Today’s Plan:
- Review Proposal Assignment
- Proposal Conference Sign Up
- Research Tools
- Canvas Assignment
- Homework
Proposal Revisited
Your paper proposals are due next Tuesday, March 29th. The proposals should look like this:
- A 2 page (double-spaced) 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.
- Rough idea (and these change depending on the exact nature of your problem/argument/method/evidence/etc): The paper should detail 1) a problem that people are discussing and/or not discussing it (that is, who is discussing the problem? who is ignoring it?–how to respond to these questions depends on the problem). The paper should probably address other proposed solutions to the problem. The paper should address what you (hope) to bring to the discussion.
- 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.
Given some of the conversations after Tuesday’s class, it might be useful to talk about proposed projects a bit.
Proposal Conference Sign Up
I have to leave class a bit early today and will miss my afternoon office hours, but I know many of you would like to talk about your proposals before they are due. I will be available tomorrow from 9:20 – 11:00 and from 2:00 – 4:00 to conference. You can (and should) bring some writing for me to look at, but I am also willing to brainstorm and/or help chase down sources.
Research Tools
I want everyone to leave class today with 3-4 texts that they can begin reading over the weekend to help them shape their proposals. To do this, we are going to use a few specific tools recommended by the library. As we work, I will ask you to post your findings to Canvas.
I want to begin with Google Scholar. There are a few ways to use this tool–you can use it like any other search engine to do a topic search. Or you can begin by putting in a specific work and using the “cited by” and date tools to return recent texts that reference that work. This is a good way to begin finding texts in conversation with one another.
Next, I want to make sure everyone is familiar enough with the library website to find copies of the sources you locate via Google Scholar.
Finally, the library recommends searching with Subject Databases to get the best results. Let’s try that.
Homework
Read one of the articles you found today and complete your proposal. It is probably easiest for you to upload a copy of your proposal as a .docx to Canvas.
Bring a copy of a reading you are working with to class on Tuesday. We will be working with They Say, I Say on contextualizing and responding to sources.
