English 1302: Composition II

Welcome to English 1302. The following materials--a course description, course outcomes, and information on assignments--will help instructors understand the role of English 1302 in a student's intellectual and academic growth. Because it is the course that focuses on the development of research skills, it plays a very important role in a student's success beyond this particular course. The skills of argumentation that we foster in English 1300/130A and 1301 come to fruition in this course in the context of independent research; thus, we want students to leave the course with a firm sense of themselves as scholars who know the rhetorical moves scholars make and the necessity of making those moves within a discourse community with other scholars. Instructors may want to cut and paste some of the material contained in these pages to distribute to students. And finally, please let Dr. Jon Harned know if there is any other material you would like added to these pages which you believe would help you and other 1302 instructors at UH-D. The site is definitely under construction.

Instructors may want to cut and paste some of the material contained in these pages to distribute to students. And finally, please let Sara Farris know if there is any other material you would like added to these pages which you believe would help you and other 1302 instructors at UH-D. The site is definitely under construction.

Textbooks for this course include:
• Negotiating Difference , Herzberg and Bizzell, or
• Project Censored 2006: The Twenty Five Most Censored Stories , Phillips, et al
• A Sequence for Academic Writing , Behrens, et al • St. Martin's Handbook , Lunsford

Links on this page:

Course Description
Catalogue Description
Course Outcomes 1302
Assignment Sequence
The Research Project
Classroom Practices
The Collective Research Project

English 1302

Course Description and Requirements: English 1302 will build on the skills you developed in 1301 by focusing on research and analytical writing skills. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis and summarization of complex texts and the need to accurately paraphrase, quote and document sources through the development of basic research skills.

This course will help you to hone your critical reading skills so that you will be able to synthesize information more effectively and evaluate sometimes difficult written texts. English 1302 anticipates the kinds of reading and writing you'll be asked to do in your sophomore and upper-level courses. In addition to homework and in-class writings (which may include an annotated bibliography, a paper proposal, an abstract, and/or drafts of essays), you will write at least one summary, a synthesis essay, a research essay, and a critical analysis essay. At least one of these papers will include multiple secondary sources, and at least one essay will be written in class. You'll also have a final exam activity or in-class essay. By the end of the semester, you will have produced 17 to 25 pages of finished prose.

When you need help with your writing, you should plan on frequent conferences in the Writing Center (N-925). If you feel overwhelmed during the first four weeks of class, you may also consider enrolling in English 1105, a one-hour writing tutorial given through the Writing Center .

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CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION

Prerequisite: A grade of C or better in ENG 1301 or placement by examination. Description:
A continuation of ENG 1301; emphasis on writing based on research

COURSE OUTCOMES FOR ENGLISH 1302

Upon completion of the Composition sequence, successful students will be able to read clearly and critically, manage their writing process, and produce thesis-driven, text-based essays

1. Read clearly and critically:

comprehend, evaluate, and synthesize ideas from academic texts
identify and understand a writer’s stance and major claims
employ effective annotating strategies
produce accurate summaries of readings
use research as a tool of inquiry, for information, and as a means to build and support an argument
demonstrate competence in navigating the research options available through a university library
recognize the difference between primary and secondary sources
evaluate sources as evidence in academic discourse

2. Manage their writing process:

practice flexible and recursive strategies such as invention, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.
incorporate research in their writing process

3. Produce thesis-driven, text-based essays:

write essays with multiple and well-developed, focused paragraphs in support of a guiding thesis
articulate a clear and engaging thesis
use evidence and appeals that are rhetorically appropriate to audience and purpose
demonstrate consistent competence with sentence boundaries
understand and observe rules regarding intellectual property and plagiarism, including recognizing the boundaries between one’s own voice and ideas and those of others, and appreciating the consequences of violating the UHD Academic Honesty Policy
under timed conditions, compose 500-to-600-word essays that exhibit the conventions of academic writing
accurately integrate and document source materials, with signal phrases, in service to the student’s thesis / purpose
acknowledge multiple perspectives through a well-qualified thesis, counter-arguments, and sources that represent an adequate range of ideas
compose concise and purposefully varied sentences
edit for grammatical errors such as unmarked plurals and possessives, verb tense shifts, subject / verb disagreement, and pronoun / antecedent confusion
edit for correct use of punctuation such as apostrophes and quotation marks
observe academic conventions of formality, voice, and diction
address a scholarly audience
advance a rhetorically sophisticated argument employing a range of appeals and evidence, including counter-arguments

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1302 ASSIGNMENT SEQUENCE

The basic types of assignments used in 1302 include summaries, synthesis essays, research projects, and rhetorical or critical analyses. There are a number of ways to link these assignments to each other in order to help students develop a sense of the long-term project of developing and communicating specialized knowledge. One of the most basic principles behind the Composition Program's choice of these assignments is that, as a process, sequential writing assignments need to provide students with opportunities to develop new knowledge and skills in addition to practice using the knowledge and skills previously learned. What follows are brief descriptions of the assignment sequences most frequently employed in this department. For a more thorough understanding of the logic behind these assignments and the particular pedagogical strategies instructors have found useful, please continue to talk with colleagues and reflect on your own experiences with these assignments. They have never been written in stone...indeed, the swift and fleeting nature of the media in which you are now reading this text is somehow parallel to the necessarily evolving nature of a writing program attempting to provide its students with an energized yet coherent curriculum that leads to their success.

Most instructors begin the course with a summary assignment. It could be a summary of a text read collectively by the class, or it could represent a student's first efforts to find an article on a certain topic. Of course students need more than one experience summarizing, so you could assign three or so summaries for a total of 10% of the grade. Another option is to weight this first summary more than the others, and assign the others as homework. A summary could serve as a low-stakes in-class mid-term and/or final.

The argumentative or informative synthesis essay typically comes next. At least one instructor assigns both. Some instructors use this assignment to help students begin work with the topic that will eventually become their research project. In other courses, the synthesis is done with essays from a communal text. Yet another option is for the entire class to work on one issue, but the synthesized texts are the product of research done individually by students. No doubt there are other options for giving students practice at handling multiple sources. Given the need for students to be involved in research throughout the semester, most instructors are no longer asking students to synthesize pre-selected essays from a common text. While there are benefits to this choice, it can delay student entrance to the research process and thus reduce the already limited time they have to become comfortable negotiating it.

In 2005, over half of the 1302 instructors experimented with a collective research paper that was based on the individual synthesis essays. The instructors who participated in the experiment believe that while collective projects present their own challenges, the benefits are significant. See below for a more extended discussion of this assignment. The thinking behind this assignment is that students need to go through the entire research/essay cycle twice. If they are allowed to experience the process once by working with others and at low stakes, they will be more able to use the process to their own advantage the second time around, when the stakes may be as high as 50% of their final grade.

The critical/rhetorical analysis can also take many forms and be placed at different moments of the semester. Focusing on rhetorical concepts, some instructors have used this assignment early in the semester to foster a greater awareness of rhetorical appeals, fallacies, etc. Others use this assignment late in the semester, after the research project, where it can become a forum for student reflection on the topic they have been studying and/or their work in the course. It may involve a critique of the ideas and/or form of an essay read by the whole class.

The research project should be composed of numerous stages that may be graded, or not. Among the types of assignments possible are the prospectus/proposal, responses, approval of topic by instructor, working bibliography, annotated bibliographies (some of us have found that spacing two of them out over two weeks results in more thorough work), outlines, introductory draft with a source list, full draft, class presentation of draft, peer reviews. See the extended discussion below for a more specific discussion of the research project.

TEXTBOOKS

Negotiating Difference: Cultural Case Studies for Composition

The Composition Program has been using this text for about six years. It offers a number of good options for introducing students to primary texts, research, and closely focused course content. Most instructors choose one or two sections of the text on which to focus. For example, the section on the Viet Nam war could be an excellent platform for the entire course. Or, one can choose to focus on the Nineteenth Century and select texts from the sections on slavery, women's rights, and the acquisition of wealth. There are numerous other options; allow your interests and expertise to guide you here. Perhaps the only thing that should be avoided is an attempt to use the entire book. The study questions in the text are generally of a higher caliber than what one usually finds in a textbook; it also contains helpful suggestions for research projects.

Project Censored 2006: The Twenty-Five Most Censored Stories

We began using this text in the fall of 2004. It is not a textbook in the sense we usually mean. It is produced at Sonoma State University as part of an upper-division sociology class. It is a book that has an explicit political agenda: it is liberal/progressive in its politics. Because of its clear political positioning, it offers students an excellent opportunity to understand “bias” in this and the other texts they read. As in ND , there are many ways to use the text. One way is to divide the text into two sections. The section that gives brief explanations of the “twenty five most censored stories” can be reserved for student research projects. The articles in the second half of the book can serve as communal texts for the class as students develop expertise in media analysis. One can choose the extent to which media analysis becomes the focus of the course. Some instructors foreground it; others do not. Because we have just begun to really use this book, please experiment and keep in touch with what does and does not work. Each year, the book will change, so in the fall of 2006 we will begin using Project Censored 2006.

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THE RESEARCH PROJECT

Because of the importance of this assignment, the Composition Program asks instructors to utilize the following practices:

• As the major project in the course, the research essay should have considerable length and use numerous sources that represent a range of source materials, i.e. journals, books, newspapers, etc.

• Feedback on at least one draft of the research essay can be very helpful to students. This feedback may be in the form of a required conference or written feedback on the draft itself. However, we should be sure and give students sufficient time to engage in substantial revision. If drafts are available on Thursday, and the essay is due the following Tuesday, there is little time for reflection and revision.

• A week of classes may be cancelled for conferences; however, research is to be done on the students' own time. Class meetings should continue throughout the process. Do not cancel class during the research portion of the course so students can do research. If you want to explore research techniques during class sessions, schedule library tours or reserve a computerized classroom in which you can demonstrate appropriate web research techniques and resources. Various end-of-semester activities can include progress reports by students, revision workshops, in-class practice at paraphrasing, thesis formation, etc.

• Because research is a form of intellectual inquiry, students should be encouraged to delay thesis formation until after most research has been completed. Students will need your assistance to convert topics into questions or positions as they proceed through this process.

• The 1302 classroom should become a community of scholars investigating one or two general subjects that have many possible individual emphases. As the major project in the course, the content of the research project should reflect these subjects. Strategies for accomplishing this important coherence may include: discussing possible research topics from the beginning of the course; requiring students to use one or two of the readings from Negotiating Difference or Project Censored as sources for their research papers, or as beginning questions for a research project; offering students a list of focused topics, not thesis statements, related to the course content that could serve as research topics. In addition to emphasizing the intellectual nature of the course, having students incorporate a course reading into their papers can help prevent plagiarism, or at the very least, make it more detectable. The programmatic textbooks for this course are very amenable to this type of approach. In ND , for example, the course can revolve around one or two of the chapters, or students can choose one of the sections for their own investigation. Project Censored is set up so that the articles in the second half of the book provide excellent communal texts for the class and the twenty-five “censored” stories provide specific options for individual student research.

• Over the course of the semester, students in 1302 should produce from 17 to 25 pages of finished prose.

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CLASSROOM PRACTICES

The following practices come directly from instructors who teach 1302 here at UHD. They are options you may wish to consider using.

• Students begin research the second full week of school. Their assignment is to use an Internet search engine (Yahoo!, Goggle, or Ask Jeeves) to find information about a topic related to prisons (this semester it was about torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib). Students record websites and kinds of information they encounter on the website and we evaluate sites as a class. The kinds of information found on the Internet then get compared and contrasted with the kinds of information found in UHD library databases.

• Project a voice of authority and break the imaginary line between professor-space and student-space by moving about the classroom to keep students awake and paying attention. This also de-familiarizes the classroom for those who still think that UHD is the same as Texas public high schools (13 th grade).

Insist, from day one, that this class will not be about “opinions,” but developing an argument. Students frequently confuse opinion with argumentation, which means that they might take short cuts around the practice of supporting thesis statements with evidence and write, instead, whatever they “feel” instead of engaging with the information they find.

• Start research with the first essay after the summary. The first assignment is the analysis, so they have to find a scholarly essay and assess its success in conveying its argument.

• Students can analyze one scholarly article solely in terms of its apparatus. Students must examine the type of texts in its works cited list, figure out what kind of sources they are, then decide what it tells us about the kind of research the author has done, and then finally assess how effective the essay is in terms of argument and evidence. This exercise seems to help students concentrate on the success of their own research and its depth.

• The "quote hunt" exercise happens early in the semester. Using one of the sections of the text, they are given an argument (e.g. Nature is the only thing that soothes the troubled mind) and asked to pore through the text and find quotes to support it; this dovetails into the exercise on how to introduce quotes. It gets them thinking about texts as evidence more overtly.

• R Require reflective writing about the writing process and about learning to write. Several examples: The first writing assignment, a Self-Assessment Essay that uses the learning outcomes specified in the syllabus as a background for students to get clearer knowledge of what they already know before taking 1302, specifically as that knowledge is relevant to their goals in 1302. This helps them get the big picture in mind for the rest of the course, and usually provides them with a gratifying sense of what they have already achieved before they arrived in 1302

• Students keep a journal about what they learn in class. This consolidates and integrates whatever they have learned on a given day, gives them a perspective on the arc of development of their own knowledge during the course and provides a basis for further reflective writing at the end of the term about what they have learned.

• Reflective knowledge can drive learning. If students have a good grasp of how valuable whatever they write is for accomplishing the goals of the course, they experience immediate gratification in writing it, rather than waiting for the instructor to provide approval. Reflective writing can also consolidate and integrate knowledge: research suggests that having students write about what they learn in class improves recall of basic information, integration of the information into higher order thinking and a general sense of improved involvement in the learning process—they “buy in” when they write their journal entries

• Begin by listing the goals for the day---what we will try to accomplish and why. It can be very helpful to keep those goals and their purposes front and center in the class.

• To combat student indifference about draft writing, students can be encouraged to develop full drafts if they are only graded on the length of the draft. Their good effort should be rewarded, so a full draft receives 100, almost full 80, etc.

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THE COLLECTIVE RESEARCH PROJECT

The potential benefits of a collective research essay that comes about mid-semester are numerous.

• Students are allowed to observe other ways of thinking, writing, studying, etc. These observations can have long-term, positive benefits.

• At mid-semester, most students remain at least somewhat confused about how to use the handbook to document sources. Working together can help students understand how to negotiate the handbook and document appropriately.

• Unhealthy work habits often become obvious early in the process, offering some students the opportunity to change these bad habits in order to be responsible to the group.

• Many of us who use this assignment have, anecdotally, experienced an increase in retention.

• Many of us believe that the final research projects we grade have been stronger since employing this assignment.

• At the end of the semester, students are typically content to have gone through the experience and believe they grow from it. It seems to improve student confidence and the ability to persevere.

• Because this assignment is relatively low-stakes (no more than 10% of the final grade), if the essay fails, the student will still have every chance of doing well in the class.

• This project can result in a substantial (about 7-8 pages) essay that helps students understand the research process from beginning to end. It also provides them with a real feeling of accomplishment because of the length of the essay. After this experience they then begin work on their own, individual research project knowing what to expect.

These claims are made tentatively. As of Spring 2006, we have had three semesters of experience integrating this new assignment. We do not have hard assessment data, but given our experiences thus far, it is most definitely an assignment worth continuing.

Of course, some instructors and students believe that collective projects are not helpful. For example, students can have a hard time getting together out of class; the students without good work habits can cause frustrations and problems in the group. However, students do not need to meet out of class; electronic communication has made it unnecessary. Moreover, the frustrations caused by weak work ethics offer students important lessons. The Composition Program invites you to experiment with this assignment. What follows is a brief discussion of some of what we have found does and does not affect the outcome of this assignment.

Role in the arc of the course:

This assignment would come right before mid-term. It assumes that the individual synthesis essay was written on a limited number of topics so that students can use their synthesis essay in the collective paper. It prepares students for the rigors of the research project that follows it.

Developing the assignment:

If the synthesis essay is an informative synthesis, the collective paper allows students to move from the expository to the argumentative mode. Most instructors provide students with a specific question to answer as part of the thesis. For example, “Is this issue (whatever the students have researched) important to the (world, school, media, history, etc)?” While a question like this may be inappropriate for the individual research project because thesis formation is itself a challenge students must face, providing students with a structure for a thesis can be a useful tool for students if we wish to focus on essay organization and source integration. A general question such as the one above also offers sufficient flexibility for the development of reasons based on the work of the individual synthesis essay.

Structuring the student groups:

It doesn't seem to make much difference how it is done. Some instructors put students into groups as part of the individual synthesis essay so they can divide up the specific issues and sources from the beginning of the process. Others wait until the individual essay is complete. We have let students choose their own group, divided students up randomly or with instructor forethought, divided by topic or research focus. Some groups are very successful, others less so; however, we haven't been able to predict success based on how the groups are made.

Classroom work:

Ideally, classroom work during this assignment is held in a computer classroom. This is sometimes difficult because of an insufficient number of such classrooms; however, it is usually possible to reserve at least a couple days in an e-rooms It is helpful to give students specific goals for each class; it is also useful for students to keep a progress log where they record the work done in each class, the specific homework students give to each other, when the work was complete d , by whom, etc. In the e-rooms, you can play a very strong role by working with various groups to help them shape their arguments and integrate both sources and the work they did in the synthesis essay. Student groups get the benefits of focused, almost individual, attention, and the instructor is able to see problems as they develop and head them off before they get enshrined in an essay.

Grading:

For an example of grading criteria, see the sample assignments. Some instructors have experimented with giving individuals within the group different grades based on their individual contribution. That seems like a whole lot of extra and unnecessary work for most of us who give the essay a grade that applies to all who were in that group. Frequently, instructors will say to one another, “...but I just hated to fail it.” Failing an essay is always unpleasant for both student and teacher. However, for this essay, the grades probably will be rather low. Students should be expected to do the level of work we expect at the end of the semester, but because this essay is only the culmination of the first practice run, many students will fall short of that mark. That is normal. Students need reassurance that central to the success of the assignment is their growth; that a failing grade on this essay does not mean failure in the course. It is the one essay that probably should not be revised after the grade because of the collective nature of it and the amount of work that needs to occur after it in the research project.

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