syllabus
calendar
blackboard
student.email resources

last.updated 5.05.12

 

Pedagogy Project & Conference Paper


Purpose

To give you the opportunity to create a usable curriculum after studying various writing and distance learning pedagogies and to demonstrate that you can apply what you have learned. This project asks you to design a pedagogical practice for a specific writing class or context. You will also make an argument for the curriculum's soundness for a public forum, mostly a conference presentation.


Instructions–Invention

Choose a specific writing class or context that you are teaching in or would want to teach in. You should be thinking of developing a unit for a writing class or a workshop, although other possibilities will considered you consult with the instructor. This project will give you the opportunity to rethink your current practices and/or develop a proposal for a new instructional opportunity.

Choose the context and the product for your pedagogical design. As you make these decisions, consider...

  • the 2000-word, single-spaced scope of the project
  • the research you did through the course of the semester.
  • your informed understanding of the instructional context; if you plan to develop your pedagogical project for a specific context–which is encouraged–do some field research to get a better sense of this context.

Instructions–Writing Pedagogy Project

Develop a 50 word abstract that briefly explains the pedagogical situation.

Compose a description of what you will be doing for this pedagogical situation. The instructor or your peers in this class, if the situation arose, should be able to use this document to teach what you have proposed with very few questions.

The choices that you make about the context and the scope of the project will determine how you structure this document and how much detail you use. As you make these decisions, think about how you want to actually use the document that you produce beyond this course.

Instructions–Conference Paper

One way instructors enter the conversation in their field is to present their curriculum at conferences. A good conference presentation will not just describe what one does, but it should justify the practices in terms of the field's research and theories. As a way to justify the pedagogy you have designed, you will write a conference paper that you could present at a conference (or something that you might have to present to an administrator to support your practices). This paper should be ~2000-words.

A conference paper will often include...

An exigency or a reason for your actions: Other than this assignment, why does the field need a unit that teaches students to do what your teaches them to do?

A breif literature review: This provides a precedent for the work that you will be doing. In this section, you will put theories and research into conversation with each other. A sophisticated literature review will also create a framework to help explain the pedagogy.

A desrciption of your pedagogy: Assume your audience has not read your pedagogy project. Therefore, you will want to briefly describe your pedagogy in a way that your audience understand the premises of it, but they overwhelmed by the details. As your describe your pedagogy, use this opportunity to make connections between it and your literature review; this is how you are justifying your design.

Anticipated outcomes: Normally one would report the outcomes from their course here. But you will not have the opportunity to teach this design, so you will want to speculate what the outcomes will be instead. This speculation should be informed by both what you know about the population you are teaching and the what you have reported in the literature review.

A Bibliography: Include the bibliography for any works you have cited. This will not count towards the word limit.

A Rift on this assignment
If you would prefer to develop a twenty minute presentation that you will present in the form of a video, you can do so. However, you, for the most part, will need to talk for twenty minutes using whatever you choose. You cannot just develop the outline for what you want to say, stick it in a PowerPoint presentation or Prezi and call it a movie. You will want to orally articulate details to explain any slides you compose.


Criteria

Logistics:

  • 50 word abstract
  • ~2000-word for pedagogy project; additional ~2000- words conference paper
  • pedagogy project should be single-spaced; conference paper can be single- or double-spaced.
  • This document is due by the end of the day on June 26, 2012 as an email attachment [.doc or .docx] to the instructor.
  • 200 points

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

  • a sense of audience–is the pedagogy project written so another person could teach what you have proposed with little trouble? is the conference paper written to an academic audience to demonstrate how the pedagogy project is the application of current scholarship in a specific pedagogical situation?
  • an informed understanding of sound writing pedagogy as it pertains to the distance learning context you have chosen
  • an ability to articulate your pedagogy to another audience, as well as explain why you will (or they should) adopt this approach
  • a well-supported rationale that clearly connects to the pedagogy you designed
  • appropriate use of conventions, including MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting