Project 3: Literacy Practices Research Project
adapted from Writing about Writing pp. 681-683 & the First-Year Writing Interview
Project
Guiding Questions:
 How is “good” writing context-specific?
 What can we learn from the literacy practices of diverse communities?
Your Task:
Considering what you have learned about literacy, both yours and other people’s, you
will study how literacy is practiced within a particular community. You will collect data by
collecting texts and interviewing one community member about them (and, optionally,
observing the community in action). Then, you will analyze your materials and make
connections to threshold concepts and course readings. Finally, you will select an
audience and craft a message and text to reach that audience.
This project will involve two parts:
 digital text (e.g., video, webtext, podcast, traditional paper around 7-10 doublespaced pages)
 accompanying artist’s statement that analyzes your rhetorical choices in the
project (approx. 2-3 pages double-spaced)
Important Dates
 Rough Draft/Prototype/Pitch Due: Week 13
 Artist’s Statement Draft: Week 14
 Final Revisions Due: Week 15
Part 1: Digital Text or Traditional Research Paper
1. Choose a Community and Collect Primary Source Data
A. Choose a community to study that you identify with in some way. This means
that you could belong to the community now, hope to belong to it in the future, or
are simply interested in learning more about it. For instance, UofL students have
analyzed literacy practices of orchestra members, chemistry professors,
“Bookstagram,” participants at a summer camp for trans youth, and the National
Weather Service.
B. Contact someone in the community to set up an interview, where you will
discuss their literacy and communication practices and ask them for copies of
texts or materials that people in the community read or write. Note: Your
interviewee does not need to have “writer” in their title because writing happens
everywhere! Note x2: Make sure you record your interview so you have a
copy of it!
1. There are 2 rules for your interviewee:
a. No family members. The purpose is to get out of your comfort
zone at least a little!
b. No email interviews. Your interview must be completed in realtime, either via a phone call, video chat, or face-to-face meeting.
2. You might ask questions like: How long have you been here? How did
you get involved and why? What are your primary roles/responsibilities?
Why did you share these particular texts with me? How do they reflect the
kinds of writing you do? How do they reflect different ways you
communicate with other people (e.g., on your team, at your restaurant)?
How did you learn to write or communicate in those ways? What
processes do you follow or strategies do you use to write them? What
kinds of processes do you follow or use to read them (e.g., skimming,
reading particular sections, reading with a particular technological
device)?
a. For more question ideas, consult the Archive of Workplace
Writing Experiences for examples of interviews
b. Also consult Sean Branick’s interview questions (pp. 600-01 of
WAW) for his research project about coaches’ literacy practices.
PDF Available upon request.
3. In some communities, the writings might be confidential, like a doctor’s
patient notes. If that’s the case, you could gather examples online, or you
could ask for texts that aren’t private, like pamphlets, research articles in
medical journals, etc.
C. Conduct and transcribe your interview. (If you use automatic transcription
software, you will want to proofread the transcript.)
D. Finish gathering texts that members of the community read and write (if you
still need to collect more after your interview)
E. Optional: Observe the community while they are engaged with other
members in a shared activity. Take detailed notes while observing.
1. You might ask yourself questions like: What are they doing? What kinds
of things do they say? What do they write? How do you know who is “in”
and who is “out”?
2. Analyze your Data
After you have transcribed your interview with a community member, collected texts
from them, and (optionally) observed community members in action, you can begin
identifying themes.
A. Think about your interview questions and how you might synthesize what
your interviewee told you. These might be questions like: What types of literacy
or communication practices are used in the community and why? In what ways
does the community practice writing/reading, and what functions do these
practices or texts serve?
B. Consider the texts you collected from the community and if they
corroborate (or don’t) the information from your interview. Do some genre
analysis (WAW p. 35). How do the texts communicate the values of the
community?
C. Review your notes on the readings from the semester, including threshold
concepts. Where in the data are these concepts appearing?
D. Each theme you have identified should be grounded in your data, reading, and
reflections. However, your audience for this project is not just me, your teacher—
it is some other public audience, such as people who are new to that community,
or “old-timers” in that community. Your audience will shape how you present what
you learned.
3. Determine an Audience
Who is the audience with whom you would like to share what you learned? Some
sample (broad) audiences:
 People who are interested in joining that community
 People who are fairly new participants
 Seasoned experts
What aspects of literacy would each of those audiences be interested in learning about?
How would what you share change based on your audience? Pick the audience that
excites or intrigues you the most.
4. Choose your mode of presentation
What medium (e.g., video, podcast, webtext, traditional written report) would be best
suited to convey this information to this particular audience? Why? (You’ll justify your
choices in your artist’s statement.)
Consider these resources to help you create the digital text:
 UofL Digital Media Suite
 Adobe Creative Campus Tutorials and Resources
 Video editing software: Adobe Premiere Rush, Panopto, Canva
 Webtext design: Adobe Express, Wix, WordPress
 Audio editing software: Adobe Audition, Audacity, GarageBand
Part 2: Artist’s Statement
Drafting Your Artist’s Statement (at least 2-3 pages double-spaced)
Once you’ve created your digital text, respond to the following questions. You do not
have to answer the questions in this order; instead, you might find that in answering
Question 1 you are answering Question 2. Essentially, your Artist’s Statement needs to
fully explain and analyze your project.
Digital Project Questions:
1. Why did you make it this way? Explain the choices you made in creating
your digital text. Why did you choose the medium that you did? What did that
medium allow your project to do/not do? What choices worked best for your
project and why? Alternatively, you may also discuss what choices didn’t work
well and why.
2. What content did you decide to include in the digital text and why was it
most relevant? Consider how much data you collected in the initial stages of
this project. Not all of this material made it to the final draft of your digital text.
What information did you focus on most and why? How did this rhetorical choice
make your project more intentional?
3. What were you unable to depict in your digital text that is still an
important part of your community’s literacy practices, if anything? Reflect
on what might not be visible in your project that still shapes the literacy practices
of your chosen community.
4. How can you use what you’ve learned? How can what you’ve learned in this
unit—about yourself, your chosen community, and/or literacy practices and digital
composing—help you in other settings in the future?
Research Paper Questions:
1. Why did you choose this discourse community to write about? Reflect on
your own history with the discourse community that you chose. Go in depth with
your relationship before and after doing research.
2. What did you discover in your research that you didn't know before? Write
about what you knew already going into the research process and what you
learned after analyzing your primary source data. Give more than one example of
new things you learned.
3. Reflect on your process so far, did you find complementary secondary
sources? Has the writing process been difficult? Easy? Compare your
Primary source data and your secondary source research. Write about how they
complemented each other and if there were any secondary sources that might
have been unknown to you before you started research.
4. What are you going to add to your revision draft that is not in your rough
draft? Reflect on what needs to go into your revision draft to make it complete.
Share your tactics on your process so far and what needs to happen before the
deadline.
What Makes It Good? Your Project Should:
 Analyze the literacy practices or features of good writing/successful
communication in the community, but also go beyond listing to explore a
particularly interesting aspect in depth.
 Reference the interview you conducted
 Include analysis of the texts you collected
 Paraphrase, quote, and cite sources appropriately
 Be thoughtfully organized
 Be thoughtfully designed to reach your audience
 Be thoughtfully edited depending on the conventions of the language varieties
you are using in your project
 Be accessible (e.g., video includes transcript or captions).
 Include an interview transcript and Works Cited
Submitting Project 3
If you create a project that uses a link:
 If your digital text is created using an internet application or software, it should
have a link. The text should be public so I will be able to see it.
 Create a document to submit to the Project 3 Digital Text assignment box with
your link copy and pasted onto the document.
 Your link MUST WORK for me to be able to grade it.
If you create a project that is a file:
 Submit your project file on the Project 3 Digital Text assignment box. Make sure
the full video file uploads.
 You will submit the Written Reflection to a separate assignment box.
Email me with any questions, comments, or concerns.