Assignment Author
Stephanie Odom-RobertsonContext of Assignment
I was frustrated by Good Reasons' format, since it starts off by detailing how the students can start building a paper around their own argument. RHE 306 requires them to "listen" to the conversation surrounding a controversy first, so I took some ideas from Gerald Graff's They Say / I Say to drive home how important this first step of listening and summarizing arguments is to Unit 1.
Pedagogical Goals of the Assignment
To introduce students to the proper uses of summarization and understanding the argument of the articles they are researching.
Assignment Description
We read the assignment for Research Summaries first, then I showed them a sample RS from last year's 306. I showed them the guide to summarization based on They Say / I Say (attached) and told them where to find it on Blackboard if they wanted to refer back to it. It's basically a Do's and Don'ts of summarization, plus lists of words that writers use to attribute speech and ideas. Then, I divided them into groups of three or four students to read the first few paragraphs of some newspaper articles to look for the main argument of those articles. These articles were all on the subject of immigration and came from the eFiles controversies stubs. I told them to decide if the author's thesis was implicit or explicit, informative or persuasive, and if they could detect the author's bias on the subject. I then walked around and talked a bit to each group on what they had come up with. I feel like this prepared them for the first research summary, which is on a lengthy article with an implicit, informative argument. We'll see how well it prepared them when I get the summaries back!