An Ethnography and Interviewing Primer

My students found this video, assigned for homework and discussed in class, very helpful in preparing them for fieldwork and thinking about the action of ethnographic research. Even if you don't assign it to them, it might help as a suggestion for some of your your students who feel nervous or unprepared to do interviews and observation.

An Ethnography and Interviewing Primer: http://vimeo.com/1269848#

PBS as Literacy Group

Check out our Project #2 site!

http://shannonmarielouise23.wix.com/pbs-as-literacy#!home/mainPage

Sincerely,

Shannon, Elise, Brandon, and Lauren

Gee Video

Will found this video of short part of an interview with James Gee. Might be of interest. There are many other Gee vids out there.

Related to Glenn

Temple Grandin, in the video posted here, calls for farms and stockyards to post webcams of their lots to help break down the barriers between producers and consumers.  I think she has a point.  You can find a number of farm webcams through a Google search.

In the video, Grandin takes the viewer on a tour of a slaughter plant.  It is graphic.  She talks about the changes made to make the slaughter of cows more humane.  The changes are the ones that she designed to help cows.  I think the video is worth a watch, though you may find it a little long to show in class.  She has many other videos posted on YouTube, including many about Autism.

I hope this post helps.

Further Reading

I always like to do further reading about texts that pique my interest and wanted to share some ideas!

Many of you saw a Berger/animal connection (no pun intended), so you may enjoy Carol Adams' text The Sexual Politics of Meat. 

Even though Swales attempts to define the term discourse community in pragmatic terms, he does touch upon a critique of it being a utopia. Joseph Harris has a great chapter titled "Community" in his text Teaching Subject, A: Composition Since 1966, New Ed. Harris' book is available as an e-book via Alice. Harris states the term is ill defined and proposes a new metaphor takes its place.

Michel Foucault!!

A brief primer of Foucault's ideas on power and discourse(s).

Writing Commons on Genres

Writing Commons is an interesting site. Worth checking out. It is pretty basic, so is appropriate for first years and students who are struggling with writing. They have a section on Genres that discusses genres in three discourse communities. Note: I do not necessarily agree with what they say!

Happy Cows talk!

Official site of the Happy Cows ads. Includes "Alarm Clock" and dude cows ogling the babes.

Enter The Meatrix

"The Meatrix" animated cartoon.

Pixar video on storyboarding process

http://vimeo.com/28500265 Talitha found this. Process is for animation film but it shows how brainstorming and group collaboration are essential to it and its entertaining (about 4 min.).

Another web site option

Not all of us are aware of it, so not many of our students will be either.  If your students or you in your 5890 group are considering producing a web site, you might want to know about Google Sites, which--especially if you are familiar with Google Docs--is fairly easy to edit and does not involve writing code if you do not want to.  Anything that you can post and/or edit through Google Drive can be posted easily onto your Google Site, along with YouTube videos.  It does involve constraints, as does any other web development.

Office Hours and Student Writing Conferences

I've been trying to resolve a few issues related to my office hours:

1) students remembering that you even have them,
2) hours of no students and then a clan of them arrive in the last 20 minutes of your office hours,
3) students scheduling appointments with you and then never showing up (usually b/c it slipped their minds).

I recently set up an online office hours scheduler for my students and I'm so pleased to see that it's working (or at least it has within the last two weeks). While the real test will be whether it works for the duration of the semester, I still think it's worth a try.

I am using the free version of a program online called ScheduleThing.

When I add extra "out-of-office" hours at Donkey Coffee now and again (something my students love, in case you haven't done this), they are easy to add as once-off hours within the system and students have responded by coming to see me more often than they had before (and for a wider range of issues). I actually see some of my most problematic students in "out of office" hours. I think the neutral terrain helps them feel less intimidated or insecure when they're coming in to discuss tough issues.

The Benefits?

1) You can generally know what to expect if students have actually officially set an appointment;
2) The system is set to send email reminders to students when they have an upcoming appointment (helping solve the "I forgot" excuse);
3) I find that students are signing up in the middle of the night (at the height of their "I have no clue what I'm doing" panic) when previously they would have calmed down by class and convinced themselves that they didn't need to see me;
4) I get announcements that students have scheduled an appointment (which then allows me to, in some cases, prepare for them specifically);
5) It's also working for drop-in purposes b/c students can quickly see (from their dorm room or elsewhere) whether I'm in my office and free (without other appointments),
6) And in general my need to be neurotically organized is satisfied by having the knowledge of what my office hours will look like.

Scheduling Writing Conferences

Lastly, I did writing conferences with my students for project one and will likely do the same (but optional) in project two. This program allowed me to open up the days I planned for conferences, shoot an email to my students, and the next day I knew I had a solid schedule without the hassle of thinking about this in class and reminding the students all the time of their appointment (or dealing with: "I forgot what time I signed up for" emails).

What does it look like?

If you'd like to see what the program looks like (from the student's perspective), take a look at my appointment scheduler: http://messitt.schedulething.com/ Also, feel free to schedule an appointment and then cancel it so you can see the whole process and confirmation emails received by students. If you do, just don't forget to cancel the appointment unless you plan to come and visit me with coffee during those 20 minutes (my order: a large, extra-shot Americano, black).

Hope this helps!  If you do try it, I'd love to know how it is or isn't working. If anyone else knows of schedulers that might be better, please let me know. I know many other universities have schedulers for all of their professors and students are used to using them. While I wish OU had this, this feels like a great alternative.

What my Dashboard looks like:

Learnist Boards for Personal Literacy Histories and Literacy Narratives

I wanted to pass along a link to the Learnist board I created for my students on Personal Literacy Histories and Literacy Narratives. This is a general board with links (and a great worksheet) to get them started and thinking about literacy narratives.

I also created:

• a board of Literacy Narrative resources for teachers
• a board of literacy history project samples.
• a board with links to easy-to-use multimedia presentation programs online.  

I hope these help!

Observations

Next week is the last for the first round of observations. I need to observe\be observed. I teach from 2-2:55 MWF. Any takers?
Feel free to build off this for anyone else needing to complete the assignment.

A Visual Representation of Project One

Hello everyone.

I shared in my teaching journal a PowerPoint slide I showed my students last week to explain how to write Project One. I didn't want to give them an outline or a form they could plug information into (ala the five paragraph essay), so I made this:

This seemed to help them get a good grasp of what the essay should be attempting. I did make sure to say that the niche does not need to be an afterthought ("Grammar should be taught in the senior year of high school and freshman year of college. And everyone should get a pony. The End.") after developing an argument. It can be built-in to the paper as a whole. 

Reading Rainbow

I was thinking about Reading Rainbow as a literacy sponsor. I had no idea that Reading Rainbow ran for 26 years, or that its run ended as recently as 2009 due to (you guessed it) budget cuts.
Check out the article from NPR here about Reading Rainbow's demise:

Butterfly in the Skyyyyyyy!

MLA Research Tutorials to share with your students

Share my Learnist Board ("Undergraduate Research: MLA Format and Citations") with your students or use it in your class to discuss MLA:

Remember Scott McCloud...

Remember the TED talk with Scott McCloud?  He talked about how we could use technology to display and explore a continuous image.  I just looked at today's xkcd comic.  You should take a look.  Remember to click and drag on the large panel.  Intertextuality at work.

Are your students crying about research?

Share my Learnist Board ("Library Research for Undergraduates") with your students:

What the Internet Looked Like in 2001

While reading Lanham, I started to wonder what online text looked like in 2001 when he wrote this. I googled some images, and here is what the New York Post looked like. :

Something to think about. 

attempt at summarizing Lanham

Lanham asks many questions in his essay. The basic one is ‘what’s next for text?’ To answer this he reviews the history of print to show that the third dimension, oral qualities, movement and other visual stimuli have always been present in writing, although the ideals of print have more or less successfully attempted to suppress them. Lanham analyzes examples from the far and recent past to establish this connection. Digital technology brings this back and also moves readers into a different “attention economy” in which there is plentiful text but a limited amount of attention. The return of the repressed element causes unease with the instability of new textuality because we are now self-conscious about language as language. Print is now seen for what it is, as a stripped down version of what we’ve always desired. He ends by concluding that oscillation between print and the multi-dimensional space/time expression of computers is what we need and what is ‘next for text.’

Week 2 Journal

Teaching Journal Week 2

This was a short week and that had some interesting effects on how class went and what we were able to accomplish. For Wednesday I had them bring a topic proposal, just a paragraph outlining their proposed writing construct and which aspect of it they wanted to question and research. I also had them look for three articles, but did not require them to be from any certain type of source. Consequently, most of the students had used Google and had very un-scholarly articles. However, since we did not have time to go into the articles anyway, it ended up not being that big of an issues. So, for Wednesday, though did the Kantz reading and response, as well as the topic proposals. When class started I asked them what they wanted to start with, because I had planned on splitting class between discussing Kantz and the topic proposals. Surprisingly they chose to discuss the Kantz reading. A few of them, I could tell from reading the responses, did not quite get the article. However, a few of them really did. In fact some of them were even super excited about it. This, of course, make me really excited as well. We discussed Kantz’s take on claim vs. fact and once we got the discussion going, I could tell the students who had been confused were getting it as they joined in.

When we transitioned to the proposal discussions the class took a little turn. Many of them were confused about what they had to have had prepared for class and what they needed to turn in. I think I was too lenient with them and intend to have a discussion on Monday about preparedness and participation. After we had cleared things up a bit, I had them split into their research communities and share their topic proposals. This was helpful for the students as well as for me because it allowed me to walk around and chat with groups and individuals. This also helped me plan for what I wanted to talk about on Friday.

On Friday, Lorraine Wochna came to class and went through some of the library research opportunities. I was very glad I had asked her to come in because she was not only a big hit with my students but she also covered the material faster and better than I would have been able to. After her presentation she and I both went around and talked to the students about their topics. We helped brainstorm focuses and key terms to search. A couple students were getting very excited and have very interesting writing constructs they wanted to question. At the end of class I went over what was due for Monday and received some unexpected responses. I think they were under the impression, because they were working on a paper they would not have other assignments. A couple even looked annoyed with me. I didn’t explain myself or the schedule to them and just told them where to find the reading response questions, which I posted to my blog, and sent them on their way. I think they are off to a good start on their first projects and they seem to be fairly interested in their topics.

I am really looking forward to discussing the Berger and McCloud readings tomorrow, though I wish I had thought to create some kind of reading guide to Berger before assigning it to them. That is one thing I will modify for next semester. 

People expressed some interest in this last night, so as requested, here are the links for the ads that I am going to use while teaching Berger.

The first three are ads featuring women, and the fourth is an ad featuring a man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwM_YKlinuk

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCm_fpM1P94

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnIgyV76JLo

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

 

 

Scott McCloud TED talk

Here's a link to a YouTube vid of a Scott McCloud TED talk. Pretty cool. There's another one from a different date and both are around 17 min. ea. Could assign students to watch.

Revised Topic for Assignment 1

Posted this on my blog ( http://wawsnakemountain.blogspot.com/) and got no bites. So here we go.

Revised Topic for Assignment #1

My original aim was to look at the role Confidence (in the sense of con-man and charlatans, not simply believing one can do something) takes in establishing voice and credibility in writing. This was too ambitious, as are most of my preliminary attempts. I framed my argument largely on Edgar Allan Poe's "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," a piece I was familiarized with by Dr. Thomas Fick in a course about the Confidence Game in American Literature and which I implemented in my paper about Brer Rabbit and Bugs Bunny "The Confidence Rabbit," and I sought to out many writers as "diddlers." Having reasoned the argument out and added Peter Elbow and a few other sources, I realized there was no argument here to be had: writers are "diddlers." So instead, I will examine the use of narratives to establish trust and whether or not this is a fair trick for an academic paper. At what point does the writer risk exposing their game to the reader? What makes some papers worthy of the price of admission and others a rock or two to chase them out of town? And do "you" and "one" really mean the same thing? Watch the cups.

Proposal Revision: May

Topic Proposal Revision: May

Prescriptive grammarians such as Strunk and White advise students to avoid using the passive voice primarily for reasons of conciseness. The social sciences likewise are concerned about issues of conciseness, but add the issue of personal responsibility. In public policy, for example, use of the passive voice is typical of evading responsibility or being neutral. In contrast, use of the passive voice in the sciences is a shared convention in terms of establishing objectivity. Scientists, however, differ in terms of the function of the passive voice in their profession. In his short article, "Prescriptions and Postscriptions," for example, Chris Dawson maintains that use of the passive voice establishes objectivity and may discourage testing the validity of scientific texts. In "The Passive Voice and Social Values in Science," Author Daniel Ding, however, explains that the passive voice supports the social value of testing scientific theories. Rather than simply pit different discourse communities against each other, my text will argue that as a social construct, teachers may want to consider treating teaching the passive voice to students as a rhetorical function to help students make effective decisions about their own texts. Similar to John Dawking’s attitude about punctuation, but in terms of the passive voice, writers “must make alert and successful choices” (253).  

Revised Blog Construct (Reposted from mj726011.blogspot.com)

(This pattern is the pattern I asked my students to use: #1: state the construct you are interested in exploring; #2: write a short paragraph considering the construct and avenues you may explore within the construct.)

1. Writing is a “thing” (e.g., an activity, a skill, a talent) that some people can do and others cannot. A more nuanced version of this construct would read: I do not find writing naturally easy; therefore, I am obviously not good at it.

2. People often entertain the idea of writing as a “natural talent” that consists of a straightforward or simple ability (think à write à edit) that some people can perform quite easily and successfully while others are doomed to just not “get it.”  Instead of an innate ability that some astute, and lucky, individuals possess, I want to explore the possibility of how writing – or one’s ability to write – often depends on a set of social or external constraints/mediators that may be more determinant than one’s innate ability to produce text. Things to consider could be i) eschewing the idea that the inability to write effortlessly means an inability to write at all, iia) how writing is not an uncomplicated “thing” but includes a complex set of recursive operations, iib) how writing is a dynamic concept that encompasses many meanings for different individuals, and iii) how academic writing follows a set of conventions that must be learned/internalized to be successful.

Proposal Revision: Plagiarism and Consumer Culture

Revision of original proposal

Original Proposal:

Writing Construct Research: Plagiarism

In the academic sphere, plagiarism is considered a violation against acceptable research and writing practices. It is commonly acknowledged that taking credit for other people’s work as your own is a form of intellectual theft and to that effect, institutions of higher learning have policies in place to penalize perpetrators of plagiarism—many go so far as expelling students for the infraction. However, each year and in each classroom, cases of student plagiarism take place leaving both the student and the teacher to make decision about responsibility and the process to which the situation will be resolved. Considering the situation of plagiarism, who ultimately bares the responsibility? How do we, as educators, effectively teach against plagiarism? This research aims to break down the relationship between writers, writing, and plagiarism as a construct.

Revised Proposal: 

Writing Construct Research: Plagiarism and the effects of the Academic Consumer Culture

Plagiarism, fraud, intellectual theft. The violation of one or more of these categories by students in academic settings comes with a range of punitive actions. Instructors may fail an assignment, request the assignment be re-done for full or partial credit, be expelled from the class, or even sent to a student judiciary hearing with the possibility of expulsion. What troubles me about this is not that students are being held accountable for plagiarism, they should be, but that institutions, who have a responsibility to be more than the figure head of a police state, seem to bear little culpability. I propose an emerging reason for plagiarism in the classroom comes from a shift in institutions' focus away from the classroom and needs of individual students, to the mass of academic consumers; the shift to higher education as a product--something to be bought, as opposed to spaces of imparting knowledge.

Proposal Reflection:

Although I like what is happening in the above proposals, I am frustrated by an apparent "missing link." Although I wanted to revise my proposal to directly implicate academic institutions and the consumerism of higher education as being part of the problem (which I did not address in my first proposal), it is not quite meshing together well, and I am specifically noting that. However, the introduction I wrote for my paper actually does the moves I want the proposal to do--so, to that end, I am also publishing my introduction along with this revision, because ultimately, I think it does a better job of saying what I want the proposal to say.

Introduction:

Although the Western consumer culture continues to embrace the concept of intellectual property and rights, and increasingly imposes punitive action against violators of intellectual theft; a continuation of plagiarism persists behind the once closed doors of academia. Study and research of plagiarism tends to favor the institution while condemning students of such actions. Exploring this research then, we see that there are significant gaps and an un-readiness to assign culpability to institutions or instructors. However, with the increasing push towards the democratization of education, the need to attend higher education longer, and for the attainment of additional degrees and certifications necessary for entry level employment, schools are flooded with a significantly growing population of students out of their depth and at a loss for how to succeed. In this essay I will argue an emergent trend in plagiarism is due to the consumer culture surrounding higher education and that the very institutions have a responsibility towards students that goes beyond effectively teaching ethical academic conduct.

Writing Construct Proposal

The construct of creativity as a concept that can be dissected and directly taught is unfortunately a constraint on the greater results of what creativity is capable of providing. By trying to breakdown creativity into a prescriptive manner, the way one might approach grammar or spelling, limits the student’s possibility at utilizing this mysterious concept. I believe that instead of instructing creativity as something teachable, which it isn’t neccesarily, we should be pushing students to think for themselves. In other words, all that is needed for helping a student be creative is to increase their awareness of the matter, encourage them to think as writers and show how writing effectively and passionately can boost the possibility of creativity. In order to better help our students understand what creativity is and how to use it, we must dissolve the notion that creativity is secondary to literacy and can be taught in the same manner. In spite of the fact there is no direct model on how to teach creativity in the classroom, we must prioritize this allusive concept on the same level as literacy, in order to illustrate to students that the “magic” of writing lies in how much of ourselves we invest into our compositions.

Project 1 Construct with Revision

Original construct proposal

I would like to explore how pronoun usage defines the writer's relationship with his or her audience.  I am unsure if any research has been done in this area.  But I often feel that when pronoun antecedents are clear, readers have a better understanding of their relationship to the work they are reading.  I think of Michael Moore, in particular, when I discuss pronouns in freshman English classes.  Michael Moore tend to run heavy in his usage of "you" as a general referral to his audience and as a way to connect to the audience members, but this general second person pronoun can also be recognized as limiting his audience to, possibly, those individuals with lower education levels.  The other reason I like (and ask for) clear pronoun antecedents is to help encourage a more academic tone in my students' writing.  I would like to see if any research exists on this topic and, hopefully, solidify my position on this issue.

Revised construct proposal

Writers who have a sense of their identity/persona as writers, who have a familiarity of the writing that occurs in their genre or field, and who use personal pronouns intentionally within their writing do so as a means to connect with their intended audiences.   The use of personal pronouns also helps to engage the readers in the topic and to insert the author into the field he or she is writing in through staking claim on the research he or she did and the argument being made.  The personal pronoun has, in a way, become a necessity and the rule in higher-level academic writing.  A problem of surprise and possible acceptance plagues undergraduate writers when they are confronted with this sort of pronoun freedom and see it modeled in scholarship.  Undergraduate then question the validity of what they were taught in high school.  To reduce the trauma and adjustment period that incoming college freshman go through when reading academic writing that practices personal pronoun usage, high schools should teach and exemplify proper and responsible use of personal pronouns and discuss how such use pertains to authorial identity/persona and their authority as writers. 

Renee's writing construct proposal

M. Renee Benham

September 4, 2012

Writing Construct Proposal

            “The majesty and grandeur of the English language; It’s the greatest possession we have.”[1] At least, that’s what Professor Henry Higgins told Eliza while drilling “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain” at one in the morning.  Eliza believed his statement and mastery of “correct” language changed her life.  In American schools, the rules of punctuation and grammar are drilled into our supple young minds until we can repeat them well enough to pass into the next grade.  In college applications, job resumes, and those ghastly computer-skills tests applicants must pass before even being considered for state employment, the rules of grammar haunt us.  Yet what if the entire subject of grammar is a construct?  Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs define constructs as “mental frameworks that people build in order to make sense of the world around them. One of the key features of an effective construct is that it quickly begins to seem “natural” or inevitable, rather than made-up” (35).  What if none of it really matters?  John Dawkins writes that “what ‘good writers’ do, writers like Orwell, is punctuate according to their intended meaning, their intended audience” (141).  He suggests that the “rules” should be more like the pirates code, providing guidelines that are only sometimes followed, if it suits the situation (Dawkins 142).  As long as correct meaning is conveyed, perhaps a double parallelism and subject-verb disagreement is not the end of the world.  Yet we have to draw the line somewhere, don’t we?  We cannot simply start wandering around making up words and ignoring punctuation willy-nilly.  For starters, I won’t understand you.  And the loss of understanding would negate the entire purpose of standardized grammar.  I argue that, as a freshman composition teacher, I need to teach my students the value and benefits of standardized (MLA) grammar and punctuation guidelines, while simultaneously challenging the common belief that good grammar denotes good writing and encouraging their creativity to write as “good writers” do. 

---

[1] http://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/myfairladyscript/myfairladyscript.htm

Will's Revised Topic Proposal

For the research project, I will focus on the writing construct of objectivity in articles written for an academic context. In English classes throughout high school and especially my undergraduate studies, I repeatedly heard that I must avoid using the first person in my papers. Phrases such as “I think” or “I believe” were strictly verboten. One of my professors often said that he simply didn’t care what we thought, only what we could argue based on evidence drawn from supporting texts. While I concede that such rules may force students to write stronger arguments and use more relevant quotations for evidence, nevertheless instructors ought to accept that “objectivity” in writing is a construct and a myth. Furthermore, I argue that if students consider this construct to be a fact about academic writing, then it may do more harm than good. Students following this rule may believe there is no room for their personalities and voices in formal writing assignments, and they may be more likely to find the academic articles we read and write to be boring. For evidence that objectivity is merely a construct and should not be strictly enforced, I will draw upon studies of the uses of first-person pronouns in professional academic writing, readings such as “All Writing is Autobiography” by Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow’s articles on voice in writing.