Assignment

For this assignment, write a further draft of your final project.

As you continue developing your research project, work towards developing depth and nuance in your critical work. Think about our recent discussions of ways of engaging in the process of critical inquiry. Try to work through your analysis, synthesis, or critical lens approach slowly and carefully. Think of the implications of "inquiry" in this process; engage with the claims of your sources by asking simple questions such as "how" or "why." Why does your research make the claims that it does? How does your research present and support the claims that it does?

In your own critical work, anticipate the questions of your readers. Lay out for your imagined reader "how" and "why" you've come to the conclusions that you have. Why have you come to this interpretation? How do you support it, or how have you synthesized it?

For this draft, aim for 7 pages in which you work to increase the length of your work by digging deeper into, and expanding the analysis.

For those that are doing multimodal work, begin developing that, as well... but adjust the page length accordingly.

Please submit your work to both Blackboard and your blog. You may also, if you'd like, submit a hard copy to me... this will allow me to do a little bit more in the way of line-level, small scale feedback.

Some thoughts about different types of critical work:

Analysis: Sometimes analysis is as simple as expressing your perspectives on the work under consideration, and then explaining how and why you've come to this conclusion, explaining your logic and evidence.

Analysis can also be a process of considering HOW a text makes meaning, rather than just restating WHAT a text says. Think about the process of "Rhetorical Analysis." How do the texts you're using address the demands of the rhetorical situation, establish ethos, logos, pathos and kairos.

Synthesis:

Synthesis is the process by which you consider several different discussions of a topic, or several related topics, and work to draw new conclusions or perspectives from those texts that combine (or synthesize) the different works. Through the work of synthesis you develop perspective that are drawn from several other sources, but which were not expressed in this new form in the original texts.

Critical Lens:

When we use a critical lens, we read a text (or group of texts), through the perspective of something else. That is, we put an ideology, or some other kind of framework between ourselves and the texts that we're reading, and look at the ways that this framework shapes our understanding of these other texts (this is where the "lens" analogy comes from). In other words, we consider the debate about climate change through the lens of our understanding of paradigms; this lens helps us to make sense of the resistance and debate around the question, because we bring our understanding of how paradigms work to this topic. The idea of the "paradigm" then structures our understanding of resistance to climate change. Similarly, through a lens of feminism, if we look at the scientific process, and the ways that science has historical marginalized the work of women, our understanding of the historical structures of patriarchy and misogyny, will shape our understanding of those struggles.