Self Assessment

We first concentrated on the analysis of articles and interviews to get a feel of what it would be like to conduct a professional interview.  We then dived into planning our own interviews with whichever person we selected.  This allowed for us to create a cycle which consisted of conducting our own research, then moving on to the analysis, receiving peer review, editing and finalizing.  Following this cycle allowed me to achieve the majority of the course learning objectives or at the least getting experience for each course learning objective which brings me closer to fully mastering the objective.  The main course learning objectives that I would label as achieved would be CLO 7 which is “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects”, CLO 8 which is “strengthen your source use practices”, CLO 3 which is “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation”, CLO 4 which is “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”, and CLO 5 which is “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond”.  When it comes to the course learning objectives, the majority of them are connected to one another so achieving one opens the path to achieving the next.  In order to show the achievements of the CLOs, I plan on showing the journey through my analysis of the papers I’ve submitted for this course.

CLO 1 which is “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility” was put into practice when it came to analyzing articles for cultural information, how it could lead to the actions that occurred in the article, and how that information could guide a fieldworker or social scientist in their investigation.  In discussion board two and three, I analyzed two articles titled “Man is Rescued by Stranger” from the NY Times and “Solange, the Polymathic Cultural Force”.  In the discussion board for the first article, I stated “Some examples of cultural information shown in this article is New Yorkers who use the subway/trains, people who’ve had the same fears of being pushed onto the tracks, New Yorkers who take the 1 train, veterans, construction workers, university students, people who experience seizures, and New Yorkers getting together to help the stranger”.  In the discussion board for the second article, I stated “The article includes cultural information such as being African American, having a connection with God since she continuously attended church, being a dancer, a singer, polymathic artists, and a single black mother”.  In both discussions, cultural information was used to navigate the cause or what led to the actions discussed.  These analyses helped to make a path to conducting my first interview for the class which allowed me, the interviewer, to gain a deeper insight into my interviewee’s background and perspective on the topic I was researching for the multicultural profile essay.

By achieving CLO 1, I was able to incorporate that practice into achieving CLOs 2, 3, and 4.  When it comes to CLO 2 which is “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising,  editing, and self assessment”, I don’t believe I’ve fully mastered the strategies for editing/revising however I was able to use that practice when it came to the literature review +  expert interview essay.  In the first draft of essay 3, the only section I included was the literature review, then in the second draft I included the section of findings from my expert interview, and in the last draft I included an abstract and conclusion.  The progress from the first attempt to the last attempt shows the progress of finalizing the paper however I realized I was lacking when it came to editing the actual literature review.  Throughout the literature review, I wasn’t able to clearly include my research question, so in my final draft in essay 3 I was able to state “Through a content analysis, I will explore to what extent do media portrayals of Arabs and/or Muslims pre and post 9/11 perpetuate islamophobia and anti-arab sentiment in western societies” in the abstract.  So when it comes to CLO 2, although I believe I have achieved the majority of it, I still believe I need more practice with editing/revising to fully master it.  

CLO 3 which is “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation” was incorporated when it came to the subject descriptions in essay 1 and 2.  For essay 1, I stated “the topic I will be focusing on is the comparison of the American Education System and school environments compared to foreign Education Systems and school environments”.  In the observational field notes of essay 2, I stated, “through these observations, I was able to reopen old memories of books I’ve read in school and how these different experiences led multiple people down similar paths which allowed them to connect with each other later in life.  I was also able to discover that overall experiences can determine what sparks your interests in genres and how you dissect certain books”.  Going from the subject description of essay 1 to the field notes of essay 2, I was able to identify how I went more into depth in what direction I wanted to take towards my research.

The practice from CLO 1, 2, and 3 all combined together to help me achieve CLO 4 and the practice of the actual interviews gave me the most experience when it came to the social aspects of the research.  During the first interview I conducted for essay 1, I had the advantage of being familiar with the person I interviewed so I was able to acknowledge the range of linguistic differences as practiced from CLO 1.  I was also able to use CLO 2 and 3 to formulate the questions I planned to use for the interview to retrieve information for my topic and then let the interviewee guide the way through the interview.  During my expert interview I also used the same strategy to formulate which questions I planned to ask to guide the interview.  The questions are as listed below:

1. What are common stereotypes that you believe are incorporated in western society about the Muslim community?
2. Can you describe some of the common representations of Arabs and/or Muslims that you’ve seen in the media? This can include movies, tv shows, literature works, news outlets and etc
3. Have you noticed any changes in media representations of Arabs and/or Muslims in recent years?
4. From the common representations that you’ve seen, what percentage of them would you say could be considered to further harmful stereotypes?
5. In your opinion, what steps can media outlets take to reduce the perpetuation of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment in their reporting?
6. How can English teachers incorporate discussions on media representation and prejudice into their curricula?

These questions incorporate CLO 4 and 6 which is “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing”.  These questions guided me to connecting the information I gathered from the interview and synthesizing it with the literature review for essay 3.

CLOs 5,7, and 8 were practiced together especially in essay 3 for the literature review which helped me in narrowing down my research question and finding sources I believed perfectly aligned with where I wanted to take my research.  In my essay 3 reflection, my research question stated was “ To what extent has American intervention in the Middle East contributed to the region’s instability and destabilization?”.  After searching for sources in a database called Academic Onefile, I found that the majority of the sources I found were too broad and too in depth in a variety of factors which would have caused my research to take multiple different routes.  I realized that my search for sources was unsuccessful and that in order to find what I actually needed I had to narrow down my research question.  So in my analysis I decided to focus on media representations of Arabs and/or Muslims because during my search for my first research question, I found an article about the topic and it intrigued me.  By doing so I was able to find more sources towards my topic by searching for specific key terms like “muslims”, “representation”,and “pre and post 9/11”.  By using that strategy, the site was able to narrow down the selection of sources to sources that focused around those key terms.  Since these sources had these key terms in common, it made it less difficult to achieve CLO 5 because those common factors allowed for the sources to connect with one another.