Assignment:
Disciplinary/Professional Literacy Research
Background: Earlier assignments for this course gave you opportunities to identify your strengths and how those can enhance your literacy and to practice analysis in the interpretation of. We began the semester exploring how important curiosity and asking questions is to reading, writing, and researching in higher education, and we return to that issue more strongly as we move into the research essay assignment. This third project allows you to continue engaging effective invention, arrangement, revision, style, and delivery practices. It also introduces you to the ways that research and participating in important academic discussions prepare you to use literacy in successful ways across the kinds of writing situations you will find yourself in in higher educations and, perhaps, beyond.
Requirements: Different academic disciplines have different ways of presenting and analyzing information, different ways of building knowledge, and different ways of presenting knowledge in written forms. These differences are the result of responding to different kinds of things in different ways. This paper gives you the opportunity to begin building your own understanding of how writing, reading, researching, and perhaps other literacy skills such as oral presentation, operate within a discipline of interest to you. You may choose any discipline you wish to examine for this project. Whichever you choose, you must engage in at least the following invention activities:
• Analyze RAIDS in at least one scholarly article from that discipline
• Analyze RAIDS in at least one article from a trade publication related to that discipline
You must also do at least 4 of the following:
• Conduct an interview with a person who teaches major courses and/or does research in that discipline (please see me for the procedures for getting interviews with Nursing faculty if you want to interview someone in that department)
• Conduct an interview with a person who practices in a field related to that discipline and who is doing the kind of work you want to do
• Analyze an introductory piece about economic and quality of life issues related to the literacy work done in that discipline or career field
• Interview an MSU alum who has the degree you want
• Interview a senior in the major you want to pursue who is getting ready to transition out of MSU by spring 2015
• Use materials related to your research area that you collect at a job fair and/or interview a recruiter you met at a job fair
Your research will include additional reading and interviewing as determined by your individual projects. Papers must be at least 7-9 pages long, in 12-point font, with one-inch margins. You must include at least one visual in this paper; your visual should communicate a specific, important piece of information; graphs and charts are commonly used for this purpose.
Writing Context: Many students come to higher education with only a vague idea of what it means to become a participating member of an academic discipline. Your purpose in this essay is to give students who are new to the academic discipline/field you have chosen an introduction to the expectations for writing, reading, researching (and perhaps other literacy practices) in that discipline. Ultimately, your paper should help your audience understand the ways that literacies are used to create and communicate knowledge in the discipline/field you choose to explore.
The assignment gives you the opportunity to continue practicing successfully meeting the learning goals connected with previous assignments. It also helps you begin to integrate the skills related to the following learning outcomes. As always, the undergraduate learning outcomes that relate to our First-Year Writing Program Goals appear in parentheses.
Writing
• Demonstrate an understanding of writing as an epistemic and recursive process; effectively apply a variety of knowledge-making strategies in writing (integrated reasoning)
Reading
• Demonstrate an understanding of reading as an epistemic and recursive meaning making processes (integrated reasoning; cultural understanding)
• Understand that various academic disciplines and field employ varied genre, voice, syntactical choices, uses of evidence, and citationstyles that call for a variety of reading strategies (analytical thinking; integrated reasoning; communication)
Inquiry/Research
• Demonstrate the ability to locate, critically evaluate, and employ a variety of sources for a range of purposes (analytical thinking; integrated reasoning)