WRD104: Composition & Rhetoric II

Week 1
“We Are What We Find, Not What We Search For”

• Primary
• Secondary
• Tertiary

Due: WordPress post — email your URL to Michael

Week 2
Relationships Between Research, Audience, & Purpose

Week 3
Presenting Research

Due: Preliminary project questions

Case Study: “The Language of Psychology: APA Style as Epistemology”

Week 4
Discipline-Specific and Professional Research

Case Study: Butler, Paul. “Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment”

Week 5
Discipline-Specific and Professional Research

Writing workshop:  Lunsford 190-198, especially cause and effect; inductive and deductive reasoning (premises); and visuals

Week 6
Writing with a Method, a Perspective, and with Authority

Due: peer-editing responses and letter

Week 7
“They say _______ , I say _______.”

“What is the purpose of higher education? Why should one attend a university and what should he or she hope to come away with when all is said and done? Sufficient answers to these questions and others like them are essential to the educational responsibility of students and teachers alike. For thousands of years, educators, academics and philosophers have wrestled with such inquiries, earnestly struggling to uncover the keys to securing a good education for themselves and those to follow. Some have met the challenge with great success and others to no avail.”

“Unfortunately, in more recent times it seems that less and less thought is being given to the original purpose of education. Or maybe it is not that less thought is given to the matter, but rather that less is being done to help students obtain a good, well-rounded education and understand the purpose of their education. Many students finish high school and head straight to college with no idea where they are, why they are or what they are going to do with themselves. As V. James Mannoia Jr. puts it in Christian Liberal Arts: An Education That Goes Beyond, “Unfortunately for many Americans, college has become a rite of passage that obscures the deeper questions about the purposes and distinctives of educational institutions.” Even more tragic is the fact that many teachers have lost sight of the purpose of education as well. Our universities are full of professors who profess nothing at all or, worse yet, indoctrinators who offer neat and tidy answers to un-pondered questions.” — W. Lamar Stockton. “A Philosophy of the Idea of Christian Liberal Arts Education Why is it important?”

“The main purpose of college or university education is to help older adolescents and adults renegotiate their membership in that encompassing common culture. The foundational knowledge that shapes us as children sooner or later circumscribes our lives.” — Bruffee, K.A. Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge.

Siegel, Alberta Engvall; Curtis, Elizabeth Ann. Familial Correlates of Orientation Toward Future Employment among College Women. Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol 54(1), Feb 1963, 33-37.

Longwell-Grice, Robert. “Get a Job: Working Class Students Discuss the Purpose of College.” College Student Affairs Journal. v23 n1 p40-53 Fall 2003

Due: Disciplinary/Professional Research Report with cover letter, describing your research process and discussing how and why your six sources are credible.

• “College Education Seen as Essential”
• Princeton Plans A General Forum; ‘Aims and Ideals of Higher Education’

Week 8
Workshop: Making Connections Between Primary Texts, Secondary Texts, and Your Ideas

Looking ahead to your digital portfolios, which are based on WRD Outcomes:

• Demonstrate that a writing assignment is a series of tasks that includes finding, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
• Integrate your ideas with those of others
• Interpret and explain the relationships among language, knowledge, and power

CHICAGO, June 11. — Delivering the convocation address at the University of Chicago today, President-elect Robert M. Hutchins declared that in his view the purpose of higher education was “to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizon, to influence their intellects”.
The New York Times.
June 12, 1929.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 11. — Governor Martin L. Davey pictured football today as “the supreme purpose of higher education” and declared that most of the Ohio State University gridiron squad is on the State payroll.”
The New York Times / The Associated Press.
October 12, 1935.

Major Issues: Writing Text-Supported Arguments About the Purpose of College (K-12 context) http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/major-issues-writing-text-supported-arguments-about-the-purpose-of-college/

“We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,” Dr. Coleman says. “We want to teach them how to make an argument, how to defend an argument, to make a choice.” These are the skills that liberal arts colleges in particular have prided themselves on teaching. But these colleges also say they have the hardest time explaining the link between what they teach and the kind of job and salary a student can expect on the other end.”
Career U.
Making College ‘Relevant’

Week 9
Workshop: Making Connections Between Primary Texts, Secondary Texts, and Your Ideas

• What would this writer, writing on this topic, need to demonstrate in order to be taken seriously by multiple audiences?
• What other voices, sources, audiences, and contexts does the writer need to consider?
• Scope: +/- ?
  

Case Study: Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe: “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends:’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”

Week 10