight” grades for courses), and that your essay and final grades may be based on some combination of the above criteria. I’ll let you know where you’re doing well and where you need more work as the semester moves along. Because we have so much work to do in this course, I don’t allow students to re-write their essays for a new grade. Some exceptions: if one of the first three essays contains a significant though manageable problem which negatively affected the grade, I will sometimes encourage a student to do one more revision and I will then reconsider the grade.
Other policies and information:
LBecause the composition classroom is a community of working writers who learn from each other and support each other's growth, it's important that students attend regularly. Consequently, the program has had a long-standing attendance policy: 6 absences from a course that meets twice weekly, or 3 absences from a course that meets once weekly can result in a failure, even if your work for the course is passing.
LPlease talk to me at the beginning of the semester if you have a documented disability that may require accommodation.
LLet me know as soon as possible if serious work or family problems threaten your ability to complete the work for the course. If you wait too long, you may miss out on university deadlines for withdrawing from your coursework, leading to a failing grade and possible loss of your financial aid.
LPlease turn off your cellphone or pager before coming into the classroom.
Tentative Schedule (open to some revision as we go along):
1/25 Introductions; first-day writing sample; hand out essay assignment #1
1/27 Discuss Johnson, “Teaching and Learning Literate Epistemologies”
2/1 No class meeting–complete Blackboard assignment
2/3 Discuss Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading”
2/8 Revision session #1 for essay #1
2/10 Revision session #2 for essay #1
2/15 Essay #1 due; discuss Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?”; hand out essay assignment #2
2/17 Discuss Brecht
2/22 Discuss Ruru, “Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage”; View video excerpts from Shakespeare productions
2/24 Revision session for essay #2
3/1 Revision session #2 for essay #2
3/3 Discuss Davidson and Lytle, “The View from the Bottom Rail”; hand out essay assignment #3
3/8 Essay #2 due; discuss Jenkins, “Incompetence and Learning Difficulties: Anthropological Perspectives” and Lehrer, “Circle Stories”
3/10 Discuss guidelines for research project
3/15 Revision day for essay #3
3/17 Revision day for essay #3
3/22 Spring break–no class
3/24 Spring break–no class
3/29 Essay #3 due; one-page project proposal and one-page statement of research strategy (including annotated working bibliography) due at beginning of class; meet in library for guided research
3/31 Discuss Torborg, “Blameless Wrongdoing”
4/5 Meet in library for guided research
4/7 Discuss Matthews, “Children’s Rights”
4/12 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
4/14 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
4/19 First “final” draft of research project due (please turn in via Blackboard); discuss Volk, “Little Red Songbooks”
4/21 Blackboard peer revision “session”
4/26 Individual conferences
4/28 Individual conferences
5/3 Final draft of research project due; complete course evaluations
5/5 “Last-chance” conference/revision day for those who need it
5/10 All research projects must be turned in by noon
Another 201A sample syllabus….
As part of their first essay assignment, students in this daytime, downtown section of LIBS 201A interviewed students in a daytime section at Robin about how they learned to read, and about how they used their literacy skills at home, work, and school. Students based their interview questions on their reading of Johnson’s “Literate Epistemologies”; like the WBEZ listening forum (on the first LIBS 201A syllabus), the interview was worth 10% of their final grade.
Tentative Schedule (open to some revision as we go along):
8/31 Introductions; first-day writing sample; hand out essay assignment #1
9/2 Discuss Johnson, “Teaching and Learning Literate Epistemologies”; create questions for online literacy interviews
9/7 Labor Day holiday–NO CLASS
9/9 Discuss Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading”; discuss online interviews of Robin LIBS 201A students
9/14 Revision session #1 for essay #1; turn in online interviews
9/16 Revision session #2 for essay #1; discuss Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?”; hand out essay assignment #2
9/21 Essay #1 due; discuss Brecht
9/23 Discuss Lehrer, “Circle Stories”
9/28 Class visit to Chicago Cultural Center to see “Raw, Boiled, and Cooked” exhibit
9/30 Revision session for essay #2
10/5 Revision session #2 for essay #2; discuss Volk, “Little Red Songbooks”; hand out essay assignment #3
10/7 Essay #2 due; discuss Volk
10/12 Discuss Manuel, “Gender Politics and Caribbean Popular Music”
10/14 Discuss Manuel
10/19 Revision day for essay #3
10/21 Revision day for essay #3
10/26 Essay #3 due at beginning of class; discuss guidelines for research project
10/28 Meet in library for guided research
11/2 One-page project proposal and one-page statement of research strategy (including annotated working bibliography) due at beginning of class; meet in library for guided research
11/4 Discuss Torborg, “Blameless Wrongdoing”
11/9 Meet in library for guided research
11/11 Discuss Coles, “Ideology and Nationalism: Nicaragua”
11/16 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
11/18 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
11/23 First “final” draft of research project due; discuss Matthews, “Children’s Rights”
11/25 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY–NO CLASS
11/30 Individual conferences
12/2 Individual conferences
12/7 Final draft of research project due; complete course evaluations
12/9 “Last-chance” conference/revision day for those who need it
12/14 All research projects must be turned in by noon
Tentative Schedule (open to some revision as we go along):
9/4 Introductions; first-day writing sample
WEEK 1 9/9 Discuss Young, “Five Faces of Oppression”; hand back writing samples and hand out first essay assignment
9/11 Discuss Young
WEEK 2 9/16 Discuss Hatsukami, et al., “Crack Cocaine and Cocaine Hydrochloride”
9/18 Revision day for essay #1
WEEK 3 9/23 Essay #1 due at beginning of class; discuss DuBois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”; hand out essay assignment #2
9/25 Discuss DuBois; in library, find web/newspaper/magazine resources relating to the roles of social class and ethnicity in mate selection among different cultural groups
WEEK 4 9/30 Discuss connections between Ross and web/newspaper/magazine resources
10/2 Revision day for essay #2
WEEK 5 10/7 Essay #2 due at beginning of class; pre-reading assignment; library work on social science discourse conventions
WEEK 6 10/9 Discuss Shibuya, “Roaring Mice Against the Tide”; in-class writing assignment; hand out interview form and essay assignment #3
WEEK 7 10/14 Discuss Shibuya
10/16 Share interview responses
WEEK 8 10/21 Revision day for essay #3
10/23 Discuss Highton, “Easy Registration and Voter Turnout”
WEEK 9 10/28 Essay #3 due at beginning of class; discuss guidelines for research project
10/30 Meet in library for guided research
WEEK 10 11/4 One-page project proposal and one-page statement of research strategy (including annotated working bibliography) due at beginning of class; meet in library for guided research
11/6 Discuss Vesperi, “The Lonely Death of Hattie Carroll”
WEEK 11 11/11 Meet in library for guided research
11/13 Discuss Newland and San Salgado, "Human Capital and Other Determinants of the Price Life Cycle of a Slave: Peru and La Plata in the Eighteenth Century"
WEEK 12 11/18 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
11/20 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
WEEK 13 11/25 First “final” draft of research project due; discuss Haas and respondents, “Power, Objects, and a Voice for Anthropology”
11/27 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY–NO CLASS
WEEK 14 12/2 Individual conferences
12/4 Individual conferences
WEEK 15 12/9 Final draft of research project due; complete course evaluations
12/11 “Last-chance” conference/revision day for those who need it
12/16 All research projects must be turned in by 11:30 a.m.
The readings in this syllabus focus on the social implications of math/technology education for disenfranchised groups; they also address ethical issues in science.
Tentative Schedule (open to some revision as we go along):
9/4 Introductions; first-day writing sample
WEEK 1 9/9 Discuss Moses and Cobb, “Algebra and Civil Rights”; hand back writing samples and hand out first essay assignment
9/11 Discuss Moses/Cobb
WEEK 2 9/16 Discuss Stein, “What’s In It for Me?”
9/18 Work on family and community “math trees” and “math maps” in class
WEEK 3 9/23 Revision day for essay #1
9/25 Revision day for essay #1
WEEK 4 9/30 Essay #1 due at beginning of class; discuss Braun, “Race, Ethnicity, and Health”; hand out essay assignment #2
10/2 In-class library work: find two popular magazine articles discussing connections between health and ethnicity; “homework”: write two pages exploring what you think Braun might say about the articles you found and why
WEEK 5 10/7 Small group work: discuss two-page essays, picking out most promising ideas from these drafts. During class time, write an additional paragraph explaining yoru own perspectives on the issues you identify in your two-page draft.
10/9 Revision day for essay #2
WEEK 7 10/14 Essay #2 due at beginning of class; discuss Gilbert, “Human Embryonic Stem Cells: A Primer”; hand out essay assignment #3
10/16 Discuss Iqbal, “Issues in Globization of Science and Religion Discourse”
WEEK 8 10/21 Half of the students in the class should bring a scholarly journal article on the moral/ethical implications of genetic experimentation; the other half of the class should bring a scholarly journal article about religious approaches to human origins/creation. During class, students from each half should work together in small groups to generate conceptual connections between Gilbert, Iqbal, and the ideas they found in their independent reading
10/23 Revision day for essay #3
WEEK 9 10/28 Revision day for essay #3; discuss guidelines for research project
10/30 Essay #3 due at beginning of class; Meet in library for guided research
WEEK 10 11/4 One-page project proposal and one-page statement of research strategy (including annotated working bibliography) due at beginning of class; meet in library for guided research
11/6 Discuss Naughton, “The Great Unwashed” and “The Gift Economy”
WEEK 11 11/11 Meet in library for guided research
11/13 Discuss Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”
WEEK 12 11/18 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
11/20 Individual conferences; bring your four-page “bookless draft”
WEEK 13 11/25 First “final” draft of research project due; discuss Brennan, “Discounting the Future”
11/27 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY–NO CLASS
WEEK 14 12/2 Individual conferences
12/4 Individual conferences
WEEK 15 12/9 Final draft of research project due; complete course evaluations
12/11 “Last-chance” conference/revision day for those who need it
12/16 All research projects must be turned in by 11:30 a.m.
Three sample assignment sequences for LIBS 201A
This first sequence includes some informal and/or in-class exercises linked to formal essay assignments; the other two don’t.
In-class writing assignment: Write informally about some specific ways in which your college education so far has focused on what Davidson and Lytle call “bottom rail” concerns, and some ways in which it has focused on “top rail” concerns (it might help to make a list of courses you’ve taken in the past year or so). What are some of the specific benefits and drawbacks of each kind of approach to learning?
Arts/Humanities Essay Assignment #1: Pick out some of the historical concepts and strategies that Davidson and Lytle use in their essay “The View from the Bottom Rail” and use them to comment on Manuel’s approach to his subjects in “Gender Politics in Caribbean Popular Music: Consumer Perspectives and Academic Interpretation.” How useful are Davidson’s and Lytle’s methods for the kind of work that Manuel is doing? From what you can tell, what factors or circumstances might lead Manuel to approach his task differently?
Arts/Humanities Essay Assignment #2: Keeping in mind the work you did on scholarly point-of-view in your first essay for this course, as well as your web research on representations of disability in the media and arts, evaluate Riva Lehrer’s collection of paintings in “Circle Stories: A Collaborative Project.” Your evaluation should be based on very close attention to specific details in Lehrer’s paintings, and should consider not only your own responses to her work, but also the concerns raised in the web resources you found.
“Self-reflexive” writing assignment for essay #1: Before turning in your essay, spend about 10 minutes writing informal responses to the following questions:
1) What were the most useful aspects of the reading/writing process that you used for this paper? What might you choose to do differently the next time around?
2) What aspects of your final draft do you feel most and least confident about?
3) What unanswered question(s) has your work on this assignment raised for you?
“Seed” exercise for essay #2: Pick a couple of terms or ideas from the web resources you brought to class, and use them to very carefully analyze one of the paintings in Riva Lehrer’s “Circle Stories.” You can adapt the writing you produce for this exercise for use in your graded essay.
“Self-reflexive” writing assignment for essay #2: Before turning in your essay, spend about 10 minutes writing informal responses to the following questions:
1) What was difficult or enjoyable about analyzing the visual details of Lehrer’s artwork?
2) In the web research that you did for this assignment, how did your own experiences of disability (or experiences with disabled people) shape your responses to the perspectives you encountered? What role did your personal responses play in the argument you developed in your paper?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #1: After you’ve 1) read Johnston et al. on “Literate Epistemologies” and Scholes on “The Transition to College Reading,” and 2) interviewed a LIBS 201A student at the Robin Campus, write an essay evaluating the training students receive for university-level literacy. In what specific ways have both your own educational experiences and those of your peer at Robin prepared you to think carefully and critically about your own world (including people and ideas that are unfamiliar to you)? In what ways do you think you and your Robin peer are less-than-prepared to do these things, and why?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #2: Working closely with central terms from Bertolt Brecht=s essay ATheatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?@, write an essay discussing how Brecht=s theories influence the way you look at specific visual works from Riva Lehrer=s ACircle Stories@ and the ARaw, Boiled, and Cooked@ exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. Your essay should include close, careful interpretation of individual images, and should explain whether (and how) you think Brecht is relevant for understanding the visual arts.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #3: What does it mean to look critically and analytically at the music you listen to every day? Working very closely with two familiar songs, write an essay that asks the kinds of questions that Manuel, Volk, and Brecht do about popular culture. Your essay should also, obviously, work hard to answer those questions, so that by the end of the essay, you can formulate and explain your own specific theory about the function(s) of popular music in your everyday life.
Tips for approaching this assignment:
1) The songs you choose should be familiar to youBthey don=t necessarily need to be songs that I or your peers knowBand you should include photocopied lyrics with your preliminary and final drafts so that your readers know what you=re talking about.
2) This assignment is both an exercise in close reading (you=ll need to analyze individual words and phrases from the songs, and you=ll also need to apply specific passages from the readings to those words and phrases) and an opportunity to practice Atheorizing@ from your close readings (in other words, looking at the ideas you come up with as you closely interpret bits of songs, and deciding where those interpretations logically lead you). ATheorizing@ is a skill that you=ll use in your major research project for the course. I=ll be evaluating how carefully you approach both activities in this essay.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #1:
The materials you’ll be working with:
1) Johnson et al., “Teaching and Learning Literate Epistemologies”
2) Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading”
3) A poem you select from the “Poetry in Motion in Chicago” web page (Blackboard)
What reading and interpretive strategies do you use when you encounter a literary text? How have your strategies developed during your years of “studenting,” and in what ways are they adequate/inadequate for the task of understanding the poem you select? (An important subquestion: what might it mean in the first place to say that you “understand” a poem?)
Taking a “Poetry in Motion” poem as your literary text, write a 4-5 pp. essay in which you use specific ideas from Johnson and Scholes in order to answer the questions I’ve asked above.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #2: Brecht’s essay “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?” emphasizes the importance of what he calls “science” (or knowledge/information that’s not directly related to art) in the theatre. Thinking about a dramatic (or epic) film or television program (not a documentary or purely informational production) that you like, write an essay of 4-5 pp. in which you discuss the kinds of “science” that contribute the most to your appreciation and understanding of this work. Keeping Brecht’s values and ideas in mind, what do you think he would notice about the film or program you discuss?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #3:
Texts you’ll be working with:
1) Jenkins, “Incompetence and Learning Difficulties” (WSJ)
2) Lehrer, “Circle Stories” (WSJ)
3) “Signatures of Intolerance” (Blackboard course documents)
4) “At Kansas L’Arche Community Love is the Not-So-Secret Ingredient” (Blackboard course documents)
5) Johnson, “Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing a Protest Against the Jerry Lewis Telethon” (Blackboard course documents)
6) UIC PhD program in Disability Studies (Blackboard course documents)
This assignment gives you an opportunity to work with multiple sources as you create an analytical response to a carefully-defined question. Your essay should be at least four pages. Here’s your task:
Working closely with specific concepts and passages from at least four of the sources listed above, develop and explain your own theory about the relationship between disability, self-representation, and definitions of personhood. What possible contradictions, conflicts, or concerns could you raise in connection with this theory?
In-class writing assignment: Pick a form of oppression emphasized in Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” and spend 20 minutes informally exploring how it helps you understand an experience of your own or of someone you know. What’s useful or strange about analyzing personal experiences in this way?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #1: First, read “Crack Cocaine and Cocaine Hydrochloride: Are the Differences Myth or Reality?” Then, write an essay of 4-5 pages that discusses how specific passages of the “Crack Cocaine” article could be revised or expanded by incorporating insights from “Five Faces of Oppression.” Based on the ideas you develop, discuss some of the reasons why the authors of the “Crack Cocaine” don’t explicitly incorporate the kinds of perspectives that Young works with in her article.
“Self-reflexive” Exercise for Essay Assignment #1: Having worked with writings from psychologists and a political scientist for this assignment, what can you say about the kinds of language and styles of argument that thinkers in each field appear to use? Which style are you more comfortable with, and why?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #2: Working with ideas from Young, DuBois, and Ross, develop your own theory to explain the roles of social class and ethnicity in popular discussions of mate selection (especially as they are represented in the web/newspaper/magazine resources you found). Based on your own observations of people you know, how closely do these people’s mating behaviors match what you see in current popular culture? How do you interpret any differences or similarities that you see?
Pre-reading assignment: Thinking about a particular social, economic, or environmental problem in your community, write informally for 10-15 minutes about the specific steps that you think people would need to take in order to raise awareness about the problem and address it in concrete ways. Based on your own understanding of this problem, what forces or circumstances have made it difficult to address so far?
In-class writing assignment: What strategies or suggestions does your pre-reading response (from the previous week’s class) have in common with those that Shibuya writes about in “Roaring Mice Against the Tide”? What new possibilities for “agenda-building” could his article contribute to the problem you wrote about?
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #3: With the help of ideas from Shibuya and Highton, analyze the comments and ideas of the two “agenda-builders” you interviewed. What successes and/or difficulties have these “agenda-builders” had that Shibuya and Highton don’t help you understand? What specific kinds of research might be needed in order to help other “agenda builders” learn from/build upon the experiences your interviewees describe?
This interview form was developed by LIBS 201B students, and can be adapted for use in LIBS 201A or 201C.
Identify two local people (they can be people you already know or ones you locate in your research) who are helping to build an “agenda for change” on an issue that is important to your community. Interview each person (face-to-face, by phone, or by email) to learn his/her answers to the following questions. (Feel free to add more questions, or to adapt the wording of these questions to fit your own style.)
How did you first learn about the problem that now concerns you?
How has your understanding of the problem changed since you=ve been working on it? What progress has been made so far?
What are the most useful resources that you have for addressing this problem? What specific resources do you wish you had?
To what extent is your issue debated politically, either locally or at other levels? How have political officials participated in or shown their understanding of this issue?
What aspects of public understanding do you think need to change before the community can make further progress on solving this problem? What barriers seem to keep people=s attitudes from changing?
An assignment sequence for LIBS 201C
In-class writing assignment: Think about the math instruction you received in middle and high school. Based on your recollections, speculate about differences between the classes you took and those that some of your peers took. How well prepared do you think you were for your college studies? If you think you could have been better prepared, what do you think you (or your schools) could have done differently?
Family/community “Math Tree/Math Map” assignment: Each student should prepare two diagrams–one tracing the (probable) levels of math education through three generations of his/her family, and one showing the population segments of his/her current neighborhood or town that (probably) have relatively more or less math education.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #1: Develop a hypothesis to explain the relationship between the levels of math education in your family and community, on the one hand, and the overall social and economic status of your family and community, on the other hand. Be sure to use 1) your “Math Tree” and “Math Map” and 2) ideas from Moses/Cobb and Stein as you discuss your hypothesis–and be sure to explore any sociocultural, historical, or economic factors that complicate the hypothesis you develop.
Pre-reading exercise and discussion: Write informally for 15 minutes about 1) any connections you see between ethnicity, health issues, and access to health care, 2) the main sources of information you have about these issues, and 3) which ones seem most reliable to you. Discuss your observations with the rest of the class.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #2: Working with ideas from Lundy, the popular magazine articles you’ve found, and your first essay, discuss the 1) challenges people from different groups face when they try to locate and evaluate health-related information; 2) some specific ways in which individuals or communities might address these challenges
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #3: Working with your group’s responses to ideas from Iqbal, Gilbert, and the scholarly journal articles you discussed, suggest some ways of reconciling one or two specific conflicts between religious beliefs (whose?) and scientific research (what kinds of research?).
On the pages that follow, you’ll find reproducible writing sample passages keyed to the three versions of LIBS 201. Each one comes from a text that’s not included in any of the LIBS 201 readers, and each is intended to help you see how your students understand what they read, grapple with central terms/ideas, articulate their own interpretations of readings, and work analytically with their own experiences.
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First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201A: Writing Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities
Carefully read the following passage (excerpted from a study of popular children’s literature), and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
Children can learn the fundamentals of critical reading before they learn the alphabet. There is a natural and continuous relationship between listening and speaking on the one hand and reading and writing on the other. Children as young as four and five can listen to complex stories and question them—learn to speculate about the author’s intent, hidden meanings in the text, and the social and cultural background of the work. They can learn to think clearly and speak well as they learn to read. After that, the development of reading skills per se is not a big deal. Once children understand the riches in written texts and want access to them, master of the mechanics of reading requires little more than patience and a supportive reader, adult or child, to answer simple questions about sounds and meanings. What is key to set children on the route to literacy is a few good stories and an adult or another child who likes to talk about tales. Content and conversation are the essential components of literate thought. The development of intelligence and sensitivity emerges through the challenges of stories. And Pinocchio is a challenging story, one that bears critical reading in the kindergarten.
When I was teaching kindergarten and first grade, Pinocchio was one of my students’ favorite stories. They loved the rogue and delighted in his mischievous ways. They were not chastened when he was turned into a donkey, and they didn’t learn from Pinocchio’s other mishaps that the unbridled quest for joy leads to unhappiness. They were sympathetic when he sold his schoolbook for a ticket to a puppet show and cheered him on during his career in the theater. Throughout all his sufferings, they were confident that he was brazen and clever enough to escape, and they turned the usual reading of the tale on its head by taking his sufferings not as the wages of sin but as the trials that had to be born for the fun he experienced.
For me mischief was a delight when it served to question arbitrary rules or test out a situation without hurting or insulting anybody. I like some aspects of Pinocchio’s irreverence myself, and one of the reasons I chose to read the book with the class was to create an occasion for the discussion of the limits of mischief and the development of empathy. Stories, delightful in themselves, are also powerful vehicles for the discussion of sensitive issues in a nonemergency situation. When there is an immediate abuse to deal with in the classroom—a case of one child picking on another or ostracizing her or stealing from him—then that particular instance has to be dealt with directly. It is foolish to try to generalize, tell a story, or preach or bring everyone together and have a class discussion: There is too much self-esteem at stake on the part of all the children involved, both those who were abused and their abusers. In situations like this my goal as an educator is to provide comfort and justice for the hurt children and limits and counsel for the ones who choose to damage others. I try to get beyond instances of abuse as well and as quickly as possible, but I don’t forget the larger moral issues involved. Stories become tools to approach and investigate these issues with students. They provide problems at a distance, moral dilemmas to discuss and examine, rather than conflict situations to be resolved.
–from “Wicked Boys and Good Schools: Three Takes on Pinocchio,” by Herbert Kohl
Thinking about your own experiences as a child (or as a parent), what roles have reading and storytelling played in the development of morals and socially appropriate behaviors? Pick a few of Herbert Kohl’s ideas and use them to write in detail about some personal experiences that help you explain the relationship you see between stories and moral behavior.
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201A: Writing Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities
Carefully read the following passage (written by two composition instructors who advocate a “service-learning” approach to the teaching of writing). Then write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
What would activism look like in our English studies classrooms? The literature on service-learning offers many models and programs, but our goal is to suggest ways to give them a more directly activist intent. Some instructors might choose to design, or to assist a class in designing, a group activism project so the entire class participates in the same act of dissent. However, individually focused possibilities are also productive and often easier to manage. There are advantages to insisting that students design their own activist projects or allowing them to do so. When we ask students to propose their own activism, we encourage them to connect course content to their own interests and philosophies—activities long valued in the educational process.
With activism, as with service-learning, there are potential trouble spots. Students may have emotional reactions to social change work, including anger, outrage, pity, and contempt. Educators need to deal with these reactions in a way that encourages students to continue their work. We must also deal with the question of assessment. How do we evaluate the success of our students who are engaged in activist work? Most social issues do not have a definitive answer, although some activist projects have measurable goals. In an “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course, students might choose to write letters of protest for a liberating-action project to businesses, legislative bodies, and other institutions. But what if no one receives a response? Students might be discouraged, apathetic, or outraged. It would be unfair to judge them on the measurable effect of their letters on other people; it is important to judge them on their ability to outline their intent as well as on the clarity and persuasiveness of the arguments expressed in their letters—on their efforts to bring about social change.
We walk a fine line. How can we expect our students to engage in activism without imposing our own ideological agendas on them? Students must be free to choose the arenas in which they engage in social change work. Although we may hope that our students are or will become progressive thinkers, we must accept the possibility that a student will support an issue or cause we find abhorrent. We only educate; we cannot insist that a student’s ideological affiliations match our own. Of course, we might ask the student to justify his or her choice based on course readings. By exploring students’ rationales for activism projects, we might also help students recognize and claim their own assumptions and ideologies. This might be a particularly powerful exercise when those hidden patterns of thought clash with the students’ conscious, intentional political statements.
—from “Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Acts of Dissent,” by Donna M. Bickford and Nedra Reynolds
Keeping in mind that the authors’ intended audience is made up of other writing teachers, spend a few moments marking ideas and/or passages that evoke a strong response in you. Then write an essay discussing, from your own perspective as a college student in a writing class that’s not devoted to service-learning, some ideas you find intriguing and some that bring up concerns or potential objections in your mind.
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201A: Writing Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities
Carefully read the following passage (written in 1936 by the national director of Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
A full and free expression on the part of creative artists may have come about in a measure at this time because of a release from the grueling pressure which most of them suffered during the early part of the Depression. It seems to have its origin also in a special set of circumstances determined by the Federal Art Project. The new and outstanding situation is that these artists have been working with a growing sense of public demand for what they produce. For the first time in American art history a direct and sound relationship has been established between the American public and the artist. Community organizations of all kinds have asked for his work. In the discussions and interchanges between the artist and the public concerning murals, easel paintings, prints, and sculptures for public buildings, through the arrangements for allocations of art in many forms to schools and libraries, an active and often very human relationship has been created. The artist has become aware of every type of community demand for art, and has had the prospect of increasingly larger audiences, of greatly extended public interest. There has been at least the promise of a broader and socially sounder base for American art with the suggestion that the age-old cleavage between artist and public is not dictated by the very nature of our society. New horizons has come into view.
American artists have discovered that they have work to do in the world. Awareness of society’s need and desire for what they can produce has given them a new sense of continuity and assurance. This awareness has served to enhance the already apparent trend toward social content in art. In some instances the search for social content has taken the form of an illustrative approach to certain aspects of the contemporary American scene—a swing back to the point of view of the genre painters of the nineteenth century. Evidences of social satire have also appeared. In many phases of American expression this has been no more than a reaction against the genteel tradition or a confession of helplessness. The dominant trend today, as illustrated by the project work, is more positive. There is a development toward greater vigor, unity, and clarity of statement....
The idea which has seemed most fruitful in contemporary art—particularly as shown by the work of artists under the Project—has been that of participation. Though the measure of security provided by the government in these difficult times unquestionably has been important, a sense of an active participation in the life and thought and movement of their own time has undoubtedly been even more significant for a large number of artists, particularly those in the younger groups. A new concept of social loyalty and responsibility, of the artist’s union with his fellow men in origin and in destiny, seems to be replacing the romantic concept of nature which for so many years gave to artists and to many others a unifying approach to art. This concept is capable of great development in intellectual range and emotional power. This is what gives meaning to the social content of art in its deepest sense. An end seems to be in sight to the kind of detachment which removed the artist from common experience, and which at its worst gave rise to an art merely for the museum, or a rarefied preciousness. This change does not mean any loss in the peculiarly personal expression which any artist of marked gifts will necessarily develop; rather it means a greater scope and freedom for a more complete personal expression.
Considering your own experiences producing or enjoying art in any form (visual, musical, literary, etc.), discuss some ideas from this passage that continue to be relevant today, and some that need to be revised or complicated for today’s social context.
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201C: Writing Social Justice in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Carefully read the following passage (excerpted from a book by a medical school professor) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
The prevention of thalassemia in Sardinia is a good example of a triumph of genetic screening. This disastrous genetic blood disorder is very common there, with 13 percent of the population carrying the gene....In 1983 a molecular test to identify the gene itself made screening even quicker and easier, and by 1989 the thalassemia rate had fallen to about 1 in 1000 births—a fourfold decrease in this devastating disease in just a dozen years.
While this story is a triumph of genetic screening, it can also remind us how human behavior interacts with scientific discovery. In the years since 1989, an interesting trend has been developing. Since many more Sardinians now reach young adulthood without knowing someone who has suffered with thalassemia, the rate at which people are getting tested has been falling precipitously. Some people predict that the rate of babies born with thalassemia will actually begin to increase again if there is no way to change the behavior of people whose knowledge of the risks involved is somehow only intellectual and not emotional. Like the human genome, this behavior is also just part of “human nature.”
The emotional side of a genetic screening program in Sardinia does not begin to reveal the strong reaction people have to genetic manipulation—even genetic manipulation in species other than humans. The tomatoes genetically altered to stay fresh longer or the bacteria genetically altered to eat raw petroleum and clean up oil spills seem to be clear advances for everyone, and they are unquestionably only hints of exciting things to come. But even these small victories have been criticized by some with the interesting argument: “It just isn’t natural!”
At times such as this, when the nature side of the debate is the party in power, it is hard to miss the striking way in which the “natural” is construed to mean the “proper” or the “moral.” With a recent claim that scientists have found a “gay gene,” the editorial pages were filled with arguments about how such a discovery proves that homosexuality is “natural”—and this is immediately taken as a decisive blow against the position that homosexuality is “improper” or “immoral.” This line of reasoning itself has a long history, as witnessed by the attempts of generations of racists to demonstrate how their moral position is simply a dispassionate conclusion drawn from recognizing the inferior endowments provided by nature to the objects of their hatred. The only difference today is that we know a little bit about the genetic basis of some of our endowments, and so racists allude to inferior DNA in making this old argument.
We must not forget, of course, that during periods in history when the nurture side dominates the debate, the natural in turn becomes an object of scorn and moral debasement, as when the Reformation (and its lingering doctrines) taught people to fight their “natural instincts” and “rise above them.” The notion of instincts inevitably gets tied up in this moral language. The “natural instinct” to seek sexual gratification and other worldly pleasures had a negative connotation in what became Puritan doctrine. Today, by contrast, with the nature side in domination, “good instincts” (sometimes called intuition in humans) appear to be valued almost beyond good training: just listen to the way people talk about who should teach their children or run their country!
—from Lessons from an Optical Illusion, by Edward M. Hundert
Pick a few of Hundert’s ideas and use them to discuss some of your own questions and concerns about the scientific ideas of “nature” and “nurture.”
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201C: Writing Social Justice in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Carefully read the following passage (adapted from a book written by a social critic) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
It is helpful for us to remember that there were no technological determinists among Enlightenment thinkers (philosophers and scientists of 18th Century Europe and North America) . There were optimists and pessimists, but none without faith in our capacity to reason ourselves into a felicitous relationship with our own creations. Which, I think, would lead them to ask still another question: What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change? This question needs to be asked because significant technological change always results in a realignment of power. This was the sort of question addressed by Adam Smith (in 1776) in his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations. In it, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which industry was pointing. Specifically, he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized skilled labor to large-scale, impersonal mechanized production. Do we need a new theory to justify the movement from an industrial economy to an “information” economy? We know that new technologies make old jobs obsolete while they create new ones. But it is likely that obsolescence will far outstrip the creation of new jobs. Is it possible that with the aid of computer technology ten percent of the population will be able to do all the work a society requires? If so (or anything like that), what is to be done with the rest of the population? Adam Smith would have had no answer to that question, but it is necessary that we do.
Of course, we have to ask the question first. And I fear that we cannot expect even our most intelligent entrepreneurs to ask it. They are, after all, dazzled by the opportunities emerging from the exploitation of new technologies, and they are consumed with strategies for maximizing profits. As a consequence, they do not give much thought to large-scale cultural effects. We must keep in mind that our greatest radicals have always been our entrepreneurs. Morse, Bell, Edison, Sarnoff (one of the inventors of television), Disney—these men created the twentieth century, as Bill Gates and others are creating the twenty-first. I do not know if much can be done to moderate the cultural changes that entrepreneurship will bring. But citizens ought to know about what is happening nad keep an attentive eye on such people.
In her book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, Esther Dyson tries to assure those who worry too much about the new electronic world that human nature will stay the same. Of course. If we mean by “human nature” our genetic structure or biological needs or fundamental emotions, no one has argued that technology will alter human nature (at least not by much). But human nature is not the issue. What is at issue are the changes that might occur in our psychic habits, our social relations, and, most certainly, our political institutions, especially electoral politics. Nothing is more obvious than that a new technology changes the structure of discourse.
—from Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, by Neil Postman
Keeping in mind specific events and trends that have occurred since Postman published his book in 1999, discuss your personal responses to some of the ideas Postman raises in this passage.
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201B: Writing Social Justice in the Social Sciences
Carefully read the following passage (adapted from a textbook on the history of economics) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
Chinese, Greek, Arab-Islamic, and European scholastic thinkers did not pursue economics as a separate discipline; they were interested in much broader, more philosophical issues. And since the economic activity they observed during those early times was not organized into a market system as we know it, they concentrated not on the nature and meaning of a price system but on ethical questions concerning fairness, justice, and equity. However, their insights into certain economic phenomena provided a foundation for later writers.
The Greek thinkers, particularly Hesiod and Xenophon, studied the administration of resources at the level of the household and producer and forged ideas about efficiency and its relationship to an appropriate division of labor. Aristotle and other Greeks examined the role of private property and incentives. In his discussion of needs and wants, Aristotle raised timeless concerns about the purpose of life, concerns that became the focal point of later examination by the scholastics. During the Middle Ages, many Greek writings were translated into Arabic and then from Arabic into Latin. Arab scholars thus influenced scholastic thought in philosophy, ethics, science, and economics to a degree that has been fully recognized only during the past fifty years. And although Muslim and Christian religious doctrine was basically hostile to economic activity, it could not eliminate all economic pursuits. Al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun, therefore, in trying to understand their times, succeeded in gaining certain useful insights into economic activity and thus contributed to the long historical process of building a foundation of economic understanding.
European scholastic doctrine did not attempt to analyze the economy; its aim was to set religious standards by which to judge economic conduct. In a society with very little economic activity, in which land, labor, and capital were not traded in markets, and in which custom, tradition, and authority played important roles, there seemed—at least to the educated churchmen—to be a “higher good” than economic goods. However, the disruptive consequences of changing technology were slowly upsetting the feudal order, and economic life posed an ever greater challenge to spiritual life.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, scholastic notions of the virtuous life were out of step with prevailing economic practice, and the ethical judgments of the church seemed inappropriate to the developing economies of Western Europe. A number of things had to happen before the market economy could fully develop and release the tremendous flood of goods inherent in the natural resources available for use and the knowledge and technology available for their exploitation. One of the most crucial changes was a great transformation of the institutional structure of Western Europe. Freedom was the key element in this change: freedom from the cold hand of tradition that stifled change, freedom from the ideology of religious teaching that viewed economic activity with disfavor, freedom from the political and economic power of the church that resisted the rise of new economic interests, and freedom from government that created and supported monopoly and engaged in other activities retarding economic advancement. Viewed over time, scholastic doctrine represents a slow retreat to a greater acceptance of economic pursuits. Freeing the economy from the church had to take place at an intellectual level as well as at a practical level.
—from History of Economic Thought, by Harry Landreth and David Colander
Which ideas or passages from this historical account of economics might offer useful starting points for discussions of economic justice in current-day communities? In your response, explain how your own cultural identity or academic interests shape your ideas about economics and social justice.
First-Day Writing Sample
LIBS 201B: Writing Social Justice in the Social Sciences
Carefully read the following passage (adapted from a book by a Spanish-speaking psychologist shortly before his 1989 death at the hands of the Salvadoran army) and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:
Today many Latin American psychologists have discarded behaviorism and taken up one or another form of cognitive psychology, not so much because they were won over by the critics of the psychoanalytic or behavioral perspective as because that is the new focus among academics in North America. The problem is not rooted so much in the virtues or defects of behaviorism or cognitive theories, but rather in the mimicry that leads us to accept successive models coming out of the United States, as if an apprentice could become an adult by putting its father’s clothes.
The dominant models in psychology are founded on a series of assumptions that are rarely discussed, and even more rarely are alternatives to them proposed. For example, positivism, as its name indicates, is that scientific conception which holds that knowledge should be limited to positive facts, to events, and to their empirically verifiable relations. Discarding everything that could be characterized as metaphysical, positivism underlines the how of phenomena, but tends to put aside the what, the because, and the why. Dividing things up in this way, positivism becomes blind to the most important meanings of human existence. Not surprisingly, positivism is very much home in the laboratory, where it can “control” all the variables, and where it ends up reduced to the examination of true trivialities that say little or nothing about everyday problems.
The most serious problem of positivism is rooted precisely in its essence; that is, in its blindness toward the negative. Recognizing nothing beyond the given, it necessarily ignores everything prohibited by the existing reality; that is, everything that does not exist but would, under other conditions, be historically possible. No doubt, a positivist analysis of the Salvadoran campesino (peasant) would lead one to the conclusion that this is a machista and fatalistic person, similar to the way the study of the intelligence of blacks in the United States leads to the conclusion that the IQ of blacks is on the average a standard deviation below that of whites. To consider reality as no more than the given—that the Salvadoran campesino is just fatalistic, or the black less intelligent—constitutes an ideologization of reality that winds up consecrating the existing order as natural. Obviously, from such a perspective the horizon drawn for Latin Americans is low, and the future that psychology can offer is poor.
Paradoxically, this positivism is combined in psychological research with a methodological idealism. It is an idealistic scheme that puts a theoretical framework first, ahead of its analysis of reality, and goes no further in its exploration of things than what is indicated by the hypotheses it has formulated. Considering that the theories were pulled out of very different positive situations from our own, this idealism can end up blinding us not only to the negativity of our human circumstances but also to what is positive in them; that is, to what they in fact are.
—from “Toward a Liberation Theology,” by Ignacio Martín-Baró (translated by Adrianne Aron)
Consider a social problem that negatively affects your community. Working closely with Martín-Baró’s criticism of “positivism,” discuss some of the difficulties that might be involved in studying and remedying this problem. In what ways is “positivism” an obstacle to creating solutions, and in what ways is it a resource?
Sample revision strategies (written for an early-semester arts/humanities section of LIBS 201)
FIRST-DAY REVISION TASKS FOR ESSAY #1
1) How clear/complete is the writer’s explanation of how his/her reading/interpretive methods work in action? Ask specific questions that help the writer fill in any gaps in his/her discussion.
2) How does the writer’s account of his/her history as a student contribute to your understanding of his/her strategies? What else could s/he say about this history?
3) Mark 3 places where the writer effectively applies Scholes or Johnston to his/her personal discussion, and 3 more places where s/he doesn’t, but could. Suggest some specific terms/concepts from the readings that might be useful.
SECOND-DAY REVISION TASKS FOR ESSAY #1 (for students who have already completed the above tasks)
Trade drafts with a student whose paper you didn’t read during your first revision session. Without making any marks on the draft, read it carefully. Then write a one-page abstract in which you summarize the paper, point out the main argument or thesis, note the key terms and concepts used by the writer, and if you find it helpful, provide additional general feedback. Return the abstract with the draft, and ask the writer to review the abstract to see if his/her intended meaning got across. If you and your partner were on the same “wavelength,” that’s great; if not, the places where clarification or elaboration are needed should be apparent to the writer.
Strategies for working with student writing in LIBS 201
The next three handouts were developed for a LIBS 201B class in order to help students see how their peers approached the first three paper assignments. In the first handout, asking students to speculate about the place of each paragraph within the writer’s larger essay helps them think about organization and the internal “signposts” that writers can use to move their arguments along.
Admirable passages from your first essays….
Can you tell where in each writer’s paper the passage appeared?
The largest oppressive force when dealing with crack cocaine sentencing versus cocaine hydrochloride sentencing is powerlessness. The powerless oppressed group has little ability to make or change laws. Those who have power in turn receive respect. According to Young, those who are “professionals” tend to have power, and those who are not professionals tend to be powerless (233). This makes it impossible for someone who is stuck in the vicious cycle of being oppressed by marginalization as well as cultural imperialism to become a professional. They are left without a voice to change the policies that oppress them. How can an oppressed person change the way the dominant group deals with the problem of crack cocaine if they aren’t even respected by the dominant group?
I’ve wondered lately how sentencing would turn out if cocaine hydrochloride were the cheaper of the two forms of cocaine. I’m sure there would still be the difference in sentencing, but perhaps it would more closely reflect the actual differences between the two types of cocaine. It seems as though the dominant lawmakers are trying to solve the issue by sweeping it under the rug, or eliminating the people associated with the problem. Instead, the problem still persists. Perhaps it needs to be solved from the bottom up, starting first with the roots of the problem: marginalization, cultural imperialism, and powerlessness.
The federal drug laws enacted by Congress aid exploitation and capitalism. If people lose their ability to vote, due to criminal records that involve drugs, they will be limited in their job searches and lose the ability to better their social and economic living conditions. Capitalism helps the corporate business community because business owners need groups of people who would be willing to work for them even if the people understand that the employers will not offer them a livable wage or medical benefits. Usually, people who work do not attain the full pay for the work that they do. It is the business owner who gains most of the profits because that is how profits are maintained and business flourishes. According to Young, “the injustice of capitalist society consists in the fact that some people exercise their capacities under the control, according to the purposes, and for the benefit of other people (226)
Looking at the extreme differences in sentencing between crack cocaine and cocaine hydrochloride, crack’s parent drug, opens up a veritable can of worms. When the sentencing is viewed as a possible tool in systemic oppression, there are many issues the researchers fail to address in their article, as well as a number of other issues and concerns that are not given any attention. Some of these issues are avoided or glossed over because they move far beyond the scope and focus of the research. To address those issues, different studies should be done, which incorporate current research, to help focus on the unasked or improperly asked questions.
This handout, which was developed for in-class use immediately after students received their graded second essays, includes passages in which students actively work with central concepts from one or more of the LIBS 201B readings. Students can check passages from their own essays against the analytical models in the handout to see if they are also working directly with important concepts from the readings.
Analysis in Action....
....Excellent Passages from Essay #2
1) Marginals, according to Young, are “people that the system of labor cannot or will not use.” I started thinking about the way I choose a mate and there are many limitations in which I will and will not date someone. In a bit of agreement with Louie Ross in the “Mate Selection” article, I do want a man that has a bit of education and can take care of himself, but those are not the only factors that influence who I will date. Going back to the people from my old neighborhood, I didn’t think until now that I may have been making some mistakes, or creating my own marginals. Most of the men I would not date did have a reason for doing what they did: they were providing for a family. One was providing for that little sister that he wants to become much more than he is, or feels he will ever be; for mom who has fallen from the path and is lost; for his son and/or daughter, who he wants to become something greater, and outdo his “daddy.’ These things never came to me until now. They are trying to do good deeds; they have a heart, but not legal ways of accomplishing their goals. But why?
2) In her essay “Five Faces of Oppression,” Young states that oppression is “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people” (219). Polish immigrants surely feel oppressed; most of them when they come do not speak English, do not understand the American society and can contribute little to the overall good of the economy. Because of their illegal status they cannot enter any schools, which would allow them to better their language skills and socioeconomic status. They work illegally and remain on the level of sustaining their survival (just like in Poland); that is, they are marginalized. They “have sufficient means to live comfortably but remain oppressed in their marginal status” (Young 231)....It is not surprising, then, that many immigrants marry for papers, and that the legality of the other sex is the primary criteria for mate selection.
3) One of the ways in which I can relate this concept of interdependence to Young’s faces of oppression is by relating it to the notion of powerlessness. Often times women, especially women belonging to poor minority groups or simply poor backgrounds, find it difficult enough to break out of the poverty cycle that they and their family members have lived through for a long time. When some of them finally have and begin receiving university-level education, their personal standards rise not only because they are expanding their knowledge and awareness about the world and people, but because now they have a nearly guaranteed opportunity that whoever they find as a mate will also have ambitions of moving up in the social ladder. By doing this, they no longer feel as powerless as they did before they were able to create options for their future. I don’t really think that it’s the marriage that breaks the cycle in this case, although often times it can, but rather it’s the education and knowledge which lead to higher standards and more specific choices in mates.
This third exercise asks students to “unbraid” tangled sentences or combine choppy ones in order to improve their style.
STYLE is more than cosmetic....
....Revising for STYLE makes your ideas clearer
Take these long, unwieldy (but smart) sentences and revise them to increase their clarity and power:
1) What I think about these figures is that, although the statistics speak for themselves to a certain extent, I feel that women, whether they may be African-American, Chinese or Arab, etc., are more than likely looking for someone who not only is capable of doing and providing well for them, but they do so because most often women who have had a higher education, like the women in the Ross reading, are looking for someone that they are not going to end up providing for themselves for the rest of their lives.
Now, take these short sentences and combine them so that the relationship between their (very useful) ideas becomes more obvious:
1) African American youth are said to have been socialized bi-culturally (DuBois 1982). This statement refers to cultural imperialism. Iris Marion Young mentions cultural imperialism in her writing, AThe Five Faces of Oppression.@ The universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, being the social norm, over other groups, defines cultural imperialism.
2) Most individuals want to marry a person within their own race. Race is seen as a very important thing by families. Most families pressure relatives to marry an individual of their same race. If a person marries someone that is not of the same race then the family relatives tend to dislike the outsider.
Sample research areas for LIBS 201A
This list is intended only to give students a sense of the kinds of projects you can develop and carry out in LIBS 201A. Feel free to “borrow” or modify any of them, if you’d like, or come up with something that’s entirely original.
1) Local history: What groups in our area need to have their stories told? What are some challenges/obstacles to researching and telling these stories? What are some of the uses of local history?
2) Millennium Park (or other examples of public art): What do various academic and non-academic groups see as the functions of public art? How well does Millennium Park fulfill these functions?
3) Analysis of religious perspectives on political life, popular culture, the environment, or economics: How do the belief systems and practices of a particular religious group influence how they look at specific aspects of contemporary life? What do academic approaches to this belief system help us understand about the experiences of its practitioners; what aspects of the believers’ lives are *not* clarified by academic theory?
4) Differences between academic and popular interpretations of specific forms of everyday culture: Where do both kinds of interpretation come from? What significance do the differences between “academic” and “popular” interpretation have for our understanding of this everyday culture?
5) Philosophical approaches to specific social justice issues: How can the work of specific philosophers (or schools of philosophy) help us understand the ethical challenges and practical difficulties connected to specific kinds of social justice activism?
6) Biographical studies of important figures in the arts and humanities (current or past): how does looking at the life of an individual figure help us understand the role that social justice activism plays/played in his/her life? What aspects of this figure’s importance to social justice activism *isn’t* (or can’t be?) explained by looking at biographical accounts of the person’s life?
Developing a Research Question in LIBS 201A
1) Identify your specific area of interest and reflect on your own personal and academic connection to it.
(For example: Let’s say you’re interested in how high school teachers approach racism in the literature or art they teach. How has this issue affected you and/or people you’re close to [the personal angle]? What questions might a researcher in your discipline [education, literary studies, philosophy, visual arts, music, etc.] ask about your experiences with this issue?)
2) Keep asking questions about your area of interest:
–For whom is this issue a problem (besides you and your social circle or immediate community)?
–What’s the recent history of this issue?
–How have other researchers in my discipline approached the problem? How satisfied are you with the questions they’ve asked and the conclusions they’ve reached? (The sources you find, and your opinions about their usefulness, go into your annotated bibliography.)
3) Identify different disciplinary angles
–How do the central questions and issues change from discipline to discipline ?
(For example, what differences do you see between the questions that researchers in education might ask about racism in the high school arts curriculum and those that philosophers might ask?)
–What resources do other arts/humanities disciplines have (in terms of methods or concepts) that might be useful for you?
(For example, if you decide to study philosophical approaches to discussing racism with high school students, what resources from literacy theory might you also want to explore?)
4) Research community angles and resources
–Who knows about this issue? Who are significant “agenda-builders” when it comes to this issue? How can you get in touch with them?
–What do “popular” resources (including TV, radio, newspapers, websites, magazines) say about this issue? How accurately do you think they portray this issue? How do the approaches taken by the popular media compare to what you find in your academic research of this issue?
When you’ve got responses to most of these questions, you are ready to formulate the question that will guide your research and writing….go to the next page!
This document, which is worth 10% of your final course grade, is short but needs to be packed with a lot of careful thinking and planning. It should include:
1) Your research question (remember that a “research question”–for example, “What constraints or obstacles do high school English teachers face when they teach novels about racism, and how can they address these problems?”–is very different from a “topic” like “racism in literature.” A research question gives you a direction to follow and can be modified as you find sources and learn more about the central issues.)
2) The research methods you plan to use (in addition to working with scholarly journal articles and popular media sources, you might *conduct interviews *develop and administer a survey *review quantitative or qualitative data collected by other researchers *carry out an observational or ethnographic study *analyze poetry, fiction, or drama about the subject....what other methods can you think of?)
3) A timeline or schedule for your research and writing (for instance, if you’re planning interviews or observations, how long do you think it might take you to line up “live” sources of information? What other tasks can you do as you are setting up interviews or putting together a survey, etc.? Where are the main textual sources of information located? Do you need to use inter-library loan to get them? How long will this take?).
Research project requirements
1) Your essay must be at least 8 pages (approximately 2000 words), not counting your Works Cited page or any tables/images/graphics.
2) You need a minimum of 6 text sources, at least three of which must be scholarly journal articles (the kinds of readings we’ve been doing so far this semester). Just as in the other papers you’ve written for this class, you need to work actively with your text sources (figuring out their central ideas, using important terms as tools that can be applied to other contexts, commenting on the usefulness of the perspectives they present). Do not simply use them to support your own ideas. No more than 2 of your sources may be ones available only on the web, and neither of those can be from “.com” websites. (Talk to me if you believe you have an especially strong case for bending this rule.)
3) You should use MLA documentation style. Be sure that your final draft includes pages numbers, a header with your last name on it, and a lively and accurate title. Please do not include a title page or report cover.
Here’s a version of the project guide written for students in LIBS 201B:
Developing a Research Question
1) Identify your specific area of interest and reflect on your own personal and academic connection to it.
(For example: Let’s say you’re interested in the U.S. health insurance crisis. How has this crisis affected you and/or people you’re close to [the personal angle]? What questions might a researcher in your discipline [sociology, political science, psychology, education, economics, etc.] ask about your experiences with this crisis?)
2) Keep asking questions about your area of interest:
–For whom is this issue a problem (besides you and your social circle or immediate community)?
–What’s the recent history of this issue?
–How have other researchers in my discipline approached the problem? How satisfied are you with the questions they’ve asked and the conclusions they’ve reached? (The sources you find, and your opinions about their usefulness, go into your annotated bibliography.)
3) Identify different disciplinary angles
–How do the central questions and issues change from discipline to discipline ?
(For example, what differences do you see between the questions that a sociologist asks about the health insurance crisis and those that a psychologist might ask?)
–What resources do other social sciences disciplines have (in terms of methods or concepts) that might be useful for you?
(For example, if you decide to study the psychological stress that accompanies living without health insurance, what ideas, statistics, or research approaches from sociology might you also want to explore?)
4) Research community angles and resources
–Who knows about this issue? Who are significant “agenda-builders” when it comes to this issue? How can you get in touch with them?
–What do “popular” resources (including TV, radio, newspapers, websites, magazines) say about this issue? How accurately do you think they portray this issue? How do the approaches taken by the popular media compare to what you find in your academic research of this issue?
When you’ve got responses to most of these questions, you are ready to formulate the question that will guide your research and writing.
This document, which is worth 10% of your final course grade, is short but needs to be packed with a lot of careful thinking and planning. It should include:
1) Your research question (remember that a “research question”–for example, “What psychological effects does living without health insurance have on parents of young children?”–is very different from a “topic” like “the health insurance crisis.” A research question gives you a direction to follow and can be modified as you find sources and learn more about the central issues.)
2) The research methods you plan to use (in addition to working with scholarly journal articles and popular media sources, you might conduct interviews, develop and administer a survey, “crunch” data derived from other published research, carry out an observational or ethnographic study, do a simple psychological experiment....what other methods can you think of?)
3) A timeline or schedule for your research and writing (based on your experiences interviewing agenda-builders, how long do you think it might take you to line up “live” sources of information? What other tasks can you do as you are setting up interviews or putting together a survey, etc.? Where are the main textual sources of information located? Do you need to use inter-library loan to get them? How long will this take?).
“BOOKLESS DRAFT” GUIDELINES
Making the first draft of the LIBS 201 research project a “bookless draft” focuses students’ attention on issues of meaning and argumentation at a point in the process when they need to approach their work in a flexible spirit.
The “bookless draft” assignment is designed to help you (and me) gauge how far along you are in developing a persuasive response to the research question you have developed. The idea is that, once you have developed a question, found numerous appropriate sources, and taken notes that actively analyze those sources, you are in a position to write a draft that presents your research question and “spells out” a tentative approach to that question--without quoting any of your sources. If you have not read carefully enough, or if you don’t really have an argument yet, the “bookless draft” will help us see where the problems are.
The “bookless draft” should be about 4 pages long (or 1000 words), which is approximately half the minimum length for the final version of your researched essay. As you introduce your research question to your reader and guide him/her through your thinking, you should use appropriate terms and ideas from your sources as you need them in order to offer background and important definitions; for the most part, however, you should rely on paraphrases and summaries of your sources. Whenever you include a term, paraphrase, or summary from a source, also include a parenthetical citation so that you know the part of the source you were using. This will help you when you go back to your draft and start incorporating actual quotations from those sources.
If you need a review on how to paraphrase or summarize, see Hacker pp. 319-320, 333-334, and 338-39.
Be sure to bring your “bookless draft,” your notes, and your scholarly journal sources with you to your individual conference.
“Problem Checklist” for LIBS 201 research projects
The following list includes some of the most common appearance (proofreading and formatting), mechanical, organizational, and stylistic problems that you may need to address before you turn in the really, truly final draft of your research project for this course. For every item I’ve checked on this list, you are responsible for finding and revising most of the examples of the marked problem in your paper. If you don’t understand what the problem is, talk to me; if you need help finding examples of it, make an appointment at the Academic Success Center in plenty of time to revise the draft before you need to turn it in for a grade.
Style issues
--Avoid “you” in academic writing
--Use single quotes for a “quote-within-a-quote”
--Sentences are long and unclear; “unpack” them into a few shorter sentences
-- Sentences are short and choppy; combine some of them so that the relationships between ideas are clearer
--Vary the lengths of sentences (mix shorter and longer sentences together to keep your writing lively
--Choose words carefully; look up meanings of words you’re not sure about
Appearance issues
-- Insert page numbers at top right corner of each page (except the first–no page number there)
--Be sure that end punctuation is inside quotation marks unless you have a parenthetical page citation at the end of the sentence (then the punctuation goes after the parentheses).
--Missing words
--Spelling
Mechanical issues
--Comma splices
--Unnecessary commas
--Fused sentences (also called “run-on sentence”)
--Sentence fragments
--Subject-verb agreement
--Verb tense consistency
-- Possessive form
--Parallelism
-- Introduce quotes clearly and be sure to integrate them grammatically into your own sentences
--Two hyphens make a dash (–)
-- there, their, they’re: which one do you need here?
Organizational issues
-- Transitions between paragraphs
--Transitions between ideas within paragraphs
--Introduction of research question within first or second paragraph
--Abrupt conclusion (paper ends too suddenly, without tying up loose ends)
Assessing student work in LIBS 201
Official course grading rubric
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Students in this mission-related course practice the reading and writing skills required for work in their academic majors and beyond as they explore contemporary, discipline-specific social justice issues. Students produce three short (4-5 page) papers in response to readings from a custom-published anthology and then, in consultation with their instructors, develop longer (8-10 page) research projects that address concrete social justice problems in their communities and beyond.
|
READING |
RECOGNIZING CONVENTIONS |
SOCIAL JUSTICE |
RESEARCH/ WRITING |
MECHANICS/ ORGANIZATION |
5 |
Easily paraphrases and interprets readings; confidently articulates disagreement with “experts” where appropriate; responsibly adapts/reworks ideas to own purposes where appropriate |
Writes like a disciplinary “insider,” employing a field’s typical rhetorical strategies and turns of phrase with ease. |
Identifies compelling issues with personal, local, and/or global significance; shows nuanced awareness of complicated causes and solutions to social justice problems |
Easily locates and incorporates diverse source materials into own writing; when appropriate to project, carries out and analyzes original research (interviews, ethnographic observation, surveys, etc.) and incorporates it into writing project according to disciplinary conventions. Skillfully links anecdotal evidence to “vetted” sources. |
Very few errors in diction, syntax, punctuation. Paragraphs are logically ordered; transitions are unobtrusive and seem intuitive. Documentation is generally precise and accurate. |
4 |
Shows grasp of difficult ideas; can usually apply ideas from one reading to contexts outside of the text |
Consistently incorporates discipline-specific rhetoric/style into own writing and/or comments on benefits/drawbacks of particular conventions |
Expresses awareness of and curiosity about social justice issues in world and home community. Writing explores possible strategies for, and obstacles to, improvement. |
Locates and uses appropriate source materials; when appropriate to project, carries out original research, though incorporation and analysis of results may seem awkward |
Occasional mechanical difficulties; transitions are appropriate but may interrupt flow of ideas. Documentation may have some formatting errors, but sources are presented responsibly. |
3 |
Paraphrases less difficult ideas from readings; misunderstands complex concepts and/or misapplies them to contexts outside of the text. Sometimes confuses indirect discourse (author’s representation of another writer’s points) with author’s opinion. |
Sometimes expresses awareness of disciplinary rhetoric/style, but rarely adopts or questions conventions. Consistently recognizes differences between academic and non-academic genres. |
Identifies significant social justice issues but may sometimes be uninformed about causes and contexts for those problems. Suggested solutions may reflect limited understanding of contexts. |
Locates sources that are appropriate to project but may have trouble using source materials to do anything but “back up” writer’s own claims. Rarely develops original research materials, or, if interviews, etc., are included, they may have methodological flaws that are obvious to the reader. |
Frequent mechanical difficulties, though most are not serious enough to impede meaning. Organization of paragraphs may undermine the goals set out in the beginning of the essay. All sources are documented, though formatting is frequently incorrect. |
2 |
Shows awareness of central topics of reading but frequently misinterprets individual ideas and passages |
Sometimes seems unfamiliar with differences among academic and non-academic genres. |
Discussion of social justice issues reflects unfamiliarity with current events and/or lack of exposure to concerns beyond those of home community |
Locates too few or inappropriate sources. Narrative and anecdotal forms of evidence may not be tied to textual or “vetted” sources. Reading problems lead to irrelevant or inappropriate uses of research. |
Mechanical problems sometimes disrupt sentence coherence. Transitions may be absent. Sources are inconsistently and/or incorrectly documented. |
1 |
Usually misunderstands both “global” and “local” concerns of readings. Choice of irrelevant passages for quotation reveals serious reading difficulties. |
Does not recognize differences between academic and non-academic genres. |
Does not identify or explore social justice issues |
Claims are presented without appropriate textual evidence |
Frequent mechanical problems seriously disrupt reader’s ability to understand writing. Documentation is absent or incoherent. |
Books and articles on Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines, compiled by Stephanie Wilson, SLS Graduate Assistant
Bazerman, C. & Russell, D. (Eds.). (1994). Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press.
Abstract: Included in this book are essays written by noted WAC authorities which expound upon writing across the curriculum. Specific topics include the American origins of WAC, assessment of WAC programs, and examples of academic discourse.
Connolly, P. & Vilardi, T. (Eds.). (1989). Writing to Learn Mathematics and Science. New York: Teachers College Press.
Abstract: This book, although older, provides a nice compilation of essays covering the possible linkages between mathematics/sciences and writing.
Dossin, M. (1997). “Writing across the curriculum: lessons from a writing teacher.” College Teaching, v45, n1, p14(2).
Abstract: This article was written by an instructor who has had hands-on experience with writing across the curriculum programs. She offers relevant and noteworthy advice on how to assist students in the development of their writing skills.
Fulwiler, T. & Young, A. (1990). Programs That Work. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Abstract: This book provides an excellent summation of fourteen writing across the curriculum programs at various universities throughout the United States. Discussion revolves around theoretical/philosophical foundations, scope and dimension, and a listing of sample courses.
Griffin, C. W. (Ed.). (1982). Teaching Writing in All Disciplines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc.
Abstract: This book provides a nice overview of the research that has guided the process of writing, effective writing techniques employed by instructors in the humanities, sciences, business, and mathematics, and effective methods of responding to student’s writing.
Herrington, A. & Moran, C. (Eds.). (1992). Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines. New York: The Modern Association of America.
Abstract: Specific topics within this book include American origins and the theories of the disciplines. Also included are reflections from instructors who have taught WAC in American literature and the biological sciences.
Magnotto, J., & Stout, B. (1992). “Faculty Workshops.” In S. McLeod & M. Soven (Eds.), Writing Across the Curriculum: A Guide to Developing Programs. (pp. 32-46). London: Sage Publications.
Abstract: This chapter by Joyce Magnotto and Barbara Stout provides a description of necessary and effective components of a WAC faculty workshop.
McLeod, S., Miraglia, E., Soven, M., Thaiss, C. (Eds.). (2001). WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs. Urbana: NCTE.
Abstract: This book provides an excellent discussion of WAC theory, electronic communication across the curriculum, service learning, interdisciplinary learning communities, writing centers, tutors, and writing intensive courses.
Russell, D. (1991). The Writing-Across-The Curriculum Movement: 1970-1990 (pp. 270-307). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Abstract: This chapter provides a nice overview of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement from 1970-1990. Specific issues discussed include the theoretical basis of WAC programs, the birth of WAC programs within higher education, and evolving models.
Young, A. & Fulwiler, T. (Eds.). (1986). Writing Across the Disciplines: Research into Practice. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Abstract: Young and Fulwiler have compiled essays covering topics such as changing faculty attitudes in regard to writing, poetic writing in psychology, writing in biology, writing in mathematics, and an evaluation of WAC.
Composition theorist Donna Qualley defines self-reflexivity as “a commitment to both attending to what we believe and examining how we came to hold those beliefs while we are engaged in trying to make sense of an other” (Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997, p. 5). Some people use the term “meta-cognition” to refer to similarly self-conscious thinking practices.