Sunday, May 20, 2012

Updating us on your current project

Before class on Monday, I'd like you take a few minutes and give the rest of us an update on your current project. What topic or issue have you chosen to write about? Who are you directing your writing to? What's your purpose in writing to them? How is your argument, claim, or main point evolving? What resources have you found helpful thus far, and what resources would you like to find and use that you haven't yet? (Please feel free to contact each other, too, if you find you're working on similar issues, and share resources!)

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Reflecting on your growth as a writer and a researcher

To start class today, I’d like you to take a few minutes and reflect on what you’ve learned as a writer and researcher thus far in our class and consider these larger questions: How have you developed as a writer? What have you learned about conducting research? To find your way into these questions, you might start by first reflecting on what you’ve learned from completing our current assignment for The Gathering Place. What insights into qualitative research have you gained? What did you learn about writing as you moved from conducting the interviews, to transcribing the recordings, to creating a written piece appropriate for the members of community that comprises The Gathering Place? To enrich this reflection, you then might contrast this experience to what you learned about writing and research from our first assignment, the literature review. What knowledge or expertise did you gain from this assignment that was distinct from the insights of our current assignment? How did this writing experience provide different sorts of lessons for you as a writer?