✍️ Assignments

Note

Due dates for all low-stakes posts and essay drafts are listed in the Calendar. Draft your posts in a word processor, so you have a local saved copy in case of technical difficulties when you copy-paste or attach them to Discord.

Low-Stakes Writing 🏖️

The low-stakes weekly “Q&A” writing in this class are designed to put you in the driver’s seat. Instead of asking you a narrow question that might feel “leading” or like it’s “testing” your understanding or knowledge, this framework anchors you in course content by asking you to ask and attempt to answer a question. You’ll develop your interest and understanding of the course material out of the things that naturally excite, inspire, and/or confuse you most, as you encounter them in assigned readings and your own research.

You can ask and answer any question you like, but your question must be informed by the prompt framework you selected for the week and pertain to that week’s work, and your answer must be in response to one of your classmates’ unanswered questions.

These posts won’t be perfect — as a matter of fact, they shouldn’t be. I hope for low-stakes posts that are informal, casual, unrehearsed, definitely unpolished, more concerned with precision of thought than adherence to grammar, mechanics, and academic style.

The questions and answers you come up with in these low-stakes posts allow me to meet you at your level and interests in engaging with you and helping you progress in your writing and learning.

Question & Answer

Due Dates

Your weekly question post is due to #classroom by 11:59PM every Tues (unless indicated differently on the Calendar). Your weekly answer post is due by 11:59PM every Fri (unless indicated differently on the Calendar).

In your weekly Question post, you’ll ask a specific question about:

• Something you’ve learned from one of the week’s assigned readings about research writing, or
• Ssomething you’d like help deciphering in a scholarly text you’re reading for one of your qualitative research project drafts.

In your weekly Answer post, you’ll attempt to answer:

• A question one of your classmates posted that no one else has tried to answer yet
• In addition to that required post, you can answer questions posed by other classmates, whether or not they have responses, to boost your participation grade

Due Dates

Occasionally, you’ll submit ungraded low-stakes writing that’s building towards your essay drafts to your #team channel. These activities are described and listed in the weekly modules when they’re due. Any project-related team activities should be posted in your #team channels by the date/time indicated on the Calendar.

Tip!

If it helps to see examples, here’s a model Question post and a model Answer post by the same student.

Process Reflections 🤔

After you submit each draft, you’ll post a reflection to your #team channel in which you describe:

• Your top 3 goals (in relation to the assignment criteria) in this draft
• The writing choices you made to try to achieve those goals
• Why you thought those choices were the most effective ones to make
• Where in your draft you think these choices are most apparent

This info will be useful when your team begins workshopping drafts with the general feedback sheet.

You can also note any material circumstances that got in the way of your drafting and what you might need to do (or what support you might need) to avoid similar hindrances next time. Don’t just say that you learned a lot or restate the course material — think of this as your chance to tell me how you’re implementing the course material into your writing practice!

Tip!

If it helps to see examples, here’s a model Process Reflection by a former student.

High-Stakes Writing 🏗️

Attention!

Make sure to review the instructions for each unit before and while you draft and revise.

You’ll write a semester-long qualitative research paper in this class. This is a longform research paper divided into 3 units for ease of drafting and revising over the semester. You’ll write 2 drafts in each unit. While your drafts don’t have to be polished until the final submission, I recommend you submit a draft that’s as complete as possible — my feedback is more useful when there’s more for me to review.

Each unit includes 2 drafts:

• Draft 1 is an ungraded rough draft, where you begin describing, explaining, and organizing your raw thoughts and data. In addition to whatever the assignment asks for, these first drafts can contain notes to yourself, questions for me, copy-pasted secondary or primary data from your “Research Dump” file, or “[I know something goes here but I don’t know what yet]” placeholders — features of a rough draft.
• Draft 2 is a more complete, revised version of Draft 1, with a short (~250-500) reflection about your writing process and decisions you made while writing. Since you’ll be working on this paper all semester, it’s OK if it’s rough until the final submission. As you read and think over the semester, parts of your paper may change, sometimes drastically, and that’s OK too!
• The final draft should be cleared of features of a rough draft.

The 3 units of the qualitative research project are as follows:

• Unit 1: Introducing Your Study
• Unit 2: Conducting Secondary and Primary Research
• Unit 3: Organizing, Analyzing, and Presenting Data

The sections you’ll use to organize your paper, and the drafts/units in which you’ll work on each section, are as follows:

• Drafts 1-2 - Research Introduction (Unit 1)
• Drafts 3-4 - Literature Review (Unit 2)
• Drafts 4-5 - Discussion, i.e. your primary research data from interviews or vlog analysis, and Conclusion (Unit 3),
• Final Draft - Works Cited (Unit 3)

As you draft, you’ll add each section to the same document. The final draft will include each of these sections, with these subheadings, in the order listed above.

Unit 1: Introducing Your Study

Length: ~300 words

Unit 1 has 1 section, titled Research Introduction.

Before beginning any research, the writer first needs to establish a connection to this work. Of course, introductions are about audiences as well, as they function as an opportunity to explain to readers the trajectory of their work, its focus, and the research’s value to readers.

The Research Introduction asks you to consider how both your experiences and contemporary discourses in your major/field generate and shape research topics, and form and address the specific set of questions your study aims to address. You’ll:

• Concisely explain the motivating experiences and factors that caused you to enter your specific academic and professional field (~1 paragraph)
• Concisely summarize what you’ve noticed about contemporary discourses in your field, according to your preliminary research (~1 paragraph)
• Develop research questions and hypotheses based on a specific problem that affects members of your discipline (e.g., experts, professionals, workers) that keeps coming up in the discourse, explain your interest, and articulate the value of this research. Your questions/hypotheses should consider how this problem manifests in the field, how it affects members of the discipline, and what its overarching ramifications are for your field in general. (~1 paragraph)

Tip!

The research hypothesis is a non-obvious, unprovable conclusion you’re drawing about an ongoing problem or tension that frequently appears in contemporary conversations in your field.

The research hypothesis is the hardest, most important part of your paper, so don’t feel down if you struggle with it. It’s also normal for your hypothesis to change as you keep drafting and researching, so don’t worry if you end up somewhere different than where you started later in the semester!

Unit 2: Conducting Secondary and Primary Research

Length: ~1000-1200 words minimum

Unit 2 has one section, titled Literature Review. You’ll add this section to your cumulative draft, right after Research Introduction.

The qualitative research project asks you to complete two forms of research: primary (interviews or blog/vlog analysis) and secondary (literature review). You’ll use the annotated bibliographies you developed from conducting preliminary research in Unit 1 to develop your literature review for Unit 2. While completing secondary research, you’ll also conduct three interviews or 2 interviews with a review of 1 vlog, using the interview questions you developed in Unit 1.

Literature reviews require writers to explore the existing scholarship that has been completed relative to their research question/topic. Rather than using the literature as support for an argument (like in the “reports” you might be used to writing), students will work to summarize and synthesize the research conducted by writers and scholars related to their area of study.

You’ll tell your readers about previous research on the topic by summarizing and synthesizing ideally 6 peer-reviewed articles published within the last 3-5 years. Using 3 peer-reviewed articles and 3 articles from popular journals (not personal blogs, institutions or organizations, or consulting companies) is also acceptable, but less preferred.

You’ll identify 2 important themes that connect these articles and go on to connect these themes to your own research hypothesis.

With a narrow enough set of research hypotheses, you’ll find that the articles you select will have thematic and conceptual connections. These points of connections are likely to appear as you sort through your literature matrix and CSD through synthesizing your research, as the model papers (and the annotated example on the feedback page) also demonstrate. These connections will allow you categorize subsets of research under very specific descriptors, i.e. for the example I shared in an early module, “Ableist HR policies disenfranchising BIPOC professors with chronic pain limitations on campus” instead of “Disabled professors on campus” might be one theme, while another might be “Chronically ill professors’ reliance on care work and mutual aid from colleagues.” Identifying themes and sorting your secondary sources into them will help you organize your research and break down your specific research hypotheses into even more specific facets.

Tip!

Strong literature reviews use sources that examine different themes/ideas in the research hypothesis. Weak literature reviews try to “match” or “prove” the research hypothesis.

The Literature Review section is at least 8 paragraphs and includes 4 subsections of its own:

• Introduction (1 paragraph): Name and describe the significance of the 2 thematic categories of rsearch you’ll be including in your literature review
• Theme 1 (3 paragraphs, 1 per article): Title this section with the name of your first theme. Summarize the 3 articles that illustrate this theme and connect them to your research hypothesis, making connections across articles as you do so.
• Theme 2 (3 paragraphs, 1 per article): Title this section with the name of your second theme. Summarize the 3 articles that illustrate this theme and connect them to your research hypothesis, making connections across articles as you do so.
• Conclusion (1 paragraph): Summarize the major takeaways that emerge in the connections across the 6 sources you chose, and reflect on what these takeaways mean for your research hypothesis.

You should begin compiling a Works Cited at the end of your paper. This section doesn’t have to be fully formatted and polished until the final draft, but I recommend keeping track of all the sources you’re using with bibliographic information (not links!) to make sure you know what they are later.

Tip!

Use Purdue OWL to manually create your Works Cited entries. Do not use GenAI or a citation engine to produce citations unless you’re confident that you’ll recognize any errors it returns with its results.

Your citations can be APA or MLA as long as you’re consistent.

Unit 3: Organizing, Analyzing, and Presenting Data

Length: ~1000-1200 words

Unit 3 has two sections, titled Discussion and Conclusion. You’ll add this section to your cumulative draft, right after Literature Review.

Using the themes you identified from coding your interviews and/or blog/vlog analysis, your themes clear, you will next complete your results, discussion, and conclusion sections.

The Discussion section of the qualitative research project is where you’ll report your findings (the themes you developed from transcribing and coding your interviews) and interpret and describe their significance as they relate to your previous research (the Literature Review) and what emerged from your interviews or blog/vlog analysis. Your goal is to explain new ideas or concepts that took shape from your study as related to your research question.

The Discussion section is at least 5 paragraphs and includes:

• Paragraph 1: Name and describe the significance of the most exemplary codes (your themes) from your interviews or blog/vlog analysis. Discuss how participant responses related (or didn’t relate) to the literature you reviewed and to your research hypothesis.
• Paragraphs 2-4: Evidence from each interview transcript demonstrating each theme you identified in Paragraph 1. You should have three voices — the participants, your sources, and your own voice. Your job is to first put the sources in dialogue with your participants. Next, you will explain your findings and how they relate to the research question — how they answer it, what was learned, why is this important/interesting? Offer and do a textual analysis of direct quotes from each of the 3 interviews and/or 2 interviews/1 vlog as evidence of those patterns. You should organize these paragraphs by idea, so you can include evidence from each interview in a single paragraph. Within each paragraph, organize your evidence in order of significance to your research hypothesis.
• Paragraph 5: How does your interview data expand on, complicate, or challenge your research hypothesis? (It’s OK if the data contradicts your hypothesis; explain outlier data instead of ignoring it.) Make sure to explain the study’s limitations as well.

The Conclusion section is intended to help the reader understand why your research should matter to them after they have finished reading the paper. A conclusion is not merely a summary of the main topics covered or a re-statement of your research problem, but a synthesis of key points and — if applicable — where you recommend new areas for future research. In short, try to explore the following:

Finally, your Works Cited should be correctly formatted by your final draft.

Tip!

If examples help, here’s an annotated model paper by a former student, marked up with some of my reader notes.