For assignment one, you developed an original and arguable claim in response to one version, or adaptation, of Little Red Riding Hood. For assignment two, you considered adaptations of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, and you found additional texts to help you answer questions you formulated in response to this event and retellings of this event. Your goal with this assignment is to formulate an original research question on a cultural product that has been adapted, conduct research to refine and answer your question, and present your answer to a specific audience.
You might be wondering, “what is a cultural product?” This is a huge umbrella term used to describe the many things produced by cultures. Films, paintings, TV shows, and songs are some of the most obvious choices, but there are many other things that we can think of as cultural products: games (from card games like Uno to professional leagues like the NFL), institutions (like the Army or your local Board of Education).
As in your first two assignments this semester, I encourage you to begin by finding a specific opportunity for conversation (a gap, tension, contradiction, ambiguity, or difficulty in the history of the thing you isolate or in the topic more broadly). You will then go through a process that I hope will inform your research process in future courses and the real world:
- Develop an original research question, find reliable sources that help you answer and refine your research question, and evaluate those sources to decide how you want to use them (research notes).
- Present your answer to your refined research question, your claim, to a specific audience with careful attention to genre (final product).
- Reflect on the decisions you made, respond to my feedback, and evaluate your final product (project reflection).
Overview
Research Notes (Chronicling Your Research Process)
Building on the note-taking questions you used in assignment two, this assignment asks you to devote considerable time to reading and taking notes on the sources you find. Make sure to use the feedback I provide on assignment two as you approach the task of finding, evaluating, and taking notes on sources for this project. I encourage you to ask for feedback on this note-taking process as you proceed. I’m happy to give feedback on a word document or on sources you’re gathering in Zotero. I can do this in class or via e-mail.
Note: If you feel confident that you will not miss anything valuable by skipping one or more of these questions, I encourage you to indicate this in your notes (something like “I’m skipping this question because I’m confident the source is reliable”). I’ll offer feedback on these choices after you’ve handed your project in.
Prompts for Note Taking
Describe the Project
- Explain how you decided to pursue the topic you have selected for your research project.
- State your research question explicitly.
- Describe the audience you plan to write for and why they will be interested in the answer to your question.
- Describe the genre you plan to produce for your project (see below: options include a traditional academic paper, a post on our course website, annotations toward an open edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner, or something else).
Source #1
- Provide the full title of the source and the larger work it is a part of (a single web-page on a website, a story in a book, a song on an album, etc.). It’s best to write the title in accordance with the citation style you will use.
- Describe the genre of this source. What is it (play, story in a collection, article on a website, article in a peer-reviewed journal) and how does that matter?
- Describe the author/creator, starting with the full name. If it was created collaboratively, try to include all of the people who contributed in a significant way to the creation of the source. For each significant contributor, Include birth and (if relevant) death dates, country of origin, and noteworthy bits of biography. Then explain how these things matter.
- Describe the publisher, starting with the name of the publisher. Is this a company selling stories? An academic press? An individual who has self-published on the Internet? A company more interested in selling a product other than the source? What does the publisher tell you about the quality of the information presented in the source? Does the publisher make you think this source is appropriate for your project?
- When and where was this source originally published/produced and who do you think it was produced for? Was this the original publication date or has it been republished for a new audience? How does this publication history matter?
- What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published? If the source was translated or edited for a later publication, you might also comment on the purpose of the source at that time.
- How are you thinking of using this source for your project? It will be most helpful if you include particular page numbers or timestamps for material you might cite. You are also welcome to include a link to another document you’re using to take notes.
Source #2
[repeat for as many sources as you find]
Concluding Thoughts
- Explain where you are now in your thinking and how your research question and your sense of how to answer that question has changed.
- Present your current answer to your question based on all that you have learned so far, or explain why you still can’t answer your question or explain what research you might pursue further.
- After doing this research, I know that I want to argue that _______.
Final Product (Presenting the Answer to Your Research Question)
As mentioned above, you have options for presenting the answer to your research question. Your question and the way you go about answering it will depend quite a bit on the genre you decide to produce for this project. We will all begin this work by reading “Navigating Genres,” an article about genre by Kerry Dirk. Here are three possibilities, but I’m very open to other options!
NOTE: For all three options, proper citations (and, where relevant, attributions) are a requirement. A project that includes improper citations or attributions is an incomplete assignment. We will spend significant time in class working on citations and attributions and you should always reach out to me if you have additional questions. This is one of the hardest parts of academic writing!
-Dr. Isbell
A Traditional Research Paper
Present your answer to your research question (an original, arguable claim) in a 6-page paper. Please format this paper according to MLA guidelines. The audience for this paper is up to you. Please include a “note on audience” after your works cited page explaining the decisions you made to appeal to that audience (you will see an example of this note in the template document). You should write formally and according to academic writing conventions, but take care to write in a way that will be compelling and persuasive to this audience.
Support for composing in this genre: Students pursuing this option will explore honors thesis projects in their discipline (link on our Canvas reading and viewing page) and an example paper written for this course.
A Blog Post on our Course Website
You might decide to use this research project to compose a post on our course website. You’ll have an opportunity to cite copyrighted sources and, in some cases, remix openly licensed sources for your project. We will discuss the importance of citation and attribution. I encourage you to think first and foremost about the audience you want to reach and decide what modes of expression (sound, text, image, etc.) will best reach that audience. Your final project should be published in WordPress, but you can use any external tools you would like to produce content that can be embedded in that post (canva, genial.ly, etc.).
Note #1: You should be writing with a particular purpose and for a specific audience, but our course website is read primarily by future students of this course. Please include a note at the bottom of your blog post explaining your target audience for the post.
Note #2: If you choose this option, you are not required to make your post visible to classmates or the public. You also have the option to change the way your name displays if you want to make your work public on our site but not directly linked to you (it will still be obvious to viewers that the author was a person enrolled in my course in a particular semester). Please send me an e-mail if you want guidance on this.
Support for composing in this genre: Students pursuing this option will draw on the guide to finding openly licensed work on our course website. They will also review featured projects from former students on our course website.
Annotations for Future Students
This option invites you to collaborate with me to serve as a contributing editor to an open edition of a text I will assign to future students. This semester, I am working on creating an open edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner and I welcome projects that will make that edition stronger. You are very welcome to advocate for an open edition of a different text or film that you think I should assign in the future. If the text or film you plan to advocate for is under copyright, you can propose contributions to a reading or viewing guide.
If you choose this option, I will ask you to produce a series of annotations with careful citations. We will work together in Pressbooks to draft and revise these notes. I will also ask you to compose an editor’s note, which will summarize the decisions you made while creating annotations. This editorial note should be uploaded to Canvas. The question you pursue for this project might be something like “how should future students experience this text/film/image?” or “how have scholars commented on ____ in this text?” It may be that you create annotations directed at students who have particular features in common (students studying engineering, students who like facts, students who enjoy ambiguity, etc.) but you can also think of your audience as any student who might be taking this course.
I ask that your editor’s note and annotations be finalized in our collaboratively produced edition document by the deadline. I will be working to incorporate them into an open edition before I teach with the text again and I will get in touch with you when your work is public.
Note: if you choose this option, you are not required to make your editor’s note or annotations visible to classmates or the public. You also have the option to change the way your name displays if you want to make your work public but not directly linked to you. Please send me an e-mail if you want guidance on this.
Support for composing in this genre: Students pursuing this option will use the existing edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner (linked from the Course Reading and Viewing page) as an example.
Project Reflection
I describe in the syllabus my approach to grading in this course. For this assignment, I provide below a framework for reflection that you can use, alongside detailed feedback from me, to decide the grade you should receive on the assignment. As long as you’ve written a project reflection that signals familiarity with my feedback and the framework for reflection, the grade you give yourself is the grade I will enter in the gradebook for the assignment.
The framework below is based on my observations of students over many years and breaks this writing project down into seven sections, offering descriptions of work within each section. When I used to assign grades, I would select one block for each section and occasionally change the language to better describe what I was observing. This helped my students identify areas of focus for future writing projects. I offer it here in the assignment prompt because it might help you get a sense of expectations for this assignment if you look at it before getting started.
Framework for Reflection
Claim
| Writer has not developed a claim that responds to the assignment. The project is a series of observations or attempts at ideas. | Writer has struggled to develop a claim that responds to the assignment. One or more ideas could become the primary claim of the project, but the entire project does not work to support this point | Writer has developed a claim and introduced it to the reader somewhere in project, but that claim is significantly lacking in complexity and originality. | Writer has developed an original claim, but has not accounted for counterclaims as he/she revises the project. The claim could be more complex by addressing counterclaims. | Claim exhibits complexity and nuance through the writer’s consideration of counterclaims. |
Process
| The writer has turned in a final project, but has not participated in the drafting and revision process | The writer has composed a draft and made surface changes before handing in the final draft. The writer has not participated fully in the drafting and revision process. | The writer has participated in the revision process in a superficial way. The writer has not used the revision process to full advantage | The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers. | The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers. Furthermore, the writer has continued with this process of revision until the final product is as strong as possible. |
Analysis
| The project does not engage source material in any meaningful way | The project references one or more sources as appropriate for the assignment, but misunderstands the text or introduces sections of the text that are irrelevant to the goals of the project | The writer draws on sources that are implicitly relevant to the project, but does not offer explicit analysis in individual paragraphs to make the relevance clear to the reader. There is a logic to the ideas introduced, but the reader has to guess why they have been chosen. | The writer has demonstrated that he/she can offer analysis of source material to support his/her project, but has not done this consistently in the project | The writer has offered thoughtful analysis of all sources introduced and demonstrated how those sections support the goals of the project. In so doing, the writer has offered a truly inventive angle on these sources. |
Organization
| The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. The writer would benefit from more careful attention to logical arrangement of well-structured paragraphs with transition sentences | The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. One of the ideas might have the potential to become a primary claim, but it is not presented as such, and the other unrelated ideas do not support that claim. | Ideas are introduced in a logical order, but the writer has not taken advantage of paragraphs with clear topic sentences and transitions between ideas | The writer has demonstrated that he/she can construct a persuasive paragraph with a clear topic sentence and careful analysis related to one distinct point, but has not done this throughout the project. | The writer has organized his/her project thoughtfully, offering carefully ordered paragraphs that contain clear topic sentences. Transitions between these paragraphs are logical and the reader is able to understand the purpose of all components of the project. |
Citation
| It is difficult to tell if the ideas in the project are the ideas of the writer or something the writer has read. It does not seem like the errors in citation are deliberate cheating; instead they seem to point to a misuse of sources | Writer references the work of other writers and indicates in some way that those ideas are not the writer’s own ideas, but the writer does not include in-text citations. | Writer includes in-text citations and a works cited page, but struggles to indicate through sentences that the ideas of others are not his/her own. | The writer has demonstrated that he/she can introduce the ideas of others clearly, but has not done this with every text referenced in the project. | The writer has introduced all ideas from other writers and has even made it clear how his/her ideas forward or counter those ideas to say something new |
Clarity
| The project is impossible to understand because of sentence-level issues | The project is difficult to understand because of sentence-level issues | Multiple sentence-level errors make the project confusing in places | Occasional sentence-level issues interrupt an otherwise easy-to-understand project | The writer has expressed his/her ideas clearly |
Audience
| The project exhibits no attention to an audience for the writer’s work. | The project makes occasional moves that might be effective with a particular audience (or perhaps moves that would be effective with different audiences), but this does not seem to have been done deliberately. | The writer makes a sustained effort to appeal to a particular audience, but makes poor decisions that would likely prove ineffective or counterproductive. The project would be stronger if the writer considered the values and expectations of his/her audience | The writer has demonstrated that he/she can appeal effectively to a particular audience, but hasn’t used this sense of audience to full advantage | The writer has appealed consistently to a specific audience, anticipating potential counterarguments and demonstrating the relevance of the project to the values or concerns of the audience. |
