assignments ENGL493 Seminar in Writing and Writing Studies: Latitude & Longitude in the Discipline
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
SPRING 2014 Office Hours
Monday: 3:30 to 4:30 Tuesday: 11:00 to 12:00 Friday: 1:00 to 2:00 and by appointment. |
LATITUDE & LONGITUDE IN THE DISCIPLINE
This title is a bit of a misnomer in some ways, but, at it's heart, these two terms are what people who care about where they are at in the world use to pinpoint their exact location in the world And, in that way, this assignment is about the world of Composition and Rhetoric today. Our longitude and latitude will not be perfectly precise, but it will do a decent job of telling us about the range of ideas that scholars and teachers in the field care about, and it will give us a bit of a window about individuals working day-to-day as teachers of writing.
Latitude: A Writing Program Administrator is any person who is directly involved in overseeing a program that is meant to support students to become better writers. So, for instance, Anne Doyle is a Writing Program Administrator. She directs first year writing at BSU. Kathy Evans, in her capacity as director of the Writing Studio, is a WPA. Even yours truly, in my role as coordinator of first and second year seminars, is a kind of WPA. The list is filled with folks from all over the country at all different kinds of institutions working to promote programs and develop faculty that help all sorts of writers in all sorts of settings.
You, my young friends, are going to join this list. I will show you how. On a rotating schedule, you will be responsible for reading the posts to the lists for a day. Then you'll post a short summary of what the buzz was about on the WPA listserv for that day. Posts only need to be about 500 words. You don't have to be clever or cutesy. This is a blog for class not something that others will flock to like Suri's Burn Book. When you are not posting to the blog, you are responsible for reading what other people are saying.
At different points during the semester, we will talk, as a class, about what we learn about what Composition and Rhetoric cares about as a discipline today, at this moment.
Longitude: During the second half of the semester, you will do an email or skype interview with an individual member of the list. Reading the list daily will give you a broad sense of all the issues that someone who cares about Composition and Rhetoric thinks about, but talking to one person gives you a different kind of knowledge. You will get to see what it means to try to make the ideas and values the field care about evident in the day to day life of the institution you are working at. Comp looks very different to someone working at a Community College or at a place like BSU or some fancy private or Ivy League or large public institution.
Early on in the second half of the semester, we will talk about what questions you think we should get answers too. You'll decide as a class. And folks will ask everybody the same set of questions so we can compare the data.
Here are the five questions you should ask your interviewee
(as decided by us--with a lot of me, I know--7 April 2014)
1. What would you say is the overarching objective of a First Year Writing Course?
2. If you teach as part of your job, what kinds of writing activities do you use in your classroom? Why? What are the students like that you face every day?
3. If you work in a professional setting that requires or makes room for scholarship, what kind of scholarship are you currently engaged in? What do you find interesting about it?
4. Why did you decide to pursue Composition and Rhetoric as a scholarly field and as a profession? What advice would you give to an undergraduate interested in becoming a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition?
5. What thinkers—other Compositionists for example but perhaps not exclusively—have most influenced how you think about what you do as a scholar? As a teacher?
You can go about doing an interview in one of two ways. I have asked the list for folks who would be willing to talk with you, and I've gotten a nice response. So you can pick from that list or you can, after having read a while on the list, pick someone you would like to interview and reach out to them to see if they are willing to talk with you. This list is full of pretty decent people (some post a lot--a lot, a lot, so much so that I wonder if they get tenure based on posting to the list). Folks who agreed to help already know about the project and have seen the assignment, but folks you are cold calling will need to know about our class and this assignment. If you get someone to interview, please let me know so I can reach out to them as well.
Finally, we will bring all of our data together and draw some conclusions for ourselves about the state of the discipline as we see it through these two lens. We are going to map our own landscape of this field. Individually, you will put together different parts of the research for a poster presentation at the Adrian Tinsley Program For Undergraduate Research Spring Symposium. Fortunately, this year's symposium is on Monday, 28 April 2014. Rather than attend class this year, we will simply do our poster presentations at this time. Don't panic. I'll help you and you can get the posters printed on campus, my treat. It'll be great. And you can put it on your resume.
Because this is a senior seminar and because we are going to present this research, at the very beginning of the semester, we are going to take this project through IRB (Internal Review Board). This is another aspect of professional scholarship. If you intend to do any research that affects human subjects, you are required to have your research proposal vetted by a committee on you campus to make sure that it does not harm the people involved. I do not suspect that anyone what we are trying to do as harmful, but that's not the point. This is how research is done in the field.
Speaking of research, students interested in turning this into a written paper should come talk to me. The editor of the journal Young Scholars in Writing, Jane Greer, is one of the folks who agreed to be interviewed. She also expressed real interest in seeing what we produce this semester from this project. There is, of course, no guarantee of publication, but it's a wonderful journal and it would be a great experience simply to try to publish there. We also have other on campus venues that we can talk about as well. You are not required to do this part of the assignment, but if you are interested in the subject and would like to continue working on the project, I'd be very excited to help you.
This title is a bit of a misnomer in some ways, but, at it's heart, these two terms are what people who care about where they are at in the world use to pinpoint their exact location in the world And, in that way, this assignment is about the world of Composition and Rhetoric today. Our longitude and latitude will not be perfectly precise, but it will do a decent job of telling us about the range of ideas that scholars and teachers in the field care about, and it will give us a bit of a window about individuals working day-to-day as teachers of writing.
Latitude: A Writing Program Administrator is any person who is directly involved in overseeing a program that is meant to support students to become better writers. So, for instance, Anne Doyle is a Writing Program Administrator. She directs first year writing at BSU. Kathy Evans, in her capacity as director of the Writing Studio, is a WPA. Even yours truly, in my role as coordinator of first and second year seminars, is a kind of WPA. The list is filled with folks from all over the country at all different kinds of institutions working to promote programs and develop faculty that help all sorts of writers in all sorts of settings.
You, my young friends, are going to join this list. I will show you how. On a rotating schedule, you will be responsible for reading the posts to the lists for a day. Then you'll post a short summary of what the buzz was about on the WPA listserv for that day. Posts only need to be about 500 words. You don't have to be clever or cutesy. This is a blog for class not something that others will flock to like Suri's Burn Book. When you are not posting to the blog, you are responsible for reading what other people are saying.
At different points during the semester, we will talk, as a class, about what we learn about what Composition and Rhetoric cares about as a discipline today, at this moment.
Longitude: During the second half of the semester, you will do an email or skype interview with an individual member of the list. Reading the list daily will give you a broad sense of all the issues that someone who cares about Composition and Rhetoric thinks about, but talking to one person gives you a different kind of knowledge. You will get to see what it means to try to make the ideas and values the field care about evident in the day to day life of the institution you are working at. Comp looks very different to someone working at a Community College or at a place like BSU or some fancy private or Ivy League or large public institution.
Early on in the second half of the semester, we will talk about what questions you think we should get answers too. You'll decide as a class. And folks will ask everybody the same set of questions so we can compare the data.
Here are the five questions you should ask your interviewee
(as decided by us--with a lot of me, I know--7 April 2014)
1. What would you say is the overarching objective of a First Year Writing Course?
2. If you teach as part of your job, what kinds of writing activities do you use in your classroom? Why? What are the students like that you face every day?
3. If you work in a professional setting that requires or makes room for scholarship, what kind of scholarship are you currently engaged in? What do you find interesting about it?
4. Why did you decide to pursue Composition and Rhetoric as a scholarly field and as a profession? What advice would you give to an undergraduate interested in becoming a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition?
5. What thinkers—other Compositionists for example but perhaps not exclusively—have most influenced how you think about what you do as a scholar? As a teacher?
You can go about doing an interview in one of two ways. I have asked the list for folks who would be willing to talk with you, and I've gotten a nice response. So you can pick from that list or you can, after having read a while on the list, pick someone you would like to interview and reach out to them to see if they are willing to talk with you. This list is full of pretty decent people (some post a lot--a lot, a lot, so much so that I wonder if they get tenure based on posting to the list). Folks who agreed to help already know about the project and have seen the assignment, but folks you are cold calling will need to know about our class and this assignment. If you get someone to interview, please let me know so I can reach out to them as well.
Finally, we will bring all of our data together and draw some conclusions for ourselves about the state of the discipline as we see it through these two lens. We are going to map our own landscape of this field. Individually, you will put together different parts of the research for a poster presentation at the Adrian Tinsley Program For Undergraduate Research Spring Symposium. Fortunately, this year's symposium is on Monday, 28 April 2014. Rather than attend class this year, we will simply do our poster presentations at this time. Don't panic. I'll help you and you can get the posters printed on campus, my treat. It'll be great. And you can put it on your resume.
Because this is a senior seminar and because we are going to present this research, at the very beginning of the semester, we are going to take this project through IRB (Internal Review Board). This is another aspect of professional scholarship. If you intend to do any research that affects human subjects, you are required to have your research proposal vetted by a committee on you campus to make sure that it does not harm the people involved. I do not suspect that anyone what we are trying to do as harmful, but that's not the point. This is how research is done in the field.
Speaking of research, students interested in turning this into a written paper should come talk to me. The editor of the journal Young Scholars in Writing, Jane Greer, is one of the folks who agreed to be interviewed. She also expressed real interest in seeing what we produce this semester from this project. There is, of course, no guarantee of publication, but it's a wonderful journal and it would be a great experience simply to try to publish there. We also have other on campus venues that we can talk about as well. You are not required to do this part of the assignment, but if you are interested in the subject and would like to continue working on the project, I'd be very excited to help you.