WRT 205 is a class I have spent a great deal of time thinking about and developing further. Regardless of version, one of my primary goals for the course is to help students develop strong source evaluation skills: acquiring sources pertaining to a specific topic in addition to analyzing them and utilizing them effectively in their own writing. As a result, we spend time talking about information literacy but also the peer review research process and citational practices. Another important goal I have for this course is students learning how to communicate knowledge in different forms, how to make something “academic” more accessible to a non-academic audience, but also how to engage with non-academic knowledge with the same care as they learn to with academic research. The course trajectory usually begins with practicing source analysis before they move on to sustained research projects in the second and third phases of the course.
The first two times I taught the course I focused on writing and technology. These versions started students off with a unit where they practices critical, rhetorical summaries of shared readings. With this practice they then put together a list of sources into the form of a hashtag syllabus (an assignment I was introduced to by another CCR student who was working with twitter). What was interesting about this second unit project is that it not only takes the place of an annotated bibliography, it also asks them to think about how sources are put together in ways that are less obvious with this more traditional research genre. This deeper analysis is important to their final project which asks them to design a different, multimodal project informed by this research (i.e. video essays, podcasts, infographics, etc).
What I liked about these first two iterations were the discussions about source-use that these nontraditional research genres made space for. The second time I taught the course, I realized students needed more guidance in evaluating sources for credibility and to be more attentive to the evidence used by both academic and popular sources to further their claims. In my most current iteration of the course, I have student examine intertextuality as a concept analogous with research: popular culture “references” other “texts” in the same way that research papers reference other sources. In examining the way that popular culture, notably hip hop music, “cites its sources” students are able to discuss the different reasons various writers include other sources of information in their writing (both academic and non-academic): to establish credibility of their own, to borrow the credibility of the another writer, to contextualize their contributions in a larger discussion, to fill in gaps in knowledge, etc.
The first unit for the current iteration of this course has students working through hip hop literacies as an analog to research literacies, notably ideas of “sampling” as remixing and building new ideas from previously established thinkers and writers (which is what a scholar does when they cite sources). Students learn how to apply rhetorical and genre analyses to texts in order to develop a popular culture review in conjunction with personal opinion and experiences.
The second unit has students delve more into intertextuality as a concept: how texts (broadly defined to include films, research, songs, games, etc.) rely on other texts to create meaning. Students build on their work from unit 1 and explore how research and writing is situated in social, historical political, and rhetorical contexts. They conduct sustained research on the contexts their chosen popular culture artifacts are situated in to which their artifact’s intertextual connections are a good starting point. Assembling a curated list of academic and popular sources, students then use this secondary research to expand their arts review from unit 1 to include social, cultural, and historical context.
The third unit asks students to conduct original, primary research, work that builds on their project from unit 2. They design and implement a research plan that contributes to the topics/contexts addressed in their developing arts review. This unit also discusses the importance of audience and access, the importance of finding different ways of communicating knowledge and information to different audiences. They then choose a different medium for their project, “remediating” their arts review into a genre that is more accessible for their chosen audience.
These three units together help students to learn that research is social and situated process, one shaped by the researchers methods, contexts, processes. Student also learn that far more than academics conduct research, intertextuality opens a way to see how our daily communication and information acquisition relies on the ideas we borrow/obtain from other people.
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