Course Description
This First-Year Composition course invites students to create and engage with texts that explore human societies and cultures through research, observation, and reflection. Students will read and write about ethnographic research while learning strategies for developing a topic, taking effective notes, conducting research, and producing a fieldwork project. Research will extend beyond the library or the Internet to include observing, listening, interpreting, and analyzing the behaviors, values, and traditions of people in the world around them. These experiences will help students expand their understanding of culture, develop empathy toward communities different from their own, and consider how cultural knowledge can be meaningfully incorporated into their own lives and communities.
Ethnography will serve as both a research method and a way of building deeper connections to the world, encouraging students to see themselves as part of an interconnected human story. Throughout the semester, students will also reflect on what it means to write at the college level, revising their work regularly to strengthen rhetorical skills and develop a flexible writing process they can apply across genres and disciplines. Note: This course is especially suited for students interested in social science and related fields, including but not limited to anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, economics, cultural studies, history, education, communication studies, and other interdisciplinary areas.
Course Learning Outcomes
- acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
- enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
- negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation
- develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
- engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond
- formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing
- practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
- strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources
Required Materials
OER Statement
Please note that this course has been designated as an Open Educational Resources (OER) course. This means that this course has zero textbook costs for students. All course readings and materials are open source and are available on the course Brightspace site. Handouts provided by the instructor will include selected essays, articles, and nonfiction texts, as well as guidance on essay writing, reading as a writer, and critical analysis.
