English 101 and 099 - Fall 2017

Syllabus Links:

English 101 - Illinois State University

English 101 - Heartland Community College

English 099 - Heartland Community College

Braided Approach

Richard A. Gale describes "braided practice" as work that combines pedagogy with scholarship to produce not only excellence in teaching, but a systematic contribution to the institutional understanding of learning.  "For when disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical expertise and scholarly inquiry are combined, not just in tandem but entwined,  connected with and reinforcing each other, they become a braided practice that is stronger, more coherent and more likely to lead to the kind of teaching that will in turn lead to significantly improved student learning" (from "Chapter 2: Braided Practice" in International Perspectives on Teaching Excellence in Higher Education, ed. Alan Skelton, 2007).  He describes a "cycle of inquiry," wherein instructors follow up their questions about student learning with investigations that often cross the lines of disciplines.

For a long time, I've been working on a pedagogy that I considered as the "braided syllabus," but I was unfamiliar with works by Gale and others.  My conception of "braiding" has been very different, less centered on a cycle of research and more centered upon the pragmatics of instructional goals: assembling a syllabus that would weave together lessons on grammar and style with lessons about research and lessons on cultural issues.  I like using the term "braided" to describe this interweaving of lesson goals, but I hesitate to use this term given its established meaning in prior scholarship.

English 101 and 145 - Spring 2016

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ENG 101 - Fall 2015 - Composition as Critical Inquiry

ENG 101 - Fall 2015

Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Outcomes - Assignment Types

One of the most difficult challenges facing student writers today is the need to reconcile the literate skills learned through social media with the formal demands of academic genres such as essays and term papers. Often, neither the social nor academic genres prove very helpful in occupational settings - you can't learn resume writing from the five-paragraph essay any more than you can learn it from Facebook. This becomes still more complicated as you factor in the variety of disciplines represented in English 101 - I frequently teach students in business, nursing, the humanities, and other majors, and each academic field has it's own demands for "good" writing.

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Menominee Indian Tribe: Creating Genres with Social Purpose

One of the most important aspects of writing is understanding that every writing situation can be approached in multiple ways.  This week, we'll be looking at how the Menominee Indian Tribe in Wisconsin uses online genres such as websites, YouTube, and Facebook in order to spread awareness of tribal customs and improve the financial security of the tribe as a whole.

We'll be using these examples to help understand different approaches we can take in our Project 2 genre examples.

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Research Quotes: Organizing Information

One of the keys to good research is collecting large quantities of information, and then organizing that information into a coherent narrative that others can understand.
Requirements:

1. Direct quotes have quotation marks, indirect quotes (paraphrasing) won't.
2. Each quote must have the author's last name listed (following MLA in-text citation)
3. I encourage you to give a line or two of your personal thoughts about the quote, but this is not required.  (Something like "I like this quote because..." or "This indicates that..."
4. For each quote, include 1-3 keywords (think hashtags).  Something like "genre convention...." or "CHAT term..."

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Quick Note: If this feels like busy work, you’re doing it wrong. Seriously. Write down the weirdest / most interesting quotes you find. Don’t worry about how they’ll fit. That’s what the outline is for.

Avoiding Plagiarism through Good Research Practices

For today's discussion, our goal is to look at how effective research practices can help us avoid plagiarism and protect us from false accusations.

Topic 1: Research Practices
Here, we consider which research practices help avoid plagiarism. Think about how some of cases were accidental versus purposeful. And what about the case where no plagiarism occurred? How might an author defend his or her work against a false accusation? What documents would be needed to provide such a defense?

Topic 2: Why Plagiarism Hurts Scholarship
In this topic, we're going to look at how plagiarism hurts research as a whole. In what ways can plagiarized papers "cheapen" the work of others?

Topic 3: How Do We Identify Plagiarism?

This is a complex topic. I'm not looking for "right" or "final" answers here - instead, we're just bringing up the issues as a way to understand the difficult complexities here.

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Project 1 Proposal

The discussion for Project 1 is very open. There's no specific research component required - I'm mostly checking to see that you know the difference between writing research and content research in terms of how you'll approach you project. So describe the writing genre you want to research for Project 1, and I'll post replies to let you know if you're on the right track.

Overall: Genre, Topic, Details
The main things I'm looking for are that

1. You've identified a genre of writing you'd like to study.
2. You can talk about the topic where you've seen this genre and why that's important to you.
3. You're able to give some details about how you'd research the genre.

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Emperor's Soul as a Metaphor for Writing

Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul offers one of the best metaphors for the writing process that I've seen.  For today's discussion, we're going to consider how this metaphor works within our differing fields of interest, and then we'll follow-up with research approaches for Project 1.  By the end of this discussion, you should have four posts that provide potential research sources for your Project 1:

1. A Main Post, where you describe your field of interest, and then relate writing in this field to a quote from The Emperor's Soul.  This main post should also include an attached PDF of a scholarly article you found via Milner Library.  (see the next blog post for Videos on Finding Scholarly Sources via Milner.)
2. Three Response Posts.  As in past discussions, each response should refer to a specific point made by one of your classmates (or to my initial post), provide your own thoughts, and then an outside quote or example to support your point (see #3 below).
3. Three quotes for Outside Support.  For each response post, your outside support can be any one of the following: a new quote from Emperor's Soul, a link to a website that you find interesting, or a quote from your Milner article (see #1 above).

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Return to ENG 145 Week 2

Finding Scholarly Articles on Milner

Next week will largely focus on finding good sources for your Project 1 research.  One of the key components for the project is finding useful scholarly sources via Milner Library.  Here's a series of videos that use the example of Trayvon Martin and Twitter to provide tips for finding useful sources. Note that the videos also reveals some of the frustrations of research - not every search will bring up what you're looking for.  These videos are not required for the course, but hopefully the can be helpful as you start thinking about Project 1.

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Discussion Post: CHAT and Everyday Writing

In this discussion, I want you each to choose a genre that you've written recently (within the past couple months or so) and describe your writing in terms of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT).

To understand CHAT, see these readings from Week 1:

• Edel: In the Twilight of the Modern Age
• Prior: Mapping Literate Activity (just the one page)

 Click "read more" to see an example of how I apply CHAT to blogging.

ENG 145 - Week 1

ENG 101 - Spring 2015 - Composition as Critical Inquiry

Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Map - Assignment Types

One of the most difficult challenges facing student writers today is the need to reconcile the literate skills learned through social media with the formal demands of academic genres such as essays and term papers.  Often, neither the social nor academic genres prove very helpful in occupational settings - you can't learn resume writing from the five-paragraph essay any more than you can learn it from Facebook.  This becomes still more complicated as you factor in the variety of disciplines represented in English 101 - I frequently teach students in business, nursing, the humanities, and other majors, and each academic field has it's own demands for "good" writing.

My goal as an instructor is to help students understand that there are differences between the types of writing they are expected to write.  From there, we look at how "good" writing in many genres will share requirements for evidence, relevance, and coherence - understanding the differences in approach can allow students to transfer skills from one genre to another.

ENG 101 - Fall 2014 - Composition as Critical Inquiry

Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Map - Assignment Types

Welcome to English 101!

Unlike most traditional writing courses, the Composition as Critical Inquiry course at Illinois State follows a Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) model.  This often causes confusion because we don't focus on "perfecting" writing - unlike courses you may have taken in the past, we won't try to teach "the one style of essay" that will work for all your classes because that's an impossible goal.  Instead, we examine how differing audiences expect unique genres of writing - as you'll see, every audience will have its own definition of what "counts" as "good" writing, and successful writing requires that we adapt our words to match the specific situations we face.

Course Schedule and Resources: Fall 2011

This schedule from the Fall Semester of 2011 can give insights into how the course generally works.

English 101 Learning Outcomes: Composition as Critical Inquiry

English 101 at Illinois State University teaches under the Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) model.  Unlike traditional composition courses, which focus on mastering the specific conventions of academic essays, the RGS model emphasizes recognition of the variety of "genre situations" students will face in their academic, professional, and personal lives.  This recognizes the fact that every writing assignment is governed by its own standards and conventions, and that these in turn shift in accordance with the differing needs and goals of professional and academic disciplines.

English 101

English 101: Composition as Critical Inquiry

Today we'll go over the course syllabus and several the electronic resources we'll be using over the semester.

ENG 101 Home