ON DAYS OF WORK SHOPS! PLEASE BRING ALL PAGES THAT YOU HAVE DONE ALREADY. FROM 1 TO WHAT EVER IS DUE THAT DAY.
Draft of Part 1 (Interest & Context) for Peer Review (1-2 pgs double spaced): _Due Monday April 4th
Draft of Part 2 (Methods) for Peer Review (2-3 pgs double spaced): __Due Monday April 11th_
Draft of Part 3 (Findings) & Applications
& Of Course your Conclusion for Peer Review (2-3 or more pgs double spaced):
Due Monday April 18th__
PLEASE NOTE!!!!!!!!!
PAPER DUE TO ME ON WEDNESAY
APRIL 20TH * THE WHOLE THING!!!!
FULL AND COMPLETED DRAFT
Monday, April 25, 2011
Feedback Return on Papers
Disscuss Reflection Letter (see below for info on Reflection Letter)
Meet with Students for feedback
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Meet with Students for feedback
Monday May 2, 2011
PORTFOLIO WORKSHOP & REFLECTION LETTER WORKSHOP
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
PORTFOLIO DUE - Last Day of Class
Reflection Letter
*A Major component of your grade in the Final Portfolio!!!!!
Reflection Letter: Looking Forward Back
A Reminder of My English 1302 Goals
Through your work in this class, you should begin doing the following things:
●Develop and build confidence in your abilities to create, interpret, and evaluate texts in all types of media.
●Develop knowledge and inspire new ideas through writing.
●Become a rhetorically effective writer who can respond credibly and accurately to a variety of writing situations.
●Learn to write with a purpose.
●Develop an awareness of how and why you revise your writing.
●Develop an understanding of the importance of getting feedback from others when writing.
●Develop habits for thoughtful and effective questioning.
●Develop reading strategies for analyzing texts (your peers’ papers as well as the readings you’ll be working with).
●Learn how to work constructively with each other through group work.
●Learn how to creatively take risks.
●Become familiar with appropriate style guidelines for class projects.
When we began this semester, we talked about how this class might not be what you’ve typically thought or experienced English classes to be. I wanted to help you think about what writing, reading, and learning are—in your lives, in school, and in the weird spaces where both overlap and we learn about ourselves and the world. And I wanted to do this by having you read, write, and think about what other people study and say about you as writing students. This may indeed sound like more than what your typical writing class aspires to do, but for me, it has everything to do with rhetoric, with thinking, writing, and interacting with others through language. Asking questions, reading about what others think, thinking about your own responses to these questions, and discussing the questions with others allows you to enrich your understanding of yourself and the world in which you live. All of this helps give you a sense of perspective, a sense of where you fit in to conversations that have been going on for many years and will continue to go on long after us. I believe doing this work matters to your development as students and to your development as contributing, thinking participants in the world, and so I am proud to have been with you along the way, helping you, sometimes pushing you, to compose your ideas with language.
We have read article about writing, we’ve worked on SQRs, we’ve talked about the different ways to think about writing as an academic and as a writer. We’ve questioned “academic voice”. We’ve learned to construct proposals for research questions. We’ve evaluated sources with annotated bibliography and constructed primary research with surveys and or interviews. We’ve watched spoken word presentations, read different ways that individuals construct academic papers such as Gloria Anzaldua. We’ve used databases and library references to gather sources that have individuals speaking about the different issues you are thinking about writing or are writing.
I hope you’ve come to see that writing isn’t a set of discrete skills that can be mastered in a single semester and then applied with ease to all future writing situations. Writing (in any medium) is hard because it’s hard, and we all need feedback from others to see where we’re accomplishing what we meant to and where we need to clarify and work through our ideas. I hope, too, that you have learned something about your own writing through your revisions and that you have come to appreciate the value of revision as a way for us to be as effective as we can be in our communication with others.
At this point in the semester, you probably haven’t had much time for reflection. Perhaps reading through the description above of what we’ve done so far represents the first time you’ve thought about all the considerable work you’ve done as a whole and not as individual pieces that have to be finished by a certain deadline. What I’m hoping you’re able to do now is begin to put all these pieces together, to try to think about what you’ve done from a “big picture” perspective. I want you to begin to think about what you’ve learned, what the challenges have been, and how you’ve dealt with those challenges. For many, it may take months or years––long after the course evaluations––to realize the full effects of what you’ve learned.
To begin this process of reflection, which I imagine will continue well past the time when your English 1302 portfolio is due, I want you to write a cover letter for your portfolio. In this letter, I want you to tell your story of English 1302. Where did you begin? Where have you ended up? What happened along the way? To do this, you will need to study the work you’ve done for the class––your in-class and homework assignments, Your SQRs, your projects, your revisions, notes and workshops. What do you see there? Look back at my goals for us in the class at the top of this project, and, also, here are some questions you can think about as you reflect on your experience:
●What do you know about yourself as a writer now that you didn’t know before? What strategies have you learned to use to make your writing more effective?
●What were the important questions for you?
●Where do you see glimmers of understanding? What do you still need to work out in your mind? Where do you see yourself not being able to say/do what you wanted to?
●What have you learned about composing, about rhetoric, about revision, about yourself?
●What were the things that helped you learn?
●What were the challenges you faced this semester? How did you deal with those challenges?
●What do you still want to know more about?
Your primary audience for this will be me since I will be using it as a guide to your portfolio. Your letter will offer me a way of reading the work of your portfolio, and by extension the work of the class, and should help me understand what you’ve learned from reflecting on your work in the class and from putting the portfolio together.
Though you certainly don’t have to, you could try to come up with an overriding metaphor that would help me see your experience in the class (or a part of it) in a way that honors the complexity of what you’ve had to do, or you could come up with a visual map of some sort––-a collage, a portrait of the class––that would represent all the strands of what your experience has been and what you’ve learned. You could also come up with a video clip or a short CD of music you put together in which you try to represent your experience in the course and what you’ve learned about writing, about work and education, and about yourself. In both cases, you would need to have a written component in which you walk me through your visual/audio and explain in detail what your alternative text tells me about what you’ve learned. Given the multimedia components of several of our assignments and the role of technology in composing, these alternatives would be very appropriate, but they are not necessary for you to do a good job with this assignment. What matters is that you are specific and thoughtful about what you’ve learned and that you refer to the specifics of your projects as you write.
As I’ve mentioned in class, you can’t really complete this assignment until you’ve done revisions of your projects, which is where much of the learning in this class takes place. But you should begin thinking about how you want to approach this assignment and start reflecting on the work you’ve done so far as soon as you can. I will be happy to take a look at your drafts of this project in the next few weeks during class. I won’t put a page limit on this assignment, but you should aim for at least 3 very tight, revised pages (and you can always do more). These cover letters will play an extremely important part in my evaluation of your portfolio as they will show me what you’ve learned and what you’ll be able to carry with you once your time in our class is over. Please, however, do not think of this assignment as an opportunity to beg for a grade or as a request for you to flatter me. I want to know what the class has enabled you to do/think, and I am really excited about reading your reflections. They’re often my favorite part of the semester.
Good luck, good writing, and kick some...well, you know how that one plays out.
