Performing Culture: Reading, Discussing, and Writing about Cultural Texts with First Year Composition Students
Session Coordinator: Juliette Berning Schaefer
English Division, Ohio Dominican University
1216 Sunbury Road, Columbus, OH 43219
schaefej@ohiodominican.edu
The Research Paper: Portfolios, Autobiography, and Culture
This presentation will address how the “traditional” research paper is written in an honors composition course. Readings in autobiography ground the students’ focus for the paper. Students learn how to research and write the long paper by delving into how the cultural aspects of identity formation and voice are revealed in autobiographies written by members of marginalized cultures. The paper is written portfolio-style, that is, in individual paper assignments that are later synthesized into the long paper and graded holistically. Individual paper assignments include a research proposal, an interview paper, a critical analysis, a paper synthesizing the research of significant historical, social, and cultural contexts of the person and period, and an annotated bibliography. Collaborative learning is also employed because it is a writing pedagogy that, according to Liz Hamp-Lyons and William Condon, assists in increasing the sense of community and occasions for learners to share their portfolio work. By writing the paper in parts without a grade and then revising into a coherent whole, grade anxiety is reduced and students concentrate on revision. The composition of the research paper becomes concrete to these students who become engaged in, and negotiate, its discourse.
Juliette Berning Schaefer
Ohio Dominican University
schaefej@ohiodominican.edu
Readers and Writers: A Synthetic Approach to Freshman Composition
Jeremy Glazier
Ohio Dominican University
Providing Momentum for the Modern Research Paper: The Classical Progymnasmata
Composition classes typically require that students write in a number of different modes—a narrative paper, an argument paper, a description paper, that kind of thing—and then, in the more advanced classes or second-semester class, students write a research paper, and, normally, students have a very difficult time overcoming the inertia they experience when faced with (from their perspective as tyros) a long, long paper of 15 to 20 pages. Many teachers will let their students use their shorter papers as a way to build up to the research paper, but most teachers, when they take this approach, do so without any awareness that this was—sans the research paper, obviously—the common method of ancient times, the Greek progymnasmata. As one modern text, which uses this approach says, the progymnasmata “presents a graded, cumulative sequence of writing tasks, manageable at each step, within an explicit rhetorical framework . . . You learn how to compose a whole speech or written essay by first becoming proficient in the parts” (xiii). The progymnasmata, then, provides teacher and student with a millennia-tested system which gives them the momentum to overcome their sense of inertia at beginning a long research paper.
Walter Kokernot
Ohio Dominican University
kokernow@ohiodominican.edu