The Task
For your second exploratory assignment, I invite you to work in teams to construct a tool that would help a group of our peers to navigate the theoretical turn we are calling “From Process to Post-Process” and all its conversations as we see fit.
About the Task
I am not asking you to actually build the tool, but rather to design or plan it, and to try to depict that design/plan in as much detail as possible. Here are some assumptions that may help guide you:
Because it is your tool, you are absolutely free to determine what would be the landmarks and focal points of the theoretical “turn” based on all the above assumptions. You are also free to limit the scope of your tool to just what we have read for week 7, or to broaden the scope to make reference to the larger intertext I mentioned above, although even if you broaden it, I certainly don't expect that you would have read every source in every works cited list. Please note that if you only focus on our required texts, I will still need you to present the nuances and intricacies of Week 7 as much as possible.
Options
To keep this assignment in perspective, I offer you some options. Would you rather build:
This is exploratory and thus need not take days and days of your time(!). But please do compose a detailed or thorough enough plan for its construction that we could understand it without too much explanation. (If you are comfortable with technical writing terms, this is sometimes called a specifications document, but I don't have very stringent expectations about what genre form you should deliver. I just want it to be thorough.)
About the Task
I am not asking you to actually build the tool, but rather to design or plan it, and to try to depict that design/plan in as much detail as possible. Here are some assumptions that may help guide you:
- Let’s assume we have a corpus of texts to work with in order to understand – perhaps even to help others understand – what we see as a “theoretical turn” from process to cognition in composition studies.
- Let’s assume that corpus of texts appears on week 7 of our syllabus. We know this “turn” has been somewhat arbitrarily identified by Dr. Graban, but we also know that it is informed by viable conversations surrounding process and cognition in the development of composition studies.
- Furthermore, let’s assume we know that those conversations are contextualized within a slightly larger conversation (reflected in the sources we did not read but that are on our supplemental readings list).
- Finally, let’s assume we know that all those conversations were extracted from a much larger intertext that is reflected in the various bibliographies and works cited lists in the articles themselves.
Because it is your tool, you are absolutely free to determine what would be the landmarks and focal points of the theoretical “turn” based on all the above assumptions. You are also free to limit the scope of your tool to just what we have read for week 7, or to broaden the scope to make reference to the larger intertext I mentioned above, although even if you broaden it, I certainly don't expect that you would have read every source in every works cited list. Please note that if you only focus on our required texts, I will still need you to present the nuances and intricacies of Week 7 as much as possible.
To keep this assignment in perspective, I offer you some options. Would you rather build:
- A searchable archive of texts most relevant to the conversation, with an overarching finding aid providing information about the historical placement(s) and location(s) of those texts?
- A glossary of terms and concepts most central, key, or critical to the conversation?
- An annotated bibliography that surmises how some voices in the conversation give rise to, respond to, build on, or complicate other voices in the conversation?
- A set of related position statements that enact or embody what you think are the most important standpoints taken throughout this conversation?
- An interactive timeline that uses any combination of chronology, geography, institutional locations, and annotation to give some kairotic structure to the conversation?
- A FAQs document that anticipates some of the questions or critical problems that were raised, get raised, or might be raised by this conversation for your peers, i.e., “about this turn from process to cognition …”?
- Or something else ... ?
This is exploratory and thus need not take days and days of your time(!). But please do compose a detailed or thorough enough plan for its construction that we could understand it without too much explanation. (If you are comfortable with technical writing terms, this is sometimes called a specifications document, but I don't have very stringent expectations about what genre form you should deliver. I just want it to be thorough.)
If you’d like, you can feel free to wire-frame or visually represent that plan; or, if you are more comfortable, you can simply describe it in organized and delineated paragraphs with embedded visualized elements. Whatever you do, please just do enough to help the rest of us understand what you would be constructing, why you would construct it this way, and how it could look or work. In describing and/or justifying its most important features, you may want to address both its abstract and its concrete aspects, i.e., how this tool would help your peers do more research into process and cognition, you might also discuss what features it should or should not have based on your experiences with Exploratory #1.
(NB: I want us to consider the “tool” as something that would enable a peer group to conduct inquiry. We want it to be the medium in which or through which they could follow a research question because we gave them some informed access into a conversation on process and cognition.)
Please upload your completed “build-a-tool” plan to Canvas by the beginning of class time on 10/10/17 3:30 p.m. on 10/12/17, and bring a hard or digital copy to class for our discussion on 10/10/17 (just in case).
The Teams
I'll arbitrarily suggest the following teams for this second exploratory:
The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the build-a-tool assignment and how some aspect of the task illuminated/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. This critical blog post should be somewhat formal. It should be a minimum of 3-4 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read. Since your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.
You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page (please keep that in mind as you polish and format). Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog. Please post to the blog by 3:30 p.m. on Thursday 10/12/17.
This is work, but have fun with it!
-Dr. G
I'll arbitrarily suggest the following teams for this second exploratory:
- Angela, Caitlin, Cindy
- Brendan and Joel
- Amanda and Liana
The Critical Blog Post
For your follow-up critical blog post (which you will do individually), please reflect on the build-a-tool assignment and how some aspect of the task illuminated/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. This critical blog post should be somewhat formal. It should be a minimum of 3-4 well developed paragraphs in length (a couple of screens), and my great desire is to see you engage expertly with both task and texts, at times speaking through or alongside what we read, and speaking with some insight about what we read. Since your post will be intertextual, I'll ask you to use parenthetical citations where needed, and to be clear that we know which articles/authors you are referencing.
You will post directly to our course blog, so what you write will become the temporary landing page (please keep that in mind as you polish and format). Be sure to define terms and unpack assumptions for us, using your posts as occasions to teach. Because the blog is somewhat performative, I'll ask you to title your posts creatively (or insightfully). Feel free to compose your post as a response to someone else’s, if you see an interesting conversation starting on the blog. Please post to the blog by 3:30 p.m. on Thursday 10/12/17.
This is work, but have fun with it!
-Dr. G
