Final

Reflective Essay Final

Write a five or so page reflective essay that explains how the work of the class helped you to meet the outcomes described below. If you are in the Language, Literature and Writing for Teachers major, you will ultimately have to submit this project to the LiveText system.

Here are the details:

I’m assigning this final at the beginning of the class to make it clear that this isn’t so much a “test” as it is an opportunity to reflect and describe what you learned (or, for that matter, what you didn’t learn) in the course of the term in English 328. Everyone has to complete this assignment of course, but it is particularly important for those of you who are in the Language, Literature, and and Writing for Teachers major (aka, “English Education”). In fact, this essay is one small part of the assessment process from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the two national organizations that EMU (and a lot of other universities) works with to accredit our programs in English Education. But beyond that and regardless of your major, the idea is that these are some of the things that you should learn in English 328.

Here are the outcomes (most of this language comes directly from NCATE and NCTE) and some of the ways you might have met these outcomes during the course of the term (in italics):

The Composing Process

• Strategies that you used to compose the texts for particular purposes and audiences, and within selected genres. Here you could discuss the process of peer review, the role of “good style” in the style rules essay and other assignments, the role that writing for particular audiences played in your writing projects, the process of working with the genres of a comic, a short video, a blog, etc.
• Strategies that you used to create visual images (or other “literacies,” e.g., oral, auditory) with or within texts for selected purposes and audiences, which may include items such as graphs, webpage, videos, blogs, etc. Besides discussing the strategies you used for creating the visual rhetoric project and the short video project, you might also want to discuss the approaches you took with your blog, with the invent your own writing technology assignment, and through the various web tools we use throughout the term.

Structuring Language (including conventions)

• Strategies that you used to analyze the writing situations and to reflect on and choose appropriate language and conventions for the selected purposes and audiences. Chances are, this is something that you discussed in the style rules essay, though “appropriate language and conventions” based on purpose and audience is also something that you had to demonstrate in all of your projects this term.

Assessing

• Strategies that you used to assess the effectiveness of the texts that you composed for selected purposes and audiences.
• Assessment strategies used to gather information and findings for particular assignments, including the presentation to selected audiences. For these two outcomes, consider the ways that you incorporated evidence into your writing projects– for example, assigned readings, observations from your writing invention, observations from your visual rhetoric assignment, materials for your short video and the accompanying essay, observations of other students’ blogs, etc.– and how you selected this evidence.

Write using your work in the class as examples of how you met the outcomes, not the other way around. In other words, instead of writing/organizing your essay around the chronology of the class assignments (“First, we did this invent your own technology assignment, and I learned these things; second, we did this style essay assignment, and I learned these things,” and so forth), organize it instead around the outcomes articulated above.

But remember– you still want to write an essay! In other words, I don’t think it’d be effective or advisable to write an essay that responds to this prompt as if it were a series of exam questions. Rather, using these prompts as a guide, write an essay where your goal is to reflect on what you learned in the class. In doing so, keep in mind an audience beyond the class– students who might take English 328, other writers, other teachers, other educators, etc.

Handing in the Final

Handing in your final is easy:  simply email it to me as an attachment– an MS Word Document, a PDF, or an RTF text.  My email address is skrause@emich.edu Be sure to have a clear subject line in your email, something like “(Your Name here)’s English 328 Final.”  Also in this email:  if we discussed the possibility of doing some revisions and you completed those revisions, please let me know that and which projects you revised.

About LiveText

IF YOU ARE AN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND WRITING FOR TEACHERS MAJOR, YOU WILL NEED TO SUBMIT THIS ESSAY TO LIVETEXT BEFORE THE END OF THE SEMESTER. Only you can be responsible for having your LiveText account set up, ready for you to submit work, etc. If you don’t know how to do this, you should follow the instructions for setting up for and then using your LiveText account at the EMU LiveText student site, which is located at http://www.emich.edu/coe/livetext/students/index.html.