Data for upcoming paper on how your discipline makes knowledge

Interesting questions today in class!

Schedule: 

• Tuesday, 4/19: Research into your field before class. Developing good questions in class for the interview.
• Thursday 4/21: discussion of Men and Housework article (answers to my questions are found on the eLearning website; type your answers up and bring them to class.  Here is my attempt at the homework).
• Tuesday, 4/26: interview with professor written up and brought to class.
• Thursday, 4/28: compare/contrast paper brought to class using the two new articles from your discipline. 
• Tuesday, 5/3: workshop of three papers (volunteers sought!).  Didion papers back.
• Thursday, 5/5: workshop of all papers (you just volunteered!)  Rubric for the paper handed out.
• Tuesday, May 10: paper due in class (not after class, but at the start of class).  Poptarts.  General frivolity.

And.....then you're done.

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Data for final paper in your discipline:

Klooster article on the way different disciplines approach AIDS

spanking article

article in your field on a hot and controversial topic you folks argue about

talks by Dr. Gathagan (History (Medieval Studies (Queenship))) and Dr. Beshers (Health (Sexual Education))

list of journals in your field

list of experts on campus

lectures

other students’ papers

discussion

your own experience in this field

Interviewing each other on the field

list of key terms (can partly be drawn from the article you copied)

heroes and luminaries in your field

history of the field you did research on 

major figures in the field

key terms in the field ("feudalism," anyone?)

questions you developed with others in class about your field 

• compare/contrast paper you will write 

 two more related articles in your field (for Thursday, April 28) 

Rhetoric of your Discipline (major)

For Tuesday, April 12, I asked you to bring some general material to class.  Make sure you have it all when we begin:

• A list of the journals in your field (the library is the best place to go; besides, you have to find and xerox an article out of one, so you might as well go there and peruse)
• An article from one important journal
• A list of the experts on campus (that is almost surely professors and other teachers)
• A list of the historical figures in your field (Psychology, for instance, would list Freud, Jung, Adler, and others).  You can find this in a textbook or on the internet.

Seem to me that a discipline is like a very long story, spread out over a lot of generations, with big events that are still talked about, just like a family recalls (and revises!) big events in their own history.  People who are in the discourse community of your discipline are always proposing new ideas to talk about -- so many that it gets dizzying sometimes.  But there are themes.  Remember when in education the big focus was on Ebonics and Whole Language?  It was all anyone could talk about and write about. To take a somewhat silly example, we got some ducks last week and that is all that anyone can talk about: How should we build a pen? Do they need to be kept warm? Will the dog eat them if he gets a chance? Who left the pen open? Will we eat them?  Can you eat duck eggs? Do they taste like chicken eggs?

......you see the parallel.  Discourse communities get wrapped up in certain questions.  The article you find for class Tuesday, for instance, will most certainly be wrapped up in a certain obsessive question that the field is dealing with (if it were an unimportant question, it wouldn't even get published!)  Our job is to find out WHAT you folks write out in your discourse community and HOW your people react to the problems.

spanking, discipline

Rhetoricians,

"Discipline" means lot of things.  I guess for Thursday, we're studying academic disciplines and corporeal discipline.  They are very different things.  Or should be!

People today modeled in class strategies for using rhetoric.  By asking questions, Gizelle drew into question the subject of our discussion, Janelle used personal experience as evidence, and several of us started to construct an argument.  It was great!  I said that an argument is not insulting each other (we didn't do that at all), but it IS a way to construct knowledge.  After responding to each other's papers, we looked at a page from the spanking article (up on elearning and also here).

We spent some time looking at the first page of the spanking article, scanning it for its FORM -- its physical features.  Then we looked at some of these features (such as the use citing by using specific page numbers) and asked "why?"  Why go through all that trouble?  In class we came up with about ten good reasons.

The point is that a rhetorician is always asking "what use is it?"  Everything in that article -- every claim, apostrophe, footnote, abstract, everything -- is useful to the people in that discourse community.  It helps them make knowledge for their colleagues.

For Thursday, please bring two pages that examines the article carefully, using these criteria:

• ·       What is the motive the drives this scholar?
• ·       Content of the argument: what topic or idea or claim is so important to this discourse community?
• ·       Conventions of form: grammar, spelling, key words, format (abstract), sentence length, complexity of sentences, bibliography, level of formality?
• ·       Connections to the discourse community: bibliography, citation, choice of forum, reflection on other’s thinking, It has to reflect the conventions of spelling and grammar, of course. 
• ·       Evidence: what counts as evidence in this community?  Why do they respect this form of evidence? Storytelling? Statistics? Explication?
• ·       Relationship to audience: How is the plot of their argument laid out?  Do they write directly?  Do they refer to other writers?  Is the conflict direct or indirect?
• ·       How does the forum use ethos, logos, and pathos?