This week’s work is focused on moving forward with your Research Guide. Here are the steps you ought to be taking this week:
1.Research Questions – Your research group should have narrowed its focus and submitted a short list of the questions you will be trying to answer through your research. If you submitted your question, you will receive feedback from me. Please use that feedback to revise and finalize your questions. You may find that, as you start looking for sources, you decide to eliminate some of your questions and focus your research more narrowly. If your group hasn’t submitted questions, share them with me ASAP as a Google Doc. You can do this simply by putting them in our shared folder and labelling the file with the name of your group plus “Research Questions.”
2. Office Hours – I will be holding regular office hours from 12:30 – 1:30 on Monday. Please stop by if you would like to chat one-on-one or if your group needs some extra guidance. No appointment necessary.
3. Gathering Sources – By the end of this week, you should have gathered the sources you plan to use for your Reflective Annotated Bibliography. I recommend gathering more sources than you will need, so that you can eliminate any sources that end up not being quite right for the project. Remember that all of your sources must address one or more of your Research Questions. The three search modes I suggest are:
–Google (Use this for finding sources aimed at general audiences.)
–Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en-US ). You can use this to find scholarly sources. However, you may encounter a paywall that will prevent you from accessing some of the documents that interest you.
–OneSearch This is the search system used at Baruch’s Newman Library. I recommend that you use this tool to locate scholarly and other sources for your research. Because CUNY is a subscriber to thousands of journals and other publications, you will almost always be able to access the full text of any sources that interest you. Here is a very short tutorial that will help you get started with OneSearch. You can also find lots of other information about how to find scholarly sources using OneSearch here.
***Please take a screenshot of your search results using OneSearch and email it to me at [email protected] before class on Wed., Nov. 18th. Jot down any questions that arise during this process, and I will answer them during Wednesday’s class.
4. Reflective Annotated Bibliography (RefAnnBib). Select one of your sources to use to produce the first entry in your RefAnnBib. It should be one that seems well-aligned with your research questions and fairly easy to understand. Produce all five sections of the entry, and share it with me as a Google Doc by Friday, Nov. 20th.
5. Group Meeting. This week your groups should be moving ahead with plans for your project.
–Create a sub-folder inside our English 2100: Writing and Democracy folder that you can use to collect your bibliographic materials and other documents.
–Start brainstorming ideas for your symposium session. What aspect of your topic do you want to focus on with the class? What format will you use to make sure that your session is participatory? (These are NOT lecture style presentations!!!). Your group will need to submit its idea to me before Thanksgiving.
–Make sure everyone is on track with finding sources and compiling RefAnnBib entries.
–Plan to meet with me if your group seems stuck or needs some help moving forward.
6. Op-Ed. Looking ahead to your Op-Ed assignment, take a look at these opinion pieces to get a better sense of the genre. In a short (200 word) post, comment on either one of these articles or on another op-ed piece that you locate yourself (as long as it is something contemporary – from the last few weeks.). In your post, identify the central idea of the op-ed and discuss what you did or did not find effective about the piece. Please share your post by Friday, November 20th.
