Personal Research Paper

I wrote a teaching narrative for a column in this issue of The Advocate, in which I described a twist on the traditional research paper for English 101, so I thought I’d include it here in case anyone's interested. This assignment is good for community colleges, where students are often more career-minded and a little less patient with deconstructing metaphors in French theory (though French theory is, of course, no less important).

The purpose is for students to research their own projected careers so that they can anticipate requirements (including time and money) and choose appropriate internships and classes along the way. I adapted this from an assignment Dominique Zino passed on to me from her 101 class (thank you, Dominique; I love this assignment). Unfortunately, I can't attach documents to posts in this blog, so I'm including it as text. Feel free to copy and paste, adapt it, pass it on, and do let me know if you have any suggestions.

Personal Research Paper

Requirements:

• approximately 5 - 6 pages
• MLA format
• summaries of 3 sources due Tuesday, May 1
• annotated bibliography with 5 sources due Wednesday, May 3
• draft due on Tuesday, May 8 (conferences)
• paper due Thursday, May 10

Research Question: How can I achieve the career I want
in 10 years (or less/more)?

There are two major parts to this paper: the what and the how. You may decide to change your chosen career as you research the process to getting there, but that’s quite all right. It's why we do research: to explore all our options before making a choice.

1. Career: What is your ideal profession (not lifestyle)?

• income you can expect, mitigating factors (gender/race, ability, location, availability/demand, education)
• working conditions you can expect (long hours, travel, stress, conducive to having a family, early retirement, vacation time, burn-out rate for others in the profession, etc.)
• type of personality and skills needed (verbally proficient, social, competitive, decisive, analytical, etc.)

2. Steps: How will you make yourself a serious candidate for the profession of which you hope to be a part?

• degree and classes, as well as GPA and requirements for transferring to 4-yr college
• experience (internships, volunteer work, skills you can acquire at certain jobs now that will be helpful later)
• other certifications
• contacts (who you know now and how you can make more)
• length of time required to achieve career
• amount of money required

Caution: For this assignment, avoid diary entries in which you write what you hope will come true. Give a pragmatically delineated plan that maps out how you can move from point A, the person living the life you have at present, to point B, the person living the life you want. Demonstrate how this plan works.

Tip: If you know someone currently in the profession you’re interested in, ask as many questions as you can. A formal interview may be included as part of your bibliography.

Equity Curricula

Every other year, Campus Equity Week is observed to raise awareness of adjunct working conditions and other issues. This year at CUNY, we don’t just want to celebrate being adjuncts or settle for feeling honored. Let’s do something! The Adjunct Project at CUNY is creating what we call "Equity Curricula": lessons designed to be incorporated in classrooms in order to raise awareness among students and make a statement to our administration, as well as to accomplish real results.

Please scroll through these ideas, copy and paste them, and send them around your department to both full-time and contingent faculty. Feel free to let your administrators know that, as a concerned and dedicated teacher in your field, you’re helping your students make connections between the material and their real-life conditions: that is, you’re telling them the truth about their adjunct teachers’ working conditions.

This will be a joint effort. Please email me to add more departments and to suggest curricula incorporating important concepts in your discipline and adjunct issues.

Anthropology: After presenting the info in the general lesson, the main discussion question might be, "Using the principles we've covered so far, how would you assess the university culture?"

Criminal Justice:

Economics: Examine trends in increasing university reliance on adjuncts (see general lesson info), and discuss why this pattern has been established. Predict where these trends will take us at this rate in 2040. Also, have students read Ellen Balleisen's article, "Adjunct Pay: More Experience Means Less Money" to examine the effects of inflation on nearly stable salaries.

English:

• Business Letter: For those of us teaching composition courses, we can teach the business letter format together with persuasion in an assignment about adjunct teachers, and the result is the launch of a letter-writing campaign to the administration sincerely from our students. This is an amazing assignment because, for one, students learn best when they are writing to real-life situations, not for formulated, in-class projects (Matsuda, Bartholomae). And, two, this sort of assignment creates a critical awareness both of the system in which the students are studying and a process for changing it. (Thank you to Pam from UL Lafayette for that idea.)
• Research: I personally think it’s asking too much of students to require an end-of-the-semester research paper on adjunct issues; however, as you provide a model of research in class, your sample topic can be something dealing with adjunct issues. In other words, in case you don’t already do this, it’s a good idea to select a topic and demonstrate research techniques (e.g. brainstorming, formulating a research question, then a thesis, searching databases, fleshing out the argument with facts and statistics), and it’s good for this topic to be something that none of the students will choose but that you’d like them to know more about (global warming, female genital mutilation, etc.)

History:

This discussion assignment is appropriate for U.S. History or Labor History (thanks to Carl Lindskoog, CUNY). Begin by presenting the information in the general CEW presentation and follow up with discussion questions. Once the class has discussed the experience of “contingent labor” in American universities and at CUNY have the students fit this knowledge into historical context by reading the brief article “Fixing the Academic Labor Crisis: Lessons History” (located on page 2). Ask the students to think about the following things when reading the piece:

· What is the main argument?
· How does the author fit the contemporary experience of adjuncts and “contingent workers” into American history?
· Is the argument convincing? Why or why not?
· Based on what we have learned in this class, what other lessons from history might help us solve the academic labor crisis?

Mathematics:

Philosophy: Perhaps use the adjunct labor system as an example when teaching the problem of evil, heh heh.

Political Science:

Social Science:

Discussion questions regarding the definitions of equity and inequity:

· How does equity relate to concepts such as: justice, fairness, and a living wage?

· How does inequity in faculty salaries impact student life inside the classroom?

Student Reading:

From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007: Equity: principles of justice originally developed by the English chancellor. In Anglo-American jurisprudence equitable principles and remedies are distinguished from the older system that the common law courts evolved. One of the earliest functions of the king's chaplain (the chancellor) and of the chancery (the office that he headed) was to govern access to the royal courts by issuing on application the appropriate original writ . At first the chancellor had great discretion in framing writs, but in time he was limited to a few rigidly circumscribed forms, and in certain cases worthy claims could not be satisfied. From this inadequacy arose the practice of appealing directly for aid to the chancellor as the "keeper of the king's conscience." By the early 16th cent. a fairly well-defined jurisdiction was exercised by the court of chancery in rivalry with the common law. In the 17th cent. it was definitely established that the court of chancery would decide any claim to jurisdiction that the courts of common law disputed. The early chancellors purported to dispense equity in its original sense of fair dealing, and they cut through the technicalities of common law to give just treatment. Some of their principles were derived from Roman law and from canon law . Soon, however, equity amassed its own body of precedents and tended to rigidity. Equity, even in its more limited modern sense, is still distinguished by its original and animating principle that no wrong should be without an adequate remedy. Among the most notable achievements of equity were the trust and the injunction . Because the decree (final order) of an equity court operated as an order of the king, disobedience might be punished as contempt ; in legal remedies, on the contrary, the plaintiff was limited to enforcing his (monetary) judgment . The fact that equity trials were decided without a jury was thought advantageous in complex cases. The coexistence of different systems of justice and delays in the courts of chancery came to present such great procedural difficulties that in England the Judicature Act was adopted (1873) to amalgamate law and equity. In the United States amalgamation had begun with the New York procedure code (1848) drafted by David Dudley Field . Today only a few of the states have separate equity courts. Of the remaining states some divide actions and (to a lesser extent) remedies into legal and equitable, while the others have almost entirely abolished the distinction. Even in those states where law and equity remain unmerged, they are often handled by two sides of the same court, with relatively simple provisions for the transfer of a case that is brought on the wrong side.

Bibliography: See F. W. Maitland, Equity (1909, repr. 1969); R. A. Newman, Equity in Law (1961); H. G. Hanbury, Modern Equity (9th ed., ed. by R. H. Maudsley, 1969); G. H. Webb and T. C. Bianco, Equity (1970).

Definition of inequity, Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989: Want of equity or justice; the fact or quality of being unfair; unfairness, partiality. 1556 J. HEYWOOD Spider & F. lvii. 10 Equite, in all things..is a vertew pewre. Inequite, for wrong, no waie can make. 1682 J. SCARLETT Exchanges Pref. Aij, To discern between the justice and injustice, the equity and inequity of these Exchanges. 1876 BANCROFT Hist. U.S. VI. Index 614 Many of her statesmen confess its inequity and inexpediency. 1886 SYMONDS Sidney iii. 48 The inequity and the political imprudence of freeing great nobles from burdens. b. with pl. An unfair or unjust matter or action. 1857 J. PULSFORD Quiet Hours i. §1 Thine iniquities are in-equities. 1884 H. SPENCER in Contemp. Rev. July 38 Our system of Equity, introduced..to make up for the short-comings of Common-law, or rectify its inequities.

Sociology: See if you can look at the adjunct labor system through the lens of social stratification, group interactions, or work economy.

Statistics: Have students research the average and minimum cost of living in NYC. Then, using the info in the general presentation or PowerPoint, have them calculate how much debt adjuncts can expect to incur in one year, considering their average salary vs. that of full-time, tenure track faculty working the same amount. Also, have students consider how much work adjuncts do outside of class (preparation, grading, responding to student emails), and calculate how much the truly earn at an hourly rate. As another option, have students check statistics of increasing adjunct labor in the Digest of Education Statistics and project figures for 2040.

Urban Education: Compare ratios of adjunct to full-time faculty at lower income institutions and ivy-league institutions.

How to Handle Plagiarism

The art of nabbing and disciplining those dirty, lying thought thieves. Plagiarism is one of the oddest concepts, considering that Western societies are the only ones that even think it’s possible to steal “intellectual property” (a very capitalist notion, yes?), while there is simply a collective of knowledge in places like China that everyone owns and anyone is free to use without citing sources. After all, hasn’t everything already been written and said? “There is nothing new under the sun,” right?—wait, let me get that source (Ecclesiastes 1.9b).

Add to that cultural discrepancy the fact that we teachers freely steal, copy and disseminate our own ideas, assignments and handouts (not to mention copyrighted material—you know who you are) when it comes to teaching. This is plagiarism. But nevermind that we don’t practice what we preach; here are some good ways of handling student plagiarism.

1. Cover your bases ahead of time. Include a long section defining plagiarism and delineating the horrible consequences thereof in your syllabus, and have students read it aloud (as a class or in turns) when you go over the syllabus. It does feel like second grade reading class, but this exercise ensures that everyone is accountable for the information. You can find your university’s plagiarism policy on its website, usually under “Policies” or something like that, or you may find it on a colleague’s syllabus (in which case you should promptly plagiarize it). My university has this great process of creating an ad hoc committee to “try” the student and determine his or her consequences (up to expulsion). I doubt you’ll ever have to go that far with a student, but that assignment should be automatically failed.

2. Design plagiarism-proof assignments. Avoid assigning generic topics or generic formats that can be easily lifted from cheat-sites. “Social issue” papers (legalizing marijuana, gun control, etc.) are sure to turn up some cheating, so rather than approving/assigning a paper on, say, global warming, shape it to fit the student: “define global warming, demonstrate the potential impact on your community, and suggest some solutions you can initiate within your community.” Many teachers have found it helpful to create paper assignments that are different from typical papers. Also, have the students brainstorm and create outlines in class (and even begin writing) so that they won’t be tempted by a profound writer’s block at the last minute to grab something off the internet.

3. It’s pretty easy to spot plagiarism. One, there will be a drastic difference between their in-class writing and a plagiarized assignment, and I’m not just talking about Spell Check and the shift+F7 function (thesaurus). I require tons of in-class essays, so I notice when their writing has suddenly become graduate-level. However, if you don’t teach a writing-intensive course, there are other things you’ll notice. For example, students often neglect to change formatting when they copy and paste from the internet. The spacing before and after lines is often still set to “auto,” so there are odd paragraph breaks. Or the student has a couple of different fonts (a sans from the internet and the default TNR from Word). Or you may see a slightly gray background he or she didn’t notice in the document.

Google usually works, because it’s probably the search engine your student used.. Enter a string of words in quotations marks (to search for those words only in a series) that doesn’t look like your student’s writing. It’ll usually be the second or third item to pop up. I’ve also heard of plagiarism software and search engines, but I’ve never come across or needed them. If you know of some, let me know and I’ll post them.

4. Confront the student respectfully. Accusations are never cool; they can make the student more defensive and prone to deny it, leading to lots of uncertainty. You might not know for sure about the plagiarism, so you won’t know what to do and, regardless of your decision, the student will feel guilty or insecure around you, making for an uncomfortable student/teacher relation for the rest of the year. You’re trying to help this student make good decisions, not “bust” him or her, so avoid accusations. I hear it is a power trip, though, if you ever want to try it.

Here’s a method I learned while teaching in New Orleans; I really like it, and I’ve shared it with a lot of people who latched onto it as well. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which teacher gave me this; otherwise, I’d certainly give her her intellectual props. Print a hard copy of the internet version of the plagiarized essay. Hand back all essays at the beginning of class except for Plagiarizing Patty’s, and ask her to see you at the end of class. She knows what’s up, so this gives her time to think about her decision and work through some of her defenses. At the end of class (I wait till the other students are gone so I can confront her privately), place her essay on the desk in front of you and, next to it, your internet print-out. Simply ask, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

The student will probably come clean (I’ve never had a student deny the plagiarism). Then put the ball in their corner again by asking, “What are the consequences for plagiarism?”

The rest is up to your discretion. I always fail that assignment, but I usually catch the plagiarism on first drafts anyway, so they can revise (rewrite) and still pass the assignment. Depending on the university’s policies, I may have students sign an Academic Dishonesty Form (which does not follow them past college, but stays on record in case they plagiarize again). I rarely receive plagiarized essays, but those few cases were not repeated by the students. I suppose I would consider asking them to drop the class if that happened.

In the cases of accidental plagiarism (for example, paraphrasing or not citing sources correctly), I still hold the students after class and fail the assignment, but provide specific instruction and assure them that a revision will replace the F. Again, it’s up to you.

5. Don’t ignore plagiarism. It is a disservice to your students to pretend it didn’t happen (either because you’re too tired or too scared to deal with it). Though you may feel merciful for not confronting Plagiarizing Patty, you are denying that student her agency as a human being. She has the ability to make choices with good or bad consequences, and she has the right, like you and I, to learn from her mistakes. And though plagiarism is indeed only a construct, she and you have agreed to the terms of the class, which include treating plagiarism as an offense.

What to Do the First Day of Class

Let's get down to business. What do you do when you walk in the first day? In short, be strict. Sounds authoritarian and awful, I know, but my disclaimer is that, while it's easy to loosen up on standards later, it’s nearly impossible to tighten up on them mid-semester. After you've taught for a while, you'll know what works best for you, but this is a good strategy for a first-time teacher.

1. Dress professionally, particularly if you’re female or young-looking (or just plain young). On issues of student respect, I once heard a tall, male professor say, “I find that it’s helpful to be tall and male. " If you’re unsure of yourself as a teacher and you possess neither of those qualities, it’s a good idea to wear a suit or blazer.

2. Walk in on the dot. If you get there early, it's weird to sit at your desk with nothing to say and nowhere to look, and even weirder to have to wave your hand, quiet everyone down and announce that class is beginning. Better to walk in, say "Good morning," and get started.

3. Begin with an assignment: a freewrite, “diagnostic” essay, pop quiz (which you won’t count, of course), contact information (email addresses are wonderful) or things you want to know about the students (last book read, grade they expect to make)… anything. You can simply walk in and say, “Get out a pen and sheet of paper, please.” Beginning every class with an assignment is an excellent way to get students “in the zone,” and doing it the first day lets students know how your class is going to be. They will choose either to drop your class or, more likely, rise to meet your expectations.

As an English teacher, I typically assign an essay the first day (what grade do you expect to make in this class—really?, or a literacy narrative), and students are free to leave when they hand in their essays.

4. Present your policies. You know this one—the syllabus! Either you can present this the first day or save it for Day 2 because your first assignment takes the whole class or because you know more students will add late (often the cases of community colleges). I present a grading contract on the second day (see my post on syllabus).

5. Have students introduce themselves. Same thing goes for introductions—decide whether you want them on the first or second day. Particularly if you’re teaching a discussion class, it’s important for students to develop a rapport with one another. I have each student meet another, procure the answers to four questions

• name
• origin
• major
• last song heard,

and introduce that student to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, during introductions, I regularly quiz the class on students who have already been introduced. It’s a great way to learn names, and you can quiz students on names any time (and any day) you need a reminder.

During this time, it's also a good idea to have students make "buddies" and take down contact info for making up notes they missed or to send messages to you. After all, you're only paid to teach the class once, so it's only fair that you shouldn't have to re-teach your lesson to students who were absent (though, of course, you'll willing to answer Qs and fill in gaps in info).