You can find descriptions for the major components of your course grade below. I will link to more developed sets of instructions for each project as we start working on it.

Please note that you must submit all assignments to pass the class, even if you would otherwise earn a passing grade receiving a zero on a given assignment.

Class Participation (15%)

I expect you to come to class having completed any assigned readings or drafts due for that meeting, prepared to engage in critical discussion and writing activities. I will gravitate toward voluntary participation, but please also be prepared to be called on for your impression or insights. I reserve the right to give reading quizzes if I suspect people aren’t doing the work, but I’d rather not, and I doubt that I will need to. I acknowledge that not everyone participates in precisely the same way, and I will look for evidence that you’re engaging with the class materials by:

  • respecting and actively listening to me and your peers;
  • offering feedback to your peers in good faith;
  • commenting and asking thoughtful questions about our course readings, whether on Zoom (video or chat), on Discord, or drop-in hours, and;
  • contributing to our collaborative notes.

Project 1: Disciplinary Autoethnography (20%)

Draft Due: Thursday, 10/1
Final Due: Wednesday, 10/14

For your first project, I will ask you to use personal narrative and self-reflection to analyze a disciplinary writing practice or set of practices based on recalled experiences. This will be toward understanding those practices in terms of how your discipline functions more broadly. Our focus will be on the process of writing this genre as much as what you produce.

Project 2: Annotated Bibliography and Critical Article Review (30%)

Annotated Bibliography Draft Due: Thursday, 10/22 10/29
Critical Review Draft Due: Thursday, 10/29 11/5
Final (Bibliography and Review) Due: Monday, 11/9 Thursday, 11/12

For your second project, you will be conducting research on a topic of your interest in your discipline, assembling metadata on your sources using the citation manager Zotero. You will produce an annotated bibliography, in which your annotations discuss and evaluate each source’s contribution to the “conversation” around your topic, in terms of features like citation patterns, key terms, and field-referencing moves. From that bibliography, you will pick a single source that is central to this conversation and write a critical review that situates the source’s place in and contribution to that conversation in more detail.

Project 3: Revision and Comments (20%)

Final Due: Wednesday, 12/2

For your third project, you will revise one of your previous projects you for this course using feedback from me and your classmates. You will annotate your revised draft with tracked changes and comments where necessary, framing it with an author’s note that describes and contextualizes your revisions.

Collaborative Glossary and Reflection (15%)

Due Dates TBA

For your final project for the semester, we will adapt the collaborative notes you’ve taken over the course of the semester to author a glossary together, defining important terms from our course readings and discussions for a public-facing audience of other University students. You will work in small groups to identify a key term and co-author an entry for it. You will provide an individually-authored reflection that self-evaluates, describing both how you contributed to the project and how this term relates to what you’ve taken from our course.