Today’s plan:
- Working with Booth
- Developing a paper proposal
Working with Booth
Over the break I asked you to read an excerpt from Wayne Booth’s The Craft of Research. The purpose of the excerpt was to help us begin to generate research topics for your final paper. Today we will work with Booth a bit to help you narrow down your interest so that it can be adequately handled in a paper of 12-15 pages.
Pages 20-22, your relationship to your reader
Page 30, dealing with inexperience (Burke’s Parlor)
Pages 14-15, finding a topic in four parts
Page 41, 3.1, from an interest to a topic
Page 43, 3.2, from a broad topic to a focused one with four key terms: conflict, description, contribution, development
- How does X’s description of Y differ from A, B, and C?
- How could X contribute to our understanding of Y?
- How has understanding of X developed over time?
- How does X’s understanding of Y differ from Z’s understanding?
- What are 3 different ways of fixing X problem?
Page 45, Page 49: make sure you ask a question worth answering
Page 52, one sentence, three blanks:
- I am studying…
- Because I want to find out…
- in order to help my reader better understand…
Paper Proposal
Your paper proposals are due next Tuesday, March 29th. The proposals should look like this:
- A 2 page introduction that lays out the problem and summarizes how you plan to approach it. This summary will vary based on the type of research you plan to do. It can include initial research and reading or it can talk about developing a research protocol or experiment.
- Your paper should address how you will meet my constraints: that your paper address at least one reading from the beginning of our course and one reading from the middle of our course. These former texts should help you articulate a definition of education (and thus contribute to the warrant for your argument), the latter texts should help you articulate the problem your research addresses–though you don’t need to use them this way. Also, you might use several of the latter texts to discuss a problem, since many of them address similar issues.
- A detailed timeline, including reading. I will be asking you to read approximately 75 pages a week and blogging summaries of your research. Blogging will get you writing about and thus processing your research material ahead of time. The schedule should map out readings by week for weeks 12, 13, and 14. Note that I want at least four sources for the paper (so if you plan on reading a longer book, make sure you incorporate some other materials into your schedule). Note too that I will ask for complete drafts of the papers on Tuesday, April 26th. I will also ask you to have a working draft of the paper (at least 8 pages with an introduction) available for peer review by Tuesday, April 19th.
Homework
Get started working on your proposals.
