Category: Blog 1: Core Seminar 1 Prep

"Your thesis is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget."-- Hua Hsu, quoting Umberto Eco, in "A Guide to Thesis Writing That is a Guide to Life," New Yorker, April 6, 2015

How I use Posts: Usually, I just write a prompt for students to respond to, e.g., identify a point of special interest of confusion in my lecture. I'd like to make "posts" assignments more dynamic. Also, I'll be creating enduring work teams of about 3 students and would like to learn how to create the equivalent (?) of Blackboard's Discussion Boards, or something similar. 

Update: So I just came across another (?) description of what to post here for this assignment, so I've logged back in and clicked on block "verse" feature (I tried paragraph, but that didn't work) to update it. 

Aim for this seminar: to transform Social Science Research Methods 4110 from a hybrid to a synchronous fully online (Sociology and Anthropology Dept). I teach it in the spirit of a graduate research seminar. The 5 modules result in a whopping 40-50 page research paper Here's a link to an earlier version of the course--spring 2020. Yeh, that semester. 

Course learning goals: The goals of this upper-level course are to train you in the critical thinking, research, writing, and ethics skills that are the hallmark of social research* in sociology, anthropology, public policy, and some business research. You will acquire these skills through textbook readings, scholarly articles, diverse instructional media, and original research tasks that result in a final paper. I like to think of this course as “social” as well, because there is substantial peer collaboration in the production of your final paper.

* Social research makes grand claims to knowledge by using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to explain some aspect of human experience. While this course will focus on qualitative methods, the words (qualitative) versus numbers (quantitative) debate belies the dynamic and interlocking roles that qualitative and quantitative data play in how scholars investigate the social world. We will explore these issues at length.

Outcomes: The paper you produce for this course will equip you with core qualitative research skills and strengthen your ability to write clearly and persuasively. Moreover, by developing scholarly insights about your chosen final paper topic, you will be able to speak and write knowledgeably in job interviews and/or in graduate school applications when asked to discuss a subject that you know and care about. By the end of the semester, you will have acquired a valuable set of marketable research skills and, more important, a “sociological imagination” for understanding the most pressing issues of our day. 

My own research: Now I’m going to try to insert a video using the tools above. Ah, dead end. I got a notice that it’s not permitted for security reasons. Guess I’ll try posting an image of that dead end?

I tried inserting my YouTube URL instead and that seemed to work as long as I DO NOT USE the video embed feature of BLOCKS.

https://youtu.be/d2b7JKBWQTM

Short video of my 2016 field research in what is now eSwatini, interviewing chiefs and their advisors about their experiences of “traditional roles” assisting their communities with hardship, including famine and HIV/AIDS and TB.

1. Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 
   • Hello everyone! I’m Lauren Salisbury and I’m an adjunct in the English Department at Baruch. I’m currently teaching ENG 2100 and am going to teach ENG 2150 in Spring 2022.
   • I currently teach online asynchronously and have taught in that format most frequently at institutions in the past. In Spring I’ll be teaching online synchronously which is a format I’ve only taught in one other time. I’ve taken many classes that way as a student, but have less experience–and certainly less recent experience–as a teacher.
   • My classes are typically small. Currently I have 15 students per section in my ENG 2100 courses.
   • I love teaching online and am invested in doing it well. I feel comfortable in the asynchronous format but less so in the synchronous format. Though I have taught face-to-face many times it’s been a while so as odd as it is, teaching synchronously feels out of the ordinary to me.
2. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 
   • I’ll be teaching ENG 2150 in the Spring which is a new prep for me. It’s the second first-year writing course at Baruch. Students will work primarily with incorporating source material into their writing and conducting academic research.
3. What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
   • Critically analyze texts in a variety of genres: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience and purpose.
   • Use a variety of media to compose in multiple rhetorical situations: Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context (alphabetic text, still and moving images, and sound), including academic writing and composing for a broader, public audience using digital platforms.
   • Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
   • Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
   • Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.
4. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
   • Since this is a new prep, I have many materials to develop. Primarily I want to create some activities for our synchronous class discussions since that will be a big shift away from the asynchronous work I currently do. Ideally, I’d like to create some version of a model I used when I last taught face-to-face. In that course–an Intermediate Writing course–I conducting f2f discussions in class and then created discussion spaces that students could return to asynchronously. Students all had to post at least a summary/review (an exit ticket) of the discussion and what they took away from it. They could also ask questions and add to each others ideas while also retaining the ability to return to those spaces if they wanted to review what we did or to get ideas for writing projects.