Week 8/MWF Days 21, 22, and 23; TR Day 15 and 16

Monday, October 9-Wednesday, October 13

Weekly Objectives

Students will be able to have a hands-on experience with the resources at Morgan library, and in class they will be able to continue putting into practice productive and ethical research methods through:
Visiting Morgan library for an orientation
Learning about Unit 2 (A3 and A4)
Practicing evaluating sources
Learning strategies for reading scholarly sources

Connection to Last Week:

Last week, students reviewed the fundamental skills of close and critical reading, Writing as Conversation, and the Rhetorical Situation all in the framework of the process of inquiry and refining an inquiry question. Additionally, students brainstormed potential ideas for their research. All these activities were used to help students arrive at a working inquiry question to guide their imminent research.

Connection to Next Week:

Next week, students will learn about the genre conventions of the Annotated Bibliography (A3) and revisit citation. It’s important for students to begin researching their inquiry questions immediately (i.e., this week) so that they can have plenty of time to sift through sources, critically read them, and write annotations.

Suggested Activities:

Unit 2 (A3 and A4) INTRODUCTION
Review A3 and A4 using whatever assignment introduction strategies you have developed, making sure to allow time to field questions.
A3 and A4 can be perceived as being complicated and the stress of the semester may be starting to wear away at some students. Be sure to break up the pieces, and make clear what the connections are between A3 and A4.
Make sure to revisit the Writing as Conversation and Rhetorical Situation models in the context of A3 and A4. Remember that these ideas represent central take-aways from the class that students will use throughout their college education and their professional and personal lives. These offer truly lifelong writing approaches and it is appropriate to ask students to explain these notions, rather than you simply doing so. This declarative knowledge of writing, which accompanies their procedural knowledge of how to apply the approaches constitutes the way they will represent the course and its focus to others. We want them to be able to articulate these ideas in addition to using them.

Evaluating Sources

In the current media landscape, it’s vital for students to have concrete skills to determine the validity of sources. When news aggregating apps and Facebook news feeds can just show people sources that align with their worldview, it’s important that we spend time helping students critically think about the sources they read and understand how to critically explore the validity of sources.
Review the criteria for evaluating a source, explore the Continuum of Credibility, the CRAAP test, and check out the links for media literacy (all can be found in A3: Materials).
Connect the criteria to what is expected to be covered in the AB
Create an activity that will help students begin to apply the criteria to evaluate sources. There are several options in A3: Materials.

Reading Workshop: Scholarly Sources

In both A1 and A2 the lesson plans incorporated reading workshops to help students hone their critical reading skills and to realize that reading – like writing – involves a continual process of improvement. College reading, like college writing, is often quite different—more sophisticated and far more sustained (longer)--that what they’ve experienced thus far in their lives and educations. You should also have a reading workshop in A3 for helping students learn how to read scholarly sources.
Scholarly sources can be intimidating for students because of their length, complexity, genre conventions (e.g., starting with an abstract, explaining methodology, etc.) Without guidance, students tend to do a poor job reading these sources (which then results in poor summaries and analyses of those sources). If you’d like to test this theory or demonstrate the importance to students, try giving them a very short excerpt to read on the spot from an academic article, perhaps one that’s from the reader. Ask them to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from it. This will tell you and them something about their level of readiness for the task that’s approaching—i.e., the source-based argument wherein they must argue AND use outside sources, fairly representing them. It will also tell you and your students how quickly problems can compound given multiple new skills they must demonstrate with this paper. The wisdom of breaking down the task of a source-based argumentative research paper will quickly become evident.
Design a reading workshop that helps students critically read a scholarly article, noting the features of the genre and providing them skills for reading them effectively. There are several scholarly articles in the Food reader, though to connect the reading workshop to the students’ own writing it could be better to have them do the reading workshop for one of the scholarly sources they plan to use for A3. There is a process tool in the A3 Materials called “Reading Workshop: Scholarly Sources” that you can use. Also make sure students check out “Overview of Terms for Scholarly Sources” – this will be helpful as they work to critically read their scholarly sources.
The A3 Materials has some web sources that provide some reading strategies for scholarly sources. If you use any of these resources in your lessons, be sure to attribute them appropriately.

Suggested Homework Assignments:

Because of the time that it takes to do good research, it’s important to give students a bit of “breathing room” in terms of homework so they have the time and energy to find sources, read them, annotate them, etc. (It’s also not a bad idea to put “Research your inquiry question” as an assigned homework item, just to keep it in the forefront of their minds.) This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t assign any homework (that’s probably a bad idea; at this point in the semester students are unlikely to do some things without being held accountable for them), but do consider assigning homework that considers the time it takes to read and do research. Moreover, make the homework assignments directly contribute to their research and functionally part of their backwards planning. For instance, some homework assignments for this week might include:
Read JTC: "Chapter 10: Evaluating Sources"
Continue researching your inquiry question using the library databases (which you can access online from home!) Note that for your AB you will need to annotate five relevant, reliable, current sources – two of which much be scholarly. The Annotated Bibliography is due Friday, October 27.
Prepare for our reading workshop by critically reading one of the scholarly articles you’re planning to use for your AB. Download the document “Reading Workshop: Scholarly Articles” from Canvas and fill it out for your scholarly article.

Assign homework that demonstrates how to backwards plan for a big project in college. Assign homework that holds them accountable for the steps in the process. (e.g., after the reading workshop might come a draft of an annotation of that article; after an annotation for one article they may have a brief workshop where they bring two more annotations to be reviewed by their peers, etc.) Point out to students that the course is demonstrating how to manage a large project and particularly how to time manage a source-based paper.

Things to Keep in Mind:

Make sure to keep highlighting connections between the creation of the AB and the writing of the researched argument. If students have never written an AB before, it may feel overwhelming and tedious; they may need to be reminded that they are working towards answering their inquiry question with an eye on developing a solid thesis statement and setting the foundation for a well-supported, ethical essay
Check the instructor’s manual for Joining the Conversation for activities designed to help students understand inquiry. Keep checking “Teaching Chapter Ten: Writing to Convince or Persuade” (116-130).
Don’t hesitate to ask any of the Comp Administrators or the Comp Director (who constructed the JTC Instructor’s Manual) for ideas if you’re stumped about a lecture or lesson. These people will have lots of ideas to share with you!