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 6 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, we know that those conversations are contextualized within a slightly larger one (reflected in the sources we did not read but that are on our supplemental readings list), and in fact, we know that all those conversations were extracted from more a much larger intertext that is reflected in the various bibliographies and works cited lists in the articles themselves.
Let’s assume we were deciding how to construct a tool that would help a group of our peers to navigate this theoretical turn and all its conversations as we see
fit. That is your assignment for Exploratory #2. I am not asking you to actually build the tool, but to plan it. Since it is your tool, you are absolutely free to determine what would be the landmarks and focal points of the theoretical “turn”. You are also free to limit the scope of your tool to just what we have read for week 6, 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.
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 …”?
This is exploratory and thus need not take hours and hours of your time(!). In ~1-2 pages, please compose a plan for its construction. (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.) 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. 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., as you are justifying 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 Weekly #1.
(In case you have read this far for further clarification
because this assignment seems to come from far afield: I haven't asked for a schema because I am making a nuanced distinction between visualizations and tools. 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.)
- Joe and Travis
- Charise and Mandy
- Julianna and Tyreek
- Erik and Netty
- Anna and Mackenzie
Please upload your “build-a-tool” plan to our shared Google Drive space by the beginning of class time on Thursday, October 2, and bring a hard or digital copy to class for our discussion (just in case).
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 illumined/complicated/addressed/extended your reading of our texts for this week. This critical blog post is somewhat formal, rather than a simple reflection. It should be a minimum of 2-3 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 (citing where necessary and embedding links where relevant). 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.
This is work, but have fun with it!
