Instructor Guide: English 102, Spring 2010

English 102 is about research and writing. See syllabus for specific objectives, and read
info about the theoretical framework at http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/scarter/
102_GUIDE.htm

In short, the goal of English 102 is to teach students how to develop an effective research
question and respond to (and tweak) that research question with original research
involving loads of primary source materials--some of it archival and some developed
through fieldnotes and other means.

We are also concerned here with the idea that all academic research contributes to a larger
scholarly conversation. Thus, students are introduced to the larger scholarly conversation
in literacy studies (via Literacies in Context and other readings) and expected to engage
that conversation with their own research.

Fieldnotes are INCREDIBLY important here and throughout the semester. Teach your
students that early. Use the guides provided by FieldWorking and online, including this
handout: http://e102.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/agenda-september-30/

You can even use this method when listening to oral histories, reading through artifacts
included in the digital collections, conducting interviews, and, of course, when visiting
the fieldsite.

No good project comes from limited research. They must get involved in that research
quickly and spend loads of time generating pages upon pages of fieldnotes, Those
fieldnotes need to be expanded and analyzed several times, noting recurring patterns.
Introduce them to the concept of “coding”--early!

Fieldworking is incredibly useful in helping students develop appropriate research

questions, obtain relevant permissions, develop good plans for research (surveys,
interviews, interview questions, research site, archival research, etc), and just about
everything else related to this work.

Literacies in Context and the texts included at http://e102.wordpress.com/resources/

should introduce students to the larger scholarly conversation in literacy studies.

“Optional” texts

I have ordered three “optional” texts that you may decide to require in your own courses.
Make that decision early, and let me know. We’ll get information to you about how to get
that set up as “required” text for your specific section(s) of English 102.

You don’t need to select any optional text, but you are welcome to.

Option 1: An American Story (Debra Dickson, 2001). This literacy narrative offers a
useful way to explore the specific ways that reading and writing functioned in one life. A
common story like this can help you generate productive conversations in class,
especially when used to make sense of the theoretical lens provided by scholars like
Deborah Brandt (“Sponsors of Literacy”). It’s an interesting story that foregrounds issues
of race, class, and politics in some really provocative ways.

Here’s a discussion guide: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?

isbn=9780385720281&view=rg
Option 2: A Better Pencil (Barron, 2009). This has gotten quite a bit of press. Just google
it and you’ll find a number of interviews and reviews, which is amazing for a number of
reasons. I mean, it JUST came out! This one is useful in that it offers a historical view of
writing from the perspective of technology. Barron is accessible and the text itself is
interesting. If you are interested in foregrounding the technical side of things, I would
recommend this. If you are interested in writing from a historical perspective, I would
also recommend this.

You might even just read this yourself over the break, regardless of whether you use it or
not. Might lead to some interesting classroom activities.

Option 3: Shane: The Lone Ethnographer (graphic narrative). You may find Shane: The
Lone Ethnographer particularly useful in terms of developing effective research methods.
In some ways, it is a little goofy. But I have found NOTHING that makes the research
methods more accessible than this short, rich and (at times) amusing text.

So Options 1 and 2 are useful in terms of offering a common story to work with that isn’t
just the scholarship, which can be a little difficult to work with. Option 3 offers another
way into the research methods, which are incredibly important to this course.

But again, you don’t need to select any optional text. They are there for you if you want
them, though.

I can also make They Say, I Say available if you wish. Just let me know.

Research Portfolio

Students will be working on this throughout the semester. There are a number of
examples available, both online and in our various offices. See more about the Research
Portfolio in Fieldworking and in the sample syllabus.

Hunter’s is at http://huntj.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
Arielle at http://boopdedoop.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/

The rest of the blogroll at http://www.e102.wordpress.com includes some useful

annotated bibliographies, which help illustrate the various artifacts and activities students
collected and found most useful in developing their projects. The annotated bibliography
serves as the table of contents for their research portfolios, so even if the students didn’t
digitalize their portfolios (they weren’t required to) you’ll be able to see what they
included in those portfolios.

Including their codebooks. Codebooks are CRUCIAL!

Handout detailing Research Portfolio available at http://e102.wordpress.com/was/ (scroll

to “Research Portfolio”)

List of topics covered in one section of English 102 available at http://

e102.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/presentations-thursday-1217/
Celebration of Student Writing

Start preparing them for this right away. It’ll happen at the end of the semester, just as it
has each term since Spring 2007. See info on syllabus and video at http://www.ncow.org/
browse/video/carter_worthcelebrating.html

Writing Assignments:
Everything leads to the final project. I would suggest you even direct comments for each
major writing assignment toward the major project, so that each time you comment you
are speaking to that particular assignment as it serves (potentially) the major research
project. How might WA1 lead to a productive final project, for example? What about
WA3? Ideally, each of these writing assignments will inform (directly) the major research
project they take on. It should at least enable them to explore several potential projects.

WA1, Literacy History: Making use of Deborah Brandt's concept "Sponsors of

Literacy" (Chapter 2, Literacies in Context), this essay calls upon you to reconstruct key
moments in your literacy history by identifying the agents sponsoring this literacy and
narrating the way literacy has "pursued" you in a variety of contexts. (see Literacies in
Context, 39, for full description).

Suggestion: Use Deborah Brandt’s interview script to help students flesh out
details of their personal literacy narrative.

Alternative: If you wish to foreground the technology of literacy rather than

writing and reading in society, try pushing the interview protocol Selfe and
Hawisher used in studying “Literate Lives in the Information Age.”

An American Story: If you are using Dickson’s An American Story in your

course, it would be quite useful to trace Brandt’s concept of sponsorship through
that text. You could ask students to trace the notion of sponsorship through
Dickson’s life, focusing on her life as a writer and a reader.

Even if you choose to focus WA1 on their own lives (especially through the
useful tool provided in one or the other interview scripts listed above), the An
American Story activity could be useful. One option would be to make this
analysis of Dickson’s literacy narrative a group activity, requiring different
groups to focus on different phases of Dickson’s life and trace the “sponsors”
emerging from that research.

You’ll find copies of both interview scripts at http://e102.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/

generating-ideas-for-wa1/

Details for assignment can be found at http://e102.wordpress.com/was/ (scroll to end) ,

including a Peer Review Guide.

WA2, Found Literacies: Making use of the readings presented in Chapter 4 of Literacies
in Context, this essay calls upon you to examine the particular ways in which literacy
functions in a given community located on the Texas A&M-Commerce campus or the
surrounding community. You are encouraged to use both images and text in the
development of this argument. (see Literacies in Context, 213, for full description)

Suggestion: Try to get students to focus on “texts” associated with their potential
research site. The more specific the better. Resnick is useful in providing students
with a series of lenses through which to read the functionality of texts. A more
 useful lens might be the more widely cited “Literacy in Three
Metaphors” (available at http://e102.wordpress.com/resources/)

Alternative: Read Dennis Barron’s A Better Pencil (in chunks, over time). If you
are focusing on the technology of literacy, I would suggest you push the “Writing
on Clay” activity and chapter. Lots of neat information can emerge from this.
This is a neat assignment to couple with Yancey’s article.

You can do this “Clay Activity” even without shifting the current assignment or
requiring students to read Barron’s book. If fact, I would suggest you do.

WA3, Literacy in the Archives: Making use of David Gold’s essay “Where Brains Had
a Chance,” oral histories from one former student (Jackson) and instructor (Bowman),
and your own close reading of one or more items contained in the Texas A&M-
Commerce Digital Collections, explore the various ways literacy manifests itself in this
area and over time as revealed through key artifacts left by previous generations. You
want to focus your attention on just a handful of artifacts, drawing some conclusions
from them in terms of potential contributions they may make to your larger research
project. Your goal here is to show that you can approach archival materials as a
researcher with something more than a passing interest in what these artifacts might
reveal.

This is an exploratory essay. Describe the artifacts selected and why you selected them
over others. Explain what these artifacts might reveal in terms a potential, larger scholarly
project. Speculate. Then plan. What do you need to know before you can make good use
of these artifacts. What do you know about who created the artifact? What it represents?
What larger system it might have been a part of? What else do you need to find, learn,
collect, or know before you can draw reliable conclusions from the artifacts you are
exploring here?

See RJ#7 at http://e102.wordpress.com/research-journal/ and below for a couple

of potential exercises using maps and the current collections. That RJ#7 includes
links to complete transcripts for both of those oral histories (recorded in the
1970s) and the recordings themselves are likely to be available in the NCoW
collection before Spring 2010. Even if they are not, you’ll be able to obtain a
copy from Special Collections to share with your students.

This essay is speculative in nature. Get them thinking about the archives as
offering relevant artifacts for their larger projects. They might even find their
semester-long project in these archives.

Listen to/read the oral histories together after reading and discussing David
Gold’s essay (both of which are referenced in that essay).

Then get them into the Digital Collections and looking for something interesting.
What stories are behind these artifacts? GO THERE FIRST AND FIND SOME
COOL STUFF WORTH SHARING!

Bring an item or two before the class and ask them to help reconstruct its context
and meaning. Draw there attention to what else might need to be foregrounded
 before any researcher could draw definitive conclusions from the relevant
artifact.

As an additional or alternative exercise, you can always bring in a copy of our

own campus yearbook, an artifact or two from your own life, or anything else
obvious like that.

For example: Take a look at the set of yearbooks from a college in Greenville no
longer in existence (1916, Wesley College http://dmc.tamu-commerce.edu/
cdm4/ document.php?CISOROOT=/HCHC&CISOPTR=148&REC=1). How about this
scrapbook “About My School and Me” (1936) at http://dmc.tamu-commerce.edu/cdm4/
browse.php?CISOROOT=%2FHCHC

What can we learn about writing (instruction, uses, etc) from these
documents? What questions do these documents raise that might be worth
exploring in more detail? What else would a researcher need to do, know, see,
collect before she could draw any definitive, reliable conclusions from these
documents?

All of this is worth exploring here in WA3.

Also worth mentioning/sharing: what about the incredible list of oral histories
available? (see http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/library/collections/special/oral/)
SUCH interesting stuff here.

Really anything you can offer that will help them begin thinking in terms of
archival materials (even contemporary or personal archives) will be very
beneficial.

WA4, Research Proposal: Before you get too far with your final project, you will be
expected to articulate your research plan--that is, what do you want to know, why is it
important, what research methods will you use to obtain the information you need, why is
the proposed research site the most appropriate one for your project's goals, and how will
your research project--as proposed--extend/resist/otherwise make use of the readings and
key arguments presented in Literacies in Context (refer again to WA1-3). Don't forget
about those important permissions (which we will discuss at some length later).

WA5, On Literacy: For this writing assignment, you will be expected to consider
contributions your own ethnographic study could make that contribute to the scholarly
conversations in literacy studies. Make use of the scholarship we’ve read and discussed
thus far; include additional, relevant evidence and arguments you’ve encountered beyond
our required course readings; bring your extended fieldwork and writing into
conversation with the larger field of literacy studies. In other words, what will be your
contribution to the scholarly conversation in literacy studies?

OR use this assignment--focusing on their putting their fieldwork to work. I

found this to be quite useful. A detailed assignment sheet can be found at http://
e102.wordpress.com/was/ (scroll down to WA4).

WA5: An Insider Perspective This essay calls upon you to make extensive use of the ethnographer’s
research tools (interview, observations, fieldnotes) to offer an insider’s perspective on your research site. For
WA4, you should conduct at least one hour-long interview with a key participant. Review that interview
 several times for recurring themes, and make sense of those themes through a sustained review of the
artifacts, field observations, and other readings you have done thus far. Why? “When you are looking at
literacy and culture, for example, [ethnographic interviewing] can help you see how the cultural identities
people claim for themselves affect the kinds of literacy behaviors they practice in different parts of their
lives. When you look at literacy and class, ethnographic interviewing can help you understand how social
stratification and expected literacy practices within different class cultures affect people at the level of the
individual. When you look at literacy and work, it can give you a more complex view of the power dynamics
involved in collaborative processes of writing. Finally, when you look at literacy and technology,
ethnographic interviewing can help you better trace people’s actual social uses of the literacy technologies
within particular contexts” (Lindquist and Seitz, Elements of Literacy). You can also make extensive use of
this in your final ethnographic study.

WA6, Annotated Bibliography: Develop a list of 25 articles, books, other publications,

interviews conducted, artifacts collected, sites visited, and other items relevant to your
study. Each item should include a complete citation; follow each citation with 3-5
sentences describing the item itself and how it will contribute to your overall project.

The detailed assignment sheet for WA6 at http://e102.wordpress.com/was/

There’s also a chart for the Research Portfolio available at the above url, as well as a rubric for grading
and other relevant items.

More on WA3

Research Journal Entry #7 (for 9/24)

For this RJ, you will look at potential research projects from a historical
perspective. It may be necessary to table your particular research plans for a
moment to open you eyes to other possibilities. This doesn’t mean that the
investigation isn’t likely to yield connections to your own research plans. It
probably will. But setting aside the project for a moment might enable you to
see more than you might have expected.

1. Take a look at the items listed in the Special Collections. What’s there for
you? What is interesting? What might this artifact reveal about Commerce
culture–at the time it was created and/or even Commerce today? What
questions might this artifact yield that might be useful fodder for further
analysis?

2. Explore these maps of the Texas A&M-Commerce campus: http://www.

4shared.com/file/132602969/8689ada2/map.html (three maps, covering
several decades of progress here on campus). What’s there in earlier maps but
not in later ones? What’s there in later maps but not in earlier ones? What might
this tell us about Commerce? What questions might these comparisons yield
that might be useful fodder for further analysis?

3. Take a look at the transcript from an oral history collected in 1974 from JW
Jackson, a lifelong resident of this area and graduate of this university (BS in
1949). You will hear a portion of this oral history soon. Scan it for highlights.
You’ll read it more carefully later. This is contained in our Special Collections at
Gee Library and is one of the key artifacts David Gold used in his study “Where
Brains Had a Chance” (College English, 2005). http://www.4shared.com/file/
132602466/1eee2360/OralHistory1974.html

4. Scan the transcript from an oral history recorded two years later–this time
from Mary Bowman, a former faculty member who came to this campus to teach
English back in 1925. You’ll also hear a portion of htis interview. Bowman’s
interview informed Gold’s study as well. http://www.4shared.com/file/
132602765/85a1cc83/OralHistory1976.html

5. Generate a summary of all of the above findings and explorations. You

needn’t settle on how you are going to use these artifacts. Not yet. But you
should investigate them carefully and ready yourself the likelihood that your
research project might be well served by examining it from a historical
perspective.

6. Now that you’ve reviewed the above documents and reflected on their
potential merit, complete the “Groundwork Activity” in Chapter 1 of
Fieldworking. It’s on pages 55-56.