McCleese, WRA 101, US 20
Disciplinary/Professional Literacies: Project 4
Week 5 (June 7-June 13)
Monday-Introduce Project 4. Review assignment in Week 5 module.
Tuesday-Review Link in assignment and in Week 5 module to MSU Library Dis Lit Assignment page. Watch two videos on finding sources. Start drafting Project 4.
Wednesday-Post one discussion question and two responses about Project 4 to Packback Questions.
Thursday-Use link in assignment and in Week 5 module to MLA citation guide on the Purdue OWL. Watch video on MLA style. Review resources as needed. Learn 1. how to cite a source using in-text citation and 2. how to create a works cited entry.
Friday-Draft/Research
Saturday-Draft/Research
Week 6 (June 14-June 20)
Monday—Draft/Research
Tuesday—Draft/Research
Wednesday-Post one discussion question and two responses to Packback Questions.
Thursday-Submit draft to NowComment for peer review by noon. Comment on partner’s draft by Friday at noon.
Friday-Revise Project 4.
Saturday-Submit Project 4 to D2L by 11:30PM EST on Saturday, June 20.
So far, you’ve had experience working from a cultural artifact as a way to build an inquiry into changing cultural values and practices during the pandemic. That experience will be useful for this project, as well—except that this time, you’ll be interested in artifacts of communication, and the “culture” in question will be an academic or professional one.
Each academic discipline has its own ideas about what counts as knowledge, its own rhetorical traditions, and its own written products—that is, its own expressions of literacy. Yet most of us come to college with only a vague idea of what it means to become a participating member of a profession--or what the relationship is between the major, its informing discipline (or disciplines), and the career that is the desired goal. This project lets you begin building your own understanding of how communication (reading, writing, speaking and listening) operates within a discipline (or profession) of interest to you.
On the one hand, this is a project that entails (primary and secondary) research: will need to find resources using the MSU library assignment guide for this project and study those resources and cite those resources as you discuss them. On the other hand, this is a rhetorical analysis: rather than use the content of your research to participate in a conversation within the discipline or profession you have chosen, you will use your research to inform an analysis of HOW members of the discipline or profession or citizenry make and exchange knowledge. As such, this will be a slightly different sort of research project than you've likely done before. As with projects before, this project is exploratory in nature, allowing you to discover a thesis through your inquiry (rather than begin with one).
THE PURPOSE
While the common purpose of this project is to help you learn more about what it means to become a participating member of the academic discipline or profession that you hope or intend to join, the ultimate purpose that directs this project will be the learning goals that you identify for yourself for your project: what can the project help you discover now, and continue to learn later?
In a sense, your "conclusions" for the product of your inquiry (the paper) will actually be beginnings, in that they will map out things for you to learn to read and write and ways that you will begin to pursue those goals as you join the discipline or profession you have chosen.
As you did for the Cultural Artifact project or the Video Essay Remix project, you’ll work through artifacts to draw conclusions about cultural values and practices.
In this case, though, the “artifacts” in question will be those associated with writing, and the “culture” will be a disciplinary or professional culture.
You’ll also supplement your inquiry with data from a one-on-one interview with a member of the discipline or profession that is the object of your inquiry and the subject of your paper.
For example, let's imagine that I want to study writing with the eventual goal of becoming a professor. Consequently, I may imagine doing research about the ways people write. We won't be JOINING the discipline or professional community--at least, not yet.
Rather, for this assignment we will STUDY and ANALYZE the sorts of literate works of the disciplines and professional communities we have chosen. Instead of evaluating WHAT these sources accomplish, we will find a variety of authoritative, literate voices in the community and evaluate HOW they do their work.
The resulting product may be written as a learning narrative that looks like a version of the first and second paper (except with citations), or it can look like a more formal report, with sections and subheadings, or even some combination of the two.
Specifically, you’ll choose a discipline or profession or some aspect of citizenry (one that you’re considering moving into, or that you just want to learn more about) and ask questions such as the following:
To address these questions, we will find a variety of disciplinary or professional or citizenship literacy artifacts to analyze:
By now, you may have already done some interviewing: for Video Essay Remix. Your prior practice with this will serve you well for this project. For your interview, if you are planning to meet face-to-face, or via Zoom, Skype, or Google Hangout, you may want to ask your interviewee to share with you via email three artifacts that represent her or his professional life. Following from our assignment prompt, you might request, "Please, bring with you ...
One nice feature of asking for artifacts, is that you can ask about what these artifacts are about in order to learn what sorts of topics, actions, and people are important to the person you are interviewing. Then you can analyze the artifacts--the texts--to see how they work.
What you ask your interviewee(s) is up to you; however, according to the prompt, you may find some of the following questions helpful in thinking about how to shape your own inquiry:
Now, that's A LOT of questions. Depending upon your familiarity with your interviewee and how much time you have for your interview, you may want or need to use only a few of these questions or you may want to ask others that arise naturally from your conversation.
If you are using artifacts, you may want to prepare very few questions apart from
However, it's a good idea to have a few questions that you know will be helpful for your project, regardless of what artifact(s) your interviewee brings to the interview.
You will write an essay (five pages) that identifies and describes the sorts of literacies (reading, writing, and other communication practices, and knowledge about these) important to the discipline or profession you have selected. Essentially, you will tell a story that makes claims about the sorts of things people in this discipline or profession read and write and the work they accomplish by way of reading and writing. You will support your claims with the evidence you have collected by way of your inquiry, and it will be organized into four main sections:
In each of the two medial sections of the paper, your purpose is to analyze how people in the discipline/profession address their reading and writing tasks. Consequently, you will want to attend to questions such as the following about the features of the writing itself:
This project is broken into two-week module, but it will follow familiar steps that will lead you to make familiar assignments:
The conclusion of the paper itself will have a reflective component in that it will reflect back over the evidence you have presented in order to articulate some formative learning goals that will direct how you will pursue reading and writing in your chosen discipline or profession. Also, this project is followed immediately by our final reflective project of the semester--so the story of your learning from and through this assignment can live there.
START HERE: Click on this link and watch videos and other digital tools for doing research on this specific assignment in the MSU library:
https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/wra101/disciplinary-literacies
2. Draft Workshops
Once you have chosen your discipline or professional community, you will propose why and how you will go about finding sources to review in order to answer the following questions:
Criteria for success:
3. MLA CITATION GUIDE FROM THE PURDUE OWL
CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO CREATE A WORKS CITED & USE IN-TEXT CITATION IN MLA STYLE
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