Today’s Plan:
- Outline
- Primary Research Check
- Homework: Researching, Drafting
Outline Assignment
Before the break, I asked you to brainstorm a quick outline in class. I want you to return to that outline today and flush it out a bit more, creating what we might call a “sentence outline.” I have an example here. The sentence outline does a few things:
- It is written in complete sentences
- The main points (roman numerals) are claims, attempts at topic sentences
- The subpoints (letters) are evidence
- The outline is broken into section headings
My paper has the following section headings:
- Introduction
- This section lays out our problem: that many writing courses eschew “creativity” because they either think teaching creativity is impossible or simply too difficult. We acknowledge that teaching creativity is painful, but necessary
- Section 1: Postpedagogy, Creativity, and/as Disequilibrium
- These sections provide more theoretical background–what is postpedagogy? in what ways is it a creative practice? in what ways does it “hurt” (via disequilibrium, confusion, stress) students? why is disequilibrium essential to learning?
- Section 2: Ambiguous Constraints: Moving Towards a Postpedagogical Creative Practice
- This section is almost like a pre-methodology section, since it describes where we did our experiment and gives an overview of our experiment
- Section 3: Methods
- Notice that it takes us 3 paragraphs to explain that we did a survey. And, truth be told, we could have done a better job, since we do not address the rationale behind the survey questions
- Section 4: Findings
- Here’s where we synthesize what we learned from our student surveys
- Section 5: Discussion / Toward a Productive Anxiety
- In this section we discuss how we integrate what we learned in the surveys into our ideas on creativity etc
- Section 6: Creativity, Disequilibrium, and Assessment
- During our review process, we were instructed to address how we grade creative projects. It was a useful request! But this section didn’t appear in our first, second, or third draft. It came later
- Conclusion
- Intro
- Section 1: Background lit
- Section 2: Methods
- Section 3: Findings
- Section 4: Discussion
- Conclusion
I am not expecting your paper will have the exact same layout as mine. But I do expect that your paper can be divided into sections that roughly follow the typical expectations for a research paper:
Primary Research Check
It is time to start drafting your papers–and that means it is time to complete your primary research projects. So, if you are working on a survey, then get that thing created. I recommend using Google Forms so that we can distribute the survey electronically. You are also welcome to do paper surveys. If you are doing interviews or focus groups, then make sure you have a date set and have confirmed participants. Also, make sure your questions are ready to go. If you are analyzing other materials (textbooks, websites, etc), then get your hands on those materials and get that shit done. IT IS GO TIME PEOPLE.
Canvas Today
I’ve made an assignment in Canvas for today. Put in there whatever you work on. If you have a survey that you want me to distribute to this class and my 329 class, then submit the link. If you need help with Google Forms, let me know. If you simply spend class working on the outline above, that’s fine too!
Homework
Get researching, get writing. I am hoping that you can have a draft of your paper by Monday April 2nd. That’s a little under 2 weeks. We will do the first paper peer review session next Wednesday, and I expect everyone to have five pages in class. I want a sentence outline similar to the one above by Monday. GO TIME.
