Check-in (30-45 minutes)

Let’s take 5-10 minutes and look through your Teaching Journals. Did you pick up on anything there that has been going on for you recently?

What else is on your mind lately?

Alessandra Occhiolini on Sources (30 minutes)

Presentation/Discussion of teaching students about sources.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wMbZODMm28qUBtnBk8R1gwfi4AiHqL2oyhjkqDUavJ0/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-oo45aRGKADHiyPk-CIHrYSAxWwH8k0AxrnPITXH5IU/edit?usp=sharing

Research Prompt or Working with Sources: Searching, Evaluating, Integrating, Synthesizing (20-30 minutes)

Were we going to look at prompts today or was that another day? I can’t remember! We were going to do it last week but I remember us delaying this for either this week or next week.

Search Activity

  • Where to search (Newman Library search, Library Databases, Google Scholar, Google/Bing/etc.)
  • Generate keywords
  • Using more than one search engine (accommodating differences in how the search algorithms are designed)
  • Boolean operators, using quotations and parentheses, etc.
  • What to do with results (scanning through multiple pages of results, reading abstracts/descriptions, opening lots of tabs to go back to later)
  • Considering primary vs. secondary (or tertiary, etc.) sources
  • Google Scholar reverse citation for more
  • Reading through reference lists
  • Recommendation: Go through this process with an example where students participate, then have them try on own and report back what they find.

Practice Evaluating Sources / RefAnnBib

  • Evaluating within the source: author’s credentials within source, scanning/skimming to see if relevant to research question, assessing credibility of publisher/publication within source
  • Evaluating around the source: Searching for author’s credentials in other places, searching information about the publisher/website/periodical, seeing if other research has found similar results, doing Google Scholar reverse citation search to see if it has been influential or not, seeing if academic vs. popular source (e.g., peer-reviewed journal, credibility of editorial board)
  • Reflecting on how your might use the source in your writing
  • Recommendation: Go through this process with an example where students participate. I often will have them do it as a short writing assignment that we then talk about in class.

Paraphrasing/Quoting

Documentation Style

  • Nuts and bolts on how to do it
  • Get at *why* these rules might exist for rhetorical and epistemological reasons (e.g., MLA uses present tense because fiction is often not bound by time in way, say, articles using experiments are).
  • Sample lesson: October 7, 2021 Lesson Plan – ENG 2150, Fall 2021: Composing institutions (cuny.edu) (this is notably LOADED, but it ended up working out okay…you might want to not do all of this stuff in one day, though).

Building Toward an Argument

  • Proposals / Research Questions
  • Updates
  • Stasis Theory
  • Outlining may be particularly helpful
  • Taking notes on all sources and writer’s own meaning made from it
  • Push them toward a constructive uncertainty over a question that is easy to answer
  • Drawing connections and synthesis; much like with analysis, make sure they think beyond summarizing what a given source says and get them to have sources talk to one another
  • Revision with attention toward how each paragraph aligns with the bigger picture investigation

Other things

  • Have students read models of writing that uses is conventions of source integration
  • Have students see these conventions as not something totally new or different. Connect to their lives (e.g., everyday stories they tell that incorporate what other people say, news articles, social media posts).

First Draft of Teaching Philosophy Debrief (20-30 minutes)

What questions did you focus on in your draft? Why? What questions did not you not choose? Why? What is some of the “I’m not sure but I’m working through it stuff” so far? How can we push that forward to something that approaches more certainty (even if still very uncertain!)?

Close out (5-10 minutes)

-The next 3 weeks will be related to podcast episodes you choose for us to listen to. For the person going on October 26, please let me know the podcast episode as soon as possible so I can let everyone else know what to listen to, preferably no later than October 21 is what I have on schedule. By October 24, please let me know your 3 discussion questions and your 2 or more reading recommendations based on listening to the episode. Most episodes are about 30 minutes, I believe. For the November 2 and November 9 episodes, please also do about a week prior, if possible with questions/readings about 2 days prior to your day facilitating.

-If *NOT* presenting, for discussion, have ready one thing that stood out to you about the readings and one question you have related to topic. Post this on our blog by class time today. Post to blog by class time (here are instructions for posting to WordPress: Getting set up with Blogs @ Baruch* – Seminar in the Teaching of Composition (cuny.edu)