Overview of College Composition II
AT A GLANCE
CCII is the second course in the Rowan Core program’s two-course composition sequence. The course serves to introduce students to self-directed research, different kinds of arguments, and information literacy, and to further develop the habits of mind (articulated in the program’s five Core Values) that are associated with successful college writing.
GENERAL COURSE OVERVIEW
Rowan students are required to complete two composition courses to fulfill their general education requirements as part of the Rowan Core Program, and College Composition II (COMP 01112) is the second of these courses.
CCII introduces students to self-directed research, different modes of argumentation, and information literacy: while CCI/ICCI focuses on critical engagement with sources and recognizing—and joining—existing conversations, CCII asks students to engage more deeply with existing conversations through research, establishing their own independent research agendas and formulating more sophisticated, informed arguments. As students develop a fuller understanding of complex topics/debates through guided and independent research, they learn how to navigate the complex digital information and media landscape. They also learn to identify the various dimensions and nuances of complex issues and debates, and the different questions and arguments to which complex issues give rise: for example, questions of how an issue should be understood, classified, or defined, how a particular measure should be evaluated (for efficacy, morality, practicality, etc.), how a problem was caused and how it will continue to affect stakeholders, and how a problem/issue should be addressed. This is what is meant by formal argumentation: identifying different dimensions of an issue (“points of stasis”) and marshalling different argumentative strategies and structures to address them. Students in CCII compose different kinds of arguments both to address different sides of a larger issue or topic and to reach different audiences.
If CCI/ICCI emphasizes critical engagement with sources, CCII emphasizes the processes by which sources are identified, evaluated, and selected: students select and refine their own independent research inquiries, developing their ability to find credible information that represents diverse perspectives in a range of popular and scholarly publications and contexts. Self-directed research becomes the foundation of their portfolio writing projects, in which students marshal evidence in pursuit of specific inquiries and make meaningful, research-informed contributions to existing conversations.
COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, & INCLUSION
The Rowan First-Year Writing Program is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our goal is to meet each of our students where they are as individuals, recognizing that they all learn differently, come from diverse backgrounds, and bring a variety of experiences and expressions to the classroom and to their writing. We aim to create courses and learning environments that are respectful of differences across gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, culture, first generation college student status, political beliefs, and more.
In CCII, this commitment is reflected in the recognition and valuing of different perspectives, instruction in strategies to identify marginalized voices in the research process, and the recognition of how and why particular voices have been suppressed, ignored, or siloed in mainstream/academic conversations.
The FYWP affirms linguistic diversity as a strength and encourages instructors to establish instructional and assessment practices that align with antiracist pedagogy. This includes recognizing how the power dynamics of the academic discourse community reinforce white supremacy, making those power dynamics visible for our students, and encouraging their conscious choices about when to push back against genre conventions and when to strategically deploy diverse Englishes in their writing. For more information see the program’s Position Statement on Language and Correctness.
COURSE STRUCTURE
Two Structure Options
There are two ways to structure the CCII course: a topic-based course, or a theme-based course. In the topic-based course, students conduct independent research on topics of their choosing. In a theme-based course, the instructor selects a broad theme or area of research, and class participants select independent areas of research within that theme. The instructor selects a course structure: while the topic-based course encourages more independent motivation and individual, self-directed inquiry, the theme-based course encourages more collective inquiry and shared understanding of key concepts and issues. Both structures are meant to encourage a sustained research agenda on a specific topic or theme for the whole semester. In other words, students select a topic and focus their research and writing on that topic for the duration of the semester, and the writing projects they produce should explore different dimensions of the same research area, instead of jumping between unrelated topics (e.g., over the course of the semester, a student conducts research on factory farming and produces writings on different aspects of the conversation/debates about factory farming, as opposed to writing one essay on factory farming and another on the gender wage gap).
THE CURRICULUM
Readings/Sources
A large portion of the reading completed for CCII arises from students’ own independent research agendas. Instead of focusing on shared texts that are discussed collectively by the full class, students in CCII primarily focus on independently finding, evaluating, and reading a range of texts in diverse genres that are relevant to their particular research inquiries. Shorter shared readings should be selected to support the independent research, reading, and composing processes. The course includes an OER (open educational resource) textbook, which is free to students and designed to align with the CCII curriculum. The OER includes chapters devoted to research methods, various types of arguments (rebuttal, causal, proposal, etc.), and principles of digital literacy. Chapters from the OER are assigned throughout the semester to scaffold students’ development of information literacy and their argument-driven writing. (See CCII Approved Texts.) Instructors may also choose to assign a few additional shared readings (for example, to provide context for the course theme or offer a model of a particular kind of argument), but they should be mindful of the reading load of students’ individual research agendas.
Information Literacy
One of the central objectives of CCII is the development of skills and habits of mind associated with “information literacy”: the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information effectively, situate information within ongoing conversations, and proactively seek diverse perspectives. In order to meet the demands of our contemporary digital information landscape, these skills and habits of mind must be rhetorically-responsive and adaptive to new situations and contexts.
In the First-Year Writing Program, we recognize that the online information landscape is incredibly complex. Fabricated and misleading information is easy (and profitable) to produce and spread, and it is difficult to regulate. Furthermore, social media platforms, search engines, and databases are constantly changing, and they are increasingly governed by inscrutable algorithms. Our online experience is continually in flux, and it is being shifted, tailored, diverted, monitored, surveilled, and designed in ways we can recognize as well as ways we cannot. At the same time, we have more agency and information seeking avenues today than any humans in history, and democratized digital communication channels have empowered more people and communities — particularly among the underrepresented and marginalized — to be heard than ever before.
Many of the common “best practices” and “rules” surrounding information literacy instruction were developed in an earlier era, sometimes even decades in the past: these rules and guidelines do not account for the complexity of the current digital information landscape, and, furthermore, they are not always responsive to the needs of different rhetorical situations. Static rules about what makes a “good source” (e.g. “if you want good sources, you must use the library website only,” or “scholarly articles are the only good sources because they aren’t biased,” or “.org websites are more credible than .com websites”) can even be misleading, and research has shown that they encourage students to be more susceptible to misinformation.
Informed by contemporary research and our commitment to equity, our approach to information literacy in CCII is guided by the following principles:
Over the course of a semester, CCII instructors should aim to devote considerable, consistent, and intentional time and attention to online research/information seeking and source evaluation activities. For example, students should practice finding public-facing conversations online, distinguishing journalism from other kinds of online content, and evaluating online articles for their credibility and angle of vision. At the same time, they should recognize the limitations of dominant/mainstream media conversations, which have traditionally privileged the voices of the powerful, and proactively seek underrepresented and marginalized perspectives. Likewise, students in CCII should gain familiarity with different kinds of scholarly research and how to access scholarly publications using university library subscription databases, while considering how academic perspectives are rhetorically situated and shaped by social and political structures of power. Students in CCII should recognize that the appropriateness of a source depends on their writing purpose and their audience, and they are encouraged to draw upon a range of texts, including digital and multimedia texts, to inform their arguments and help them to gain a robust sense of diverse stakeholder perspectives.
Inquiry-Driven Research
An important intellectual threshold that students are crossing in FYW, and CCII especially, is to begin to practice inquiry-driven research. Rather than having a predetermined thesis and finding/using sources to support that thesis, students begin with a question and use research to seek understanding. The research process can effectively be understood as a process of finding the ongoing conversations about a topic: Who cares about and is invested in this topic? Who are the stakeholders and other credible conversants — journalists, researchers, etc. — who are discussing this topic? Where should one go online to find these conversations? What are the key ideas and debates circulating in these conversations?
Through their extensive research, students identify different stakeholders in the conversation and their points of view, attempting to listen to different voices and to understand the complexity of an issue. This process allows them to formulate an informed claim or position. Instead of cherry-picking evidence from arbitrary web sources in support of a predetermined stance, ignoring evidence and perspectives that might complicate that stance, students in CCII are guided to learn about and address the fullness of an existing conversation, acknowledging different points of view before establishing their own informed perspective.
The Annotated Bibliography
As they conduct digital research in popular/public and scholarly contexts, CCII students produce an annotated bibliography, which helps them to read their sources carefully and gain an informed perspective on the critical conversations surrounding a topic. Instructors should anticipate spending considerable time in the beginning of the semester helping students prepare for and practice writing annotations, as these become the foundation for students’ subsequent argument-driven writing projects. Though they may complete the majority of their annotations in the first half of the course, students should be conducting research progressively over the course of the semester, engaging with different kinds of information and perspectives as they pursue new kinds of argument and inquiry. (For example: in preparation for the first writing project, students might first focus on identifying journalistic and scholarly writings representing a range of different perspectives, including underrepresented or marginalized voices, and then for the second writing project, they might expand their inquiry to tap into think-tank research, public opinion polling, empirical studies, and/or social media.) At the end of the semester, a cumulative annotated bibliography of at least 8 sources is included in the final portfolio. Because annotations are labor intensive and time consuming to produce (and to read/evaluate), we recommend students produce no more than 14 source annotations for the portfolio. Sample annotated bibliography assignment sheets can be found on the CCII Default Syllabi & Sample Assignments page.
Two Research-Based Writing Projects
CCII students compose at least two research-based writing projects, which might be produced in a variety of different forms or genres: academic essays, web-based or multimodal compositions, journalistic genres, etc. One of the projects must be within a non-academic genre, produced for an audience that is not exclusively scholarly: this could be a writing for a public audience (e.g. an op-ed, open letter, call to action letter, or another journalistic genre), a professional audience (e.g. a white paper, intra-organizational report, trade publication, etc.), or another specific discourse community.
These projects should incorporate at least 2-4 credible and relevant sources (a specific writing purpose may justify more), and each should focus primarily on one particular claim type: a definition argument, evaluation argument, proposal argument, causal argument, etc. (See the OER and sample essay assignment sheets for more on these claim types).
Students will receive instructor feedback on initial drafts and revise both of these projects for inclusion in the final portfolio. Drafts are not given official grades (grades that are computed into the cumulative course grade), but they should be evaluated with a placeholder “ballpark grade” or some other indication of the draft’s current progress.
Basic CCII Project Guidelines/Requirements:
Multimodal Rhetoric
Though a formal multimodal rhetoric assignment is no longer required in the final portfolio, students in CCII should consistently engage with multimodal composition and rhetoric: the production of texts/arguments that are not solely text-based but also use other modes of communication (visuals, animations, sound, music, graphs, video, color, etc.). Students might analyze existing multimodal texts to evaluate the effectiveness of their arguments, or they might create multimodal compositions or multimodal components to the formal writing projects, using rhetorical terminology (rhetorical appeals, considerations of audience, purpose, and context, etc.) to discuss and evaluate the effectiveness of the text.
Reflection
Reflection is an important tool for achieving one’s goals, recognizing one’s learning and development, and encouraging transfer of new skills and habits. Just as importantly, reflection helps individuals better understand themselves as writers, and it is important practice for addressing new writing situations.
Throughout the semester, instructors should present CCII students with opportunities for individual and collective reflection on their writing experiences and their practice of the habits of mind represented in the five Core Values: this is often appropriate on days when major writing projects are due. Students will compose a final Reflective Statement, included in the final portfolio, focusing on their understanding and practice of the Core Values over the course of the semester. Students should demonstrate conceptual understanding of each value and offer examples from their own work of where they engaged with it in course.
KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS
Some of the rhetorical elements and writing/reading strategies that students leaving the course should understand and be conversant with are:*
GRADING
The Portfolio (60% to 75% of the final grade) (see also the CCII Portfolio Info page)
The CCII student portfolio contains the following items:
The Non-Portfolio Grade (25% to 40% of the Final Grade)
The non-portfolio grade is made up of class engagement and all graded class activities/assignments not included in the portfolio. This might include portions of the annotated bibliography, presentations of research, other homework or scaffolding activities, and credit for peer-review/workshopping.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS:
Getting CCII Students Started with Research:
Since CCII is a research-driven, persuasive writing course, here is a packet of information, assignments, and presentations designed by Erin Herberg to help students prepare for the rigors of academic research.
CCII is the second course in the Rowan Core program’s two-course composition sequence. The course serves to introduce students to self-directed research, different kinds of arguments, and information literacy, and to further develop the habits of mind (articulated in the program’s five Core Values) that are associated with successful college writing.
- There are two approaches to structuring the course, both of which encourage students to establish their own sustained research agenda on a specific topic or theme for the whole semester:
- Topics-based course: students conduct independent research on topics of their choosing
- Theme-based course: instructor selects a broad theme or area of research, and class participants select independent areas of research within that theme
- Students produce at least two major writing projects included in the final portfolio:
- Each should make a particular kind of argument (definition argument, evaluation, proposal, etc.), following genre conventions, to advance inquiry into a specific student-selected topic
- Each should meaningfully engage with at least 2-4 credible sources found through research
- One of the major writing projects should be a non-academic genre: a research-based composition that is not a conventional scholarly essay and follows the conventions of a genre intended for a non-scholarly audience
- Students also produce a cumulative annotated bibliography of their research (at least 8 sources) that is completed progressively over the course of the semester and included in the final portfolio
- Throughout the semester, consistent attention is given to multimodal rhetoric and composing (communication assembled in different modes outside of exclusively text-based forms, using still and moving images, animations, color, words, music, etc.), and to the skills and habits of mind associated with digital information literacy
- Class activities often focus on:
- developing individual research topics and key questions to guide research inquiry
- guided practice in web-based research strategies to identify credible public perspectives and publications, underrepresented and marginalized voices, professional and trade perspectives, and scholarly resources (utilizing public search engines, different publications, reports produced by research groups and think tanks, the university library’s digital resources and subscription databases, social media, etc.)
- evaluating digital information and sources of information for credibility and angle of vision
- exploring different kinds of arguments and their purposes, and analyzing sample arguments in different contexts and genres (academic/scholarly arguments, arguments in journalism, public-facing arguments published online, professional/trade genres in different disciplines, etc.)
- practicing source annotation and synthesis
- articulating and practicing the recursive and social phases of the writing process
- Students’ final grades are determined holistically through the submission of a final portfolio, with consideration of non-portfolio work and engagement throughout the semester
GENERAL COURSE OVERVIEW
Rowan students are required to complete two composition courses to fulfill their general education requirements as part of the Rowan Core Program, and College Composition II (COMP 01112) is the second of these courses.
CCII introduces students to self-directed research, different modes of argumentation, and information literacy: while CCI/ICCI focuses on critical engagement with sources and recognizing—and joining—existing conversations, CCII asks students to engage more deeply with existing conversations through research, establishing their own independent research agendas and formulating more sophisticated, informed arguments. As students develop a fuller understanding of complex topics/debates through guided and independent research, they learn how to navigate the complex digital information and media landscape. They also learn to identify the various dimensions and nuances of complex issues and debates, and the different questions and arguments to which complex issues give rise: for example, questions of how an issue should be understood, classified, or defined, how a particular measure should be evaluated (for efficacy, morality, practicality, etc.), how a problem was caused and how it will continue to affect stakeholders, and how a problem/issue should be addressed. This is what is meant by formal argumentation: identifying different dimensions of an issue (“points of stasis”) and marshalling different argumentative strategies and structures to address them. Students in CCII compose different kinds of arguments both to address different sides of a larger issue or topic and to reach different audiences.
If CCI/ICCI emphasizes critical engagement with sources, CCII emphasizes the processes by which sources are identified, evaluated, and selected: students select and refine their own independent research inquiries, developing their ability to find credible information that represents diverse perspectives in a range of popular and scholarly publications and contexts. Self-directed research becomes the foundation of their portfolio writing projects, in which students marshal evidence in pursuit of specific inquiries and make meaningful, research-informed contributions to existing conversations.
COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, & INCLUSION
The Rowan First-Year Writing Program is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our goal is to meet each of our students where they are as individuals, recognizing that they all learn differently, come from diverse backgrounds, and bring a variety of experiences and expressions to the classroom and to their writing. We aim to create courses and learning environments that are respectful of differences across gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, culture, first generation college student status, political beliefs, and more.
In CCII, this commitment is reflected in the recognition and valuing of different perspectives, instruction in strategies to identify marginalized voices in the research process, and the recognition of how and why particular voices have been suppressed, ignored, or siloed in mainstream/academic conversations.
The FYWP affirms linguistic diversity as a strength and encourages instructors to establish instructional and assessment practices that align with antiracist pedagogy. This includes recognizing how the power dynamics of the academic discourse community reinforce white supremacy, making those power dynamics visible for our students, and encouraging their conscious choices about when to push back against genre conventions and when to strategically deploy diverse Englishes in their writing. For more information see the program’s Position Statement on Language and Correctness.
COURSE STRUCTURE
Two Structure Options
There are two ways to structure the CCII course: a topic-based course, or a theme-based course. In the topic-based course, students conduct independent research on topics of their choosing. In a theme-based course, the instructor selects a broad theme or area of research, and class participants select independent areas of research within that theme. The instructor selects a course structure: while the topic-based course encourages more independent motivation and individual, self-directed inquiry, the theme-based course encourages more collective inquiry and shared understanding of key concepts and issues. Both structures are meant to encourage a sustained research agenda on a specific topic or theme for the whole semester. In other words, students select a topic and focus their research and writing on that topic for the duration of the semester, and the writing projects they produce should explore different dimensions of the same research area, instead of jumping between unrelated topics (e.g., over the course of the semester, a student conducts research on factory farming and produces writings on different aspects of the conversation/debates about factory farming, as opposed to writing one essay on factory farming and another on the gender wage gap).
- Topic-Based Course: Students choose their own individual topics to research for the semester. The topic should be an area of research that is currently stirring debate or provoking questions in some way; that is, there should be current conversations and debates to participate in. Students spend early weeks determining the issue or topic they want to focus on for the semester, developing their information literacy skills, and conducting background research to gain a strong understanding of why the issue is important and why it is contentious. They learn how and why to write annotations and produce shorter annotated bibliographies to organize, evaluate, and synthesize their collected research. As the semester progresses, students continue to refine their independent research inquiries to gain a more nuanced sense of the issue’s key dimensions: who are the stakeholders, what are the key debates, how/when/where did the issue arise, what are the stakes of resolving it, etc. They learn about different kinds of arguments and genres, and produce two writing projects that each (1) marshal appropriate evidence in support of their argument and (2) meet the demands of the specified genre. The "Global Issues in Local Contexts" curriculum on the CCII Default Syllabi and Sample Assignments page is a topic-based course.
- Theme-Based Course: The instructor chooses a course theme, and students select individual research inquiries within that theme to research for the semester. The theme should be broad enough to encompass a variety of issues and sub-topics that students can explore across their research and writing projects. (Examples: media literacy, technology, the environment, prisons, identity, the food industries). Students spend early weeks learning about the course theme, determining one sub-topic or category within the theme that they want to focus on for the semester, and developing their information literacy skills. As they collect research on their selected topic, they learn how and why to write annotations, and they produce shorter annotated bibliographies to organize, evaluate, and synthesize their collected research. As the semester progresses, students explore different dimensions of their topic through research in different genres (e.g. popular journalism, empirical studies, public opinion polling, think tank research, activism and calls to action, social media posts, etc.) They learn about different kinds of arguments and genres, and produce two writing projects that each (1) marshal appropriate evidence in support of their argument and (2) meet the demands of the specified genre. The "Media Literacy" curriculum on the CCII Default Syllabi and Sample Assignments page is an example of a theme-based course.
THE CURRICULUM
Readings/Sources
A large portion of the reading completed for CCII arises from students’ own independent research agendas. Instead of focusing on shared texts that are discussed collectively by the full class, students in CCII primarily focus on independently finding, evaluating, and reading a range of texts in diverse genres that are relevant to their particular research inquiries. Shorter shared readings should be selected to support the independent research, reading, and composing processes. The course includes an OER (open educational resource) textbook, which is free to students and designed to align with the CCII curriculum. The OER includes chapters devoted to research methods, various types of arguments (rebuttal, causal, proposal, etc.), and principles of digital literacy. Chapters from the OER are assigned throughout the semester to scaffold students’ development of information literacy and their argument-driven writing. (See CCII Approved Texts.) Instructors may also choose to assign a few additional shared readings (for example, to provide context for the course theme or offer a model of a particular kind of argument), but they should be mindful of the reading load of students’ individual research agendas.
Information Literacy
One of the central objectives of CCII is the development of skills and habits of mind associated with “information literacy”: the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information effectively, situate information within ongoing conversations, and proactively seek diverse perspectives. In order to meet the demands of our contemporary digital information landscape, these skills and habits of mind must be rhetorically-responsive and adaptive to new situations and contexts.
In the First-Year Writing Program, we recognize that the online information landscape is incredibly complex. Fabricated and misleading information is easy (and profitable) to produce and spread, and it is difficult to regulate. Furthermore, social media platforms, search engines, and databases are constantly changing, and they are increasingly governed by inscrutable algorithms. Our online experience is continually in flux, and it is being shifted, tailored, diverted, monitored, surveilled, and designed in ways we can recognize as well as ways we cannot. At the same time, we have more agency and information seeking avenues today than any humans in history, and democratized digital communication channels have empowered more people and communities — particularly among the underrepresented and marginalized — to be heard than ever before.
Many of the common “best practices” and “rules” surrounding information literacy instruction were developed in an earlier era, sometimes even decades in the past: these rules and guidelines do not account for the complexity of the current digital information landscape, and, furthermore, they are not always responsive to the needs of different rhetorical situations. Static rules about what makes a “good source” (e.g. “if you want good sources, you must use the library website only,” or “scholarly articles are the only good sources because they aren’t biased,” or “.org websites are more credible than .com websites”) can even be misleading, and research has shown that they encourage students to be more susceptible to misinformation.
Informed by contemporary research and our commitment to equity, our approach to information literacy in CCII is guided by the following principles:
- Information seeking (research) is rhetorically situated: what makes a source of information useful and trustworthy is shaped by the context and purpose.
- Hard and fast rules about “criteria” for reputable online sources are not rhetorically situated, and are likely to be misleading.
- When we teach students about research, we want to encourage them to recognize and seek a range of different perspectives, including marginalized voices that are less often represented in mainstream media.
- Determining the credibility and “angle of vision” of a source requires lateral reading: opening up new tabs to situate the information, author, and publication or sponsoring organization in context.
- By modeling a pragmatic and flexible understanding of how to navigate digital information systems, we aim to support students’ lifelong information literacy and civic online reasoning.
More information on these guidelines and what they look like in practice is provided in the slide deck (linked here) from our Summer 2021 Information Literacy workshop.
Over the course of a semester, CCII instructors should aim to devote considerable, consistent, and intentional time and attention to online research/information seeking and source evaluation activities. For example, students should practice finding public-facing conversations online, distinguishing journalism from other kinds of online content, and evaluating online articles for their credibility and angle of vision. At the same time, they should recognize the limitations of dominant/mainstream media conversations, which have traditionally privileged the voices of the powerful, and proactively seek underrepresented and marginalized perspectives. Likewise, students in CCII should gain familiarity with different kinds of scholarly research and how to access scholarly publications using university library subscription databases, while considering how academic perspectives are rhetorically situated and shaped by social and political structures of power. Students in CCII should recognize that the appropriateness of a source depends on their writing purpose and their audience, and they are encouraged to draw upon a range of texts, including digital and multimedia texts, to inform their arguments and help them to gain a robust sense of diverse stakeholder perspectives.
Inquiry-Driven Research
An important intellectual threshold that students are crossing in FYW, and CCII especially, is to begin to practice inquiry-driven research. Rather than having a predetermined thesis and finding/using sources to support that thesis, students begin with a question and use research to seek understanding. The research process can effectively be understood as a process of finding the ongoing conversations about a topic: Who cares about and is invested in this topic? Who are the stakeholders and other credible conversants — journalists, researchers, etc. — who are discussing this topic? Where should one go online to find these conversations? What are the key ideas and debates circulating in these conversations?
Through their extensive research, students identify different stakeholders in the conversation and their points of view, attempting to listen to different voices and to understand the complexity of an issue. This process allows them to formulate an informed claim or position. Instead of cherry-picking evidence from arbitrary web sources in support of a predetermined stance, ignoring evidence and perspectives that might complicate that stance, students in CCII are guided to learn about and address the fullness of an existing conversation, acknowledging different points of view before establishing their own informed perspective.
The Annotated Bibliography
As they conduct digital research in popular/public and scholarly contexts, CCII students produce an annotated bibliography, which helps them to read their sources carefully and gain an informed perspective on the critical conversations surrounding a topic. Instructors should anticipate spending considerable time in the beginning of the semester helping students prepare for and practice writing annotations, as these become the foundation for students’ subsequent argument-driven writing projects. Though they may complete the majority of their annotations in the first half of the course, students should be conducting research progressively over the course of the semester, engaging with different kinds of information and perspectives as they pursue new kinds of argument and inquiry. (For example: in preparation for the first writing project, students might first focus on identifying journalistic and scholarly writings representing a range of different perspectives, including underrepresented or marginalized voices, and then for the second writing project, they might expand their inquiry to tap into think-tank research, public opinion polling, empirical studies, and/or social media.) At the end of the semester, a cumulative annotated bibliography of at least 8 sources is included in the final portfolio. Because annotations are labor intensive and time consuming to produce (and to read/evaluate), we recommend students produce no more than 14 source annotations for the portfolio. Sample annotated bibliography assignment sheets can be found on the CCII Default Syllabi & Sample Assignments page.
Two Research-Based Writing Projects
CCII students compose at least two research-based writing projects, which might be produced in a variety of different forms or genres: academic essays, web-based or multimodal compositions, journalistic genres, etc. One of the projects must be within a non-academic genre, produced for an audience that is not exclusively scholarly: this could be a writing for a public audience (e.g. an op-ed, open letter, call to action letter, or another journalistic genre), a professional audience (e.g. a white paper, intra-organizational report, trade publication, etc.), or another specific discourse community.
These projects should incorporate at least 2-4 credible and relevant sources (a specific writing purpose may justify more), and each should focus primarily on one particular claim type: a definition argument, evaluation argument, proposal argument, causal argument, etc. (See the OER and sample essay assignment sheets for more on these claim types).
Students will receive instructor feedback on initial drafts and revise both of these projects for inclusion in the final portfolio. Drafts are not given official grades (grades that are computed into the cumulative course grade), but they should be evaluated with a placeholder “ballpark grade” or some other indication of the draft’s current progress.
Basic CCII Project Guidelines/Requirements:
- Approximately 1,000-1,300 words
- Incorporating (at minimum) 2-4 credible and relevant sources that represent meaningful stakeholder perspectives
- In-text citations and a References page in APA format (students should practice assembling APA citations and may need additional guidance/review on APA expectations)
Multimodal Rhetoric
Though a formal multimodal rhetoric assignment is no longer required in the final portfolio, students in CCII should consistently engage with multimodal composition and rhetoric: the production of texts/arguments that are not solely text-based but also use other modes of communication (visuals, animations, sound, music, graphs, video, color, etc.). Students might analyze existing multimodal texts to evaluate the effectiveness of their arguments, or they might create multimodal compositions or multimodal components to the formal writing projects, using rhetorical terminology (rhetorical appeals, considerations of audience, purpose, and context, etc.) to discuss and evaluate the effectiveness of the text.
Reflection
Reflection is an important tool for achieving one’s goals, recognizing one’s learning and development, and encouraging transfer of new skills and habits. Just as importantly, reflection helps individuals better understand themselves as writers, and it is important practice for addressing new writing situations.
Throughout the semester, instructors should present CCII students with opportunities for individual and collective reflection on their writing experiences and their practice of the habits of mind represented in the five Core Values: this is often appropriate on days when major writing projects are due. Students will compose a final Reflective Statement, included in the final portfolio, focusing on their understanding and practice of the Core Values over the course of the semester. Students should demonstrate conceptual understanding of each value and offer examples from their own work of where they engaged with it in course.
KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS
Some of the rhetorical elements and writing/reading strategies that students leaving the course should understand and be conversant with are:*
- The distinctions between public/popular, academic/scholarly, and (possibly) trade/disciplinary texts, and the purposes of each
- Strategies for finding credible popular and scholarly sources in a variety of digital venues
- How to evaluate sources and web-based information for credibility, relevance, and usefulness
- How to assess the degree to which a writer's perspective informs their writing (understanding that all writing, including one’s own, is shaped by its authors' experiences and background, and that therefore no writing is purely objective or free of bias)
- The purposes and structures of different kinds of arguments, and the kinds of evidence that are appropriate in different contexts (e.g. scholarly reports, journalistic writing, etc.)
- How visual and other multimodal texts convey arguments and ideas in popular, academic, and/or technical contexts, responding to the rhetorical situation and utilizing rhetorical appeals
- Writing as a recursive and social process
- The social/ethical dimensions of which perspectives are heard, valued, and promoted in different contexts
GRADING
The Portfolio (60% to 75% of the final grade) (see also the CCII Portfolio Info page)
The CCII student portfolio contains the following items:
- Two major writing projects/essays, revised and including references to at least 2-4 outside sources, APA-format citations, and an APA-format Reference page
- At least one instructor-commented draft for each of the final portfolio essays
- An Annotated Bibliography with annotations for 8-14 sources (sources are not all required to be included in the two writing projects but instead reflect the inquiry-driven research process)
- A Reflective Statement that addresses the five (5) Core Values/Course Outcomes
Grading Portfolios
Portfolios are graded holistically using the CCII Portfolio Evaluation form. While graded holistically, certain elements carry more weight as would be expected (such as the essays themselves). Instructors are not expected to make extensive comments in the portfolio. The Portfolio Evaluation form allows for comments and feedback.
Students are expected to turn in complete portfolios. Students cannot include essays in their portfolio that the instructor has not previously seen and commented on. See more about grading portfolios and the FYWP grading scale under the Grading tab.
The Non-Portfolio Grade (25% to 40% of the Final Grade)
The non-portfolio grade is made up of class engagement and all graded class activities/assignments not included in the portfolio. This might include portions of the annotated bibliography, presentations of research, other homework or scaffolding activities, and credit for peer-review/workshopping.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS:
- Not all CCII students will have taken ICCI/CCI, and students may have a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences with composition and the First-Year Writing Program:
- Some CCII students are transfer students who had an “equivalent” course that could be quite different than our CCI
- Some CCII students are first-year students that placed out of CCI based on their AP exam score
- Some CCII students began in Foundations for College Writing and/or repeated an earlier composition course (and therefore have taken more than two FYWP courses)
- Instructors should anticipate that students may require various degrees of introduction to (and reinforcement of) the concepts and practices that are established in CCI
- Instructors should anticipate that students will benefit from a highly scaffolded approach to information literacy skills: while many young people do spend a lot of time using digital tools in their daily lives, research shows that most students will have minimal to no experience with a rhetorically-situated approach to research and source evaluation.
Getting CCII Students Started with Research:
Since CCII is a research-driven, persuasive writing course, here is a packet of information, assignments, and presentations designed by Erin Herberg to help students prepare for the rigors of academic research.