Presentations Thursday, 12/17

Presentations begin at 10:30 in the Hall of Languages, Room 203, and run to 12:30. Everyone is invited. Stick around for pizza after and additional conversation with researchers.

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Agenda, 12/8

Peer Review your Final Ethnographic Project

1. Fieldsite: What is the fieldsite here? It might be an actual place or some organization made up of people or it might just be the life histories of the people themselves. Whatever the fieldsite, it should be described in enough detail for you to know it well and be ready to enter it with the researcher. That means the researcher should have described it well enough in her ethnography. Do you feel she/he has?

2. Statement of Problem: What is the research question here?

Is it sufficiently grounded in the relevant research in literacy studies? If not, what suggestions can you offer from our readings that might help bring the scholarly nature of the research question forward?

Is the research question clearly stated? what might help clarify the question for you?

3. Methods: The researcher should make the research tools as clear as possible and tie those methods to the overall research question. What methods did the researcher use? Interviews? Surveys? Fieldobservations? Some combination of the above? Something else? How did she work to treat the participants with the care and respect they deserve? How many participants were involved and how? How much time did the researcher spend in the field? What’s the relationship between these methods and the research question?

4. Interpreting the Fieldwork: What recurring themes emerged from the research? Does the researcher effectively foreground those themes in terms of her research and connect them to the research question? Do you need to see more here?

5. What contribution does this study make to the larger scholarly conversation in literacy studies? Who does the researcher cite from our course readings and how does it work in terms of this study? Comb our course readings for relevant quotes and arguments. Offer at least two suggested quotes that might work well in terms of bringing the researcher’s current study into conversation with the larger scholarly conversation.

6. Is it interesting? Star the most interesting part and explain what makes it so interesting.

7. Are there areas of the study you’d like to hear more about. Mark those areas and explain what you’d like to hear more about and why.

8. How about the current organizational structure? Any recommendations there?

9. The title? Any recommendations?

10. Anything else?

Findings: What are the recurring themes

Agenda, 12/3

–CHANGE OF PLANS—

1. Submit WA5 Friday, as originally planned. I’ll respond to those between now and Monday.

2. Submit your Research Portfolio to me by Monday, 12/7.

3. By Tuesday, have ready a rough plan for your final ethnography and some relatively concrete ideas about how you will approach the CSW and the Commerce Writes Symposium. We’ll discuss these in groups and ready ourselves for the Friday, 12/11 show.

4. Monday, 12/7, (and Tuesday, if necessary) we’ll have one-on-one conferences to discuss your WA4 in terms of your final project, your research portfolio, and feedback on your WA5.

5. We’ve had a couple of days with no class or class cut short, so perhaps we can absorb this one-on-one conference without disrupting too much of your week. In any case, Thursday will be a day for you to work on your projects–preferably here with the rest of us.

NOTE ON PORTFOLIO:  If you have already begun developing a physical portfolio and feel better about going this route, then go for it! No problem on my end. We’ll just have to tweak your submission process a little. Bring it in to me during your scheduled conference time (see above) and we’ll examine it together to make sure you are on track. At the end of term, you’ll have to give up your Research Portfolio. But we’ll return it to you after the Spring semester begins. Just ask!

If you go with the physical portfolio, continue to think of it in terms of the major categories listed in the guide for your Research Portfolio. Your annotated bibliography should draw our attention to those relevant bits represented in each of those categories and should still function as your table of contents. But be creative in terms of making the WA5 work in relationship with the Research Portfolio. Whatever you do with it, WA5/Table of Contents should serve as a guide for readers AND fulfill the objectives of this assignment–namely, getting these elements of your research process foregrounded so we can see the rigor of your research process.

NEXT WEEK

Monday–conferences (see above)

Tuesday–work out plans for final ethnography and presentations

Thursday–same, with special attention paid to the

Friday–Celebration of Student Writing

RESEARCH PORTFOLIOS

So how many of you have already created a physical Research Portfolio, making bringing it into an online version difficult?

Shoot me an email if you are one of those folks. To shannon_carter@tamu-commerce.edu

There’s likely an alternative that won’t require you to recreate this thing for cyberspace. Still keep pressing forward with your WA5s, folks. I know you are stressing. We’ll have time to work on Thursday during class and I’ll do what I can to answer your questions.

The good news: If we can get this stuff out of the way this week, we can focus on writing next week and making plans for get some of this work to serve you in multiple forums. I think that’s a natural way to go about this sort of thing.

Agenda, 12/1

By this point you should have completed all your field research and be ready to begin bringing it all together for display in your online Research Portfolio and to develop your final ethnographic essay. This week we will focus on your Research Portfolios (with annotated bibliography) and writing up your final ethnographic essay (whatever form that will take).

1. How can I tell that you’ve not done enough research to develop a solid project? Let me count the ways . . . others can tell too. Don’t rely on one short interview to develop your project. Don’t depend on one set of field notes collected in a single visit. Don’t expect for it to work well with even just a little bit more. You need many, many hours of field research to work with. You know you’ve reached “saturation point” when your field work begins producing similar findings but if that happens after just an hour or two in the field then you have not selected an appropriate research question. That should not happen until you’ve spent many, many hours in the field.

2. When working on writing up your findings, don’t forget to make use of the scholarship in literacy studies. We’ll talk more about how to make this happen. First, let’s check out a couple of WA4s.

3. Research Portfolios (online)–draft due 12/4 (Friday) by noon
4. WA5 (annotated bibliography)–due 12/4 (Friday) by noon
5. Studio time on Thursday. Be ready to finish up your Research Portfolio and WA5 (which will serve as the table of contents for your research portfolio).

Plans for presentations, both at the Celebration of Student Writing and the Commerce Writes Symposium? http://sunski17.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/research-journal-23/

Grade Report

Interested in what your grade is at this point? Try preparing the following rubric. If you have questions, make an appointment to visit with me about your grade.

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Research Portfolio

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