syllabus
calendar
blackboard
student.email resources

last.updated 5.5.08

 

Conference Paper/Article


Purpose

As instructors at all levels, and in multiple English Studies contexts, you will be designing pedagogy that responds to various instructional exigencies. Therefore, the design of your pedagogy, the rationale for your design, and how students actually respond to your pedagogy all make important contributions to English Studies pedagogy–both at the local and disciplinary level. You should begin to see this process within a praxis framework and consider how others can benefit from the work you have done.

Conferences and publications give you an opportunity to share this work with other instructors, helping them think about pedagogical designs for their own contexts. This assignment gives you the opportunity to practice articulating the concepts of your pedagogy. Also, the assignment gives you the opportunity to produce a text that you can propose to conferences and journals.


Instructions–Epistemological Process

Begin this process by thinking about the contribution you can make to the field or to your local context. You are encouraged to work with the same subject you used for your Pedagogy Project and may choose to address one of the following prompts:

  • what pedagogical exigencies do English Studies instructors at your institution face and how does the scholarship recommend that you respond to these exigencies?
  • what exigencies does a specific field of English Studies currently face? how might the instructional practices at your institution respond to these exigencies? how might another field of inquiry help the field to respond to these exigencies?
  • what direction is a certain field's pedagogy going? Do a literature review of these trends and develop an informed argument about the current practices.
  • You may want to look at a call for papers in a field relevant to this course and write the paper you would present if you were accepted.

Other inquiries related to English Studies pedagogy are also acceptable. However, I would recommend that you do not try to propose universal truths unless you have a broad understanding of the field, as well as the various contexts where your audience may reside.

Instructions–Writing

You will compose an argumentative paper that is grounded in the field's scholarship and fulfills the genre conventions of a conference paper. You will all also be required to compose a 250 word (single spaced) abstract of your paper that you can use to propose this work (this abstract is in addition to the page lengths described below).

Conference Paper

Most conferences give panel speakers twenty minutes to present their work. It is considered rude to exceed this time limit because you will either be cutting into another speaker's presentation and/or into the Q&A time. Therefore the rule of thumb is to compose eight double-spaced pages. Due to the oral nature of this genre's delivery, you will want to reference scholarship more than you cite it, and you never read in-text citations. However, for this paper you will include in-text citations for any scholarship you reference or cite and include an additional bibliography; this is a good practice because it allows you to re-purpose your text for verbal delivery quite efficiently.


Criteria

Logistics:

  • 8 pages for conference paper
  • double-spaced
  • This document is due on June 26 , 2008 as a hard copy submitted after your presentation.
  • 150 points

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

  • a sense of audience–do you understand the range of your audience–from novices to experts, from practitioners to theorists?
  • an informed understanding of English Studies. Does your inquiry demonstrate an understanding of the issues relevant to the teaching of English?
  • an argument that engages with specific fields of study
  • involvement in the academic discussion on your topic. Do you show how your ideas respond to those who have already written about this topic and they have already responded to each other?
  • appropriate use of conventions, including MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting