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English 105-02: Advanced Composition for Freshman
Composing College and Career
Spring 2012- T, Th 2:30pm -3:45pm
Bingham Humanities 104A
Professor: Brice Nordquist
Email: banord01@louisville.edu via Blackboard
bricenordquist@gmail.com
Office: HM LL4D (basement)
Office Hours: T, Th 4:00-5:00pm
(and by appointment)
Office Phone: 852-1252
Introduction
How do you understand the relationship of your academic work to your desired career
and your current commitments, affiliations, values and goals? Typical responses to this
sort of question often appeal to the promise of academic credentials for career
opportunity, social mobility and financial security—a promise of health, wealth and
happiness. This promise motivates the operations of an increasingly integrated
educational-occupational system. In this system the demands of the job market must be
met in college courses, while the demands of college determine the objectives of high
school, and so on down the line. In this way, the U.S. education system is designed to
move students through a series of increasingly exclusive stages for the attainment of
habits, knowledge, skills and experiences deemed essential for entry into and success
within the labor market. However, given the scope and the speed of changes in
educational and occupational expectations and market demands and the degree of
instability at all levels of life in our new capitalist, high-tech, global society, it’s uncertain
what habits, knowledge, skills and experiences may or may not be marketable at any
given time or place. Because educational and occupational markets move in different
directions and at different speeds, discrepancies arise with regard to the demands of
various school and work environments. This is one reason why presentations of “collegelevel” writing in high school do not always match expectations in college; likewise, the
writing conventions valued in this course will not necessarily match conventions valued
in other university courses or in future occupations. These discrepancies contribute to
diverse and often competing presentations of educational outcomes, career opportunity,
financial security, mobility, and marketable skills.
Our ideas about the relations between schooling and careering are central to our desires
and expectations for college education and thus for taking this course. To take advantage
of the critical resources each of us has developed over the course of our lives for
understanding these relations, this class will engage in a collective project to investigate
the network of ideas, institutions, individuals, practices and texts that link educational
and economic systems. Together, over the course of this semester, we will attend to
“official” meanings given to terms such as student, worker, career, mobility, and
marketable skills and compose our own meanings for these terms in specific instances of
reading, writing and living. Here are some questions we can begin with, and revise in
putting to work, as we consider and compose various presentations of college and career:
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How are the relations among education and occupation presented in scholarship,
reform initiatives, curricula, course texts, etc.?
How might these presentations be revised to fit our individual and/or collective
expectations and desires?
How do certain texts construct or define students, teachers, workers, careers,
mobility, and marketable skills?
How might these terms be revised to suit our educational and occupational needs
and desires?
What kinds of working life might be possible or desirable in our fast capitalist,
high-tech, global society?
What kinds of working life and what particular aspects of career patterns might
we see as no longer feasible or desirable?
How might we best go about composing sustainable university and work lives?
Course Expectations
In this course, you’ll be asked to engage in various reading-writing practices. In addition
to trying out these practices, you’ll be expected to reflect upon the choices you and others
make in performing them. This will require you to employ habits of critical reading and
thinking as you seek to explore possibilities for making meaning from different texts
within various contexts. Your overall performance in this class will be evaluated
according to the quality of contributions you make to our discussion of various texts and
ways of reading and writing. These contributions should seek to engage your classmates
and me in an open dialogue as you pose and respond to questions concerning texts and
reading-writing practices. The projects you’ll be asked to take up in this course are
intended to help you meet the Composition Program’s objectives for English 105, which
you will find posted on Blackboard under the “Syllabus” heading. Here, you will also
find the University’s Plagiarism Policy, Statement on Behalf of Students with
Disabilities, and the Composition Program’s Grievance Procedure.
What you make of the course’s activities—how you choose to engage in them—will be
largely up to you. You should expect to read and write for every class period and share
your work on a regular basis. This means you should plan to attend class every time we
meet. You will be allowed four absences without penalty. Each additional absence will
lower your grade for the course one-third letter grade (A to A-, B- to C+). When absent,
you are responsible for any in-class work you miss. Because the daily activity of this
class depends on the quality and timeliness of your contributions, late work will not be
accepted. Moreover, I consider your punctuality for our class meetings to be an essential
component of your work in this course. Tardiness will be factored into my evaluation of
your work over the course of the semester.
Because we are aiming for depth rather than breadth in our reading and writing practices,
we will be devoting a good deal of attention to a limited number of texts. Our approach
will be recursive, requiring you to read and re-read, write and rewrite from a number of
perspectives as we seek to put texts in conversation with each other. Considering the
various responsibilities you likely have outside the confines of this classroom, I have
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tried to arrange our schedule to provide you with the time necessary to devote a fair
amount of attention to each assignment.
The writings you produce will be the primary lenses through which we will view course
texts. Thus, most of our attention in this course will be devoted to the performance of
your texts and the meanings those performances offer. Many of the texts you provide for
our class discussions will remain anonymous, while others will not (e.g., Blackboard
discussion posts, peer-review drafts, etc.). You will be required to submit texts
electronically for class discussion by 8:00 PM on the day designated on your assignment
schedule. You should also keep hardcopies of each completed assignment in a folder or
binder that you bring to class every time we meet so that you’ll be able to share your
work on any given occasion. You will also occasionally be asked to bring photocopies of
your completed assignments.
The texts you produce for this course will take a variety of forms—reading notes,
Blackboard posts, journal entries, drafts, essays, revisions, peer-review comments, and
more. While you can consider of all of your writings for this course as works-inprogress, some forms, such as essays, will require greater degrees of formality than
others. You will also have the opportunity to showcase the work you do over the course
of this semester in a final portfolio.
Student Texts:
 Reading Notes: These notes can take a variety of forms—sometimes you’ll be
asked to try out specific reading and noting-taking practices and other times you’ll
decide for yourself what types of note-taking practices best suit your readingwriting objectives.

Journal Entries: You can think of your journal entries as spaces for exploration
and experimentation. I will usually provide questions to get you started, but you
should use these questions as springboards for your own exploration of the texts. I
anticipate these entries will be approximately 2 pages, typed and double-spaced.

Peer-Review Responses: Like your reading notes, these responses will also take a
variety of forms—sometimes you’ll be asked to respond to your classmates’ texts
with specific objectives in mind, and other times you’ll decide how to formulate
your response in a manner that you think will be most beneficial to the writer.

Blackboard Responses: Occasionally, you’ll be asked to conduct conversations
with your classmates and me on Blackboard. Your contributions to these
discussions should seek to engage us in dialogue as you pose and respond to
questions concerning texts and reading-writing practices.

Essays: The forms of writing mentioned above should contribute to your
composition of several more formal/finalized essays for this course. Your essays
should seek to trace out a unifying claim (or thesis) in a well-structured response
to various prompts. Like your journal entries, your essays should be typed and
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double-spaced and should meet MLA or APA standards. I anticipate that they
will be between 5 and 6 pages long. Your are invited to revise essays as many
times as you like in pursuit of the goals you set for yourself in this course.
o Essay #1 Due: 2/11; Essay #2 Due: 3/10; Essay #3 Due: 4/17

Final Portfolio: Your work in this course will be developed and evaluated
according to a portfolio system. This system is designed to give you time for
reflection and revision so that you may present your strongest work for end-ofthe-term evaluation. (Due 4/24)
Your grade will be based upon the collective performance of your writing over the course
of the semester along with your contributions to our class discussions. I will respond to
individual writing assignments, but will not mark them with grades. These responses are
not intended to provide quantifiable evaluations of your writing, but rather to comment
on the moves and meanings I see you making in your texts and to engage you in a
conversation that contributes to your individual and our collective projects. You will
frequently be asked to reply to my and your classmates’ responses to your texts with
comments of your own. If you become concerned about your performance in this class at
any point in the semester, you should arrange a time to meet with me to express this
concern. Your grade for this course will be awarded on a plus/minus scale.
Grading Scale:
A+
97 – 100
A
96 – 93
A92 – 90
B+
B
B-
89 – 87
86 – 83
82 – 80
C+
C
C-
79 – 77
76 – 73
72 – 70
D+
D
DF
69 – 67
66 – 63
62 –60
59 and below
Because the performance of your writing constitutes our central subject, you are partly
responsible for the construction of meaning and learning that takes place in the course, as
well as its continuity. Consequently, I feel that my job is not to provide you with answers
but rather to engage you, along with your classmates, in a conversation that encourages
the pursuit of your own answers concerning ways of reading and writing college and
career.
Required texts: Lu, Min-Zhan, and Bruce Horner. Writing Conventions. New York:
Pearson Longman, 2008. I will provide any assigned reading not included in Writing
Conventions via Blackboard.
Course Prerequisites: This section is restricted to students eligible for the Honors
Program.
General education statement: This course fulfills a General Education Written
Communication Requirement.
The instructor has the right to make changes to the course schedule/syllabus if necessary.
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Select Assignments
Assignment 2
Because you will inevitably shape and be shaped by the activity that takes place in this
course, it is important that you develop a sense of the assumptions that operate in the
structure of course and of the roles and purposes that might be available in the context of
this classroom. One way to get a sense of the course’s underlying assumptions and
expectations is to pay careful attention to the relationships between wordings and
possible meanings in course texts. For this assignment, read through our course
description, mark passages and take notes in the margins or on a separate sheet of paper
in response to aspects you consider significant, surprising, confusing or frustrating.
With the ideas from our course description in mind, read and take notes (marking
passages, making marginal comments, etc.) on the first half of “Reading and
Rereading”—Chapter 2 of Writing Conventions, pgs. 33-48. In the first half of this
chapter, Lu and Horner suggest that learning to reflect upon your habits of reading can
help you understand how and why you might arrive at different meanings than other
readers when reading the same text. After reading this section, review your notes and
compose a response to the text that you think might be fruitful for class discussion in
light of our course description.
Here are some questions to get you started in this response: How are the reading practices
Lu and Horner propose in this chapter similar to or different from those you’ve conducted
in the past? What sort of “student role(s)” would these practices require you to take? How
are these roles related to those our course description asks you to assume? What benefits
and/or limitations can you foresee in taking up these roles and practices? Be sure to
address specific statements and passages from Chapter 2 to help explain your comments.
_______
Assignment 3
The second half of “Reading and Rereading” discusses how underlining might be used
“as a revision tool for developing alternative approaches to a text” (34). After reading
and taking notes on the second half of Chapter 2 (pgs. 49-62), use the practice of reverse
underlining (49) to focus your attention on sections of our course description that remain
unmarked after your first reading.
Use reverse underlining to make connections between those parts of the course
description that immediately caught your attention and/or struck you as significant and
those sections you initially glossed over for whatever reason—boredom, confusion,
annoyance, etc. With these connections in mind, provide an overview of what you take
this course to be about in light of your and your classmates’ (re)readings and (re)writings
of our course description. What material resources in terms of time, space, energy and
writing tools do you think you will need to succeed in this course? What might this
course provide beyond the completion of a general education requirement? Does this
provision match your expectations? How might you use the work we conduct in the
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course to help you pursue the goals you’ve set for yourself in and beyond the university?
Be sure to include specific evidence from the CD to help explain your reading.
_______
Assignment 4
Your readings of and responses to our course description have contributed to a general
picture of the work we’ll be conducting over the course of the semester in our exploration
of the shifting relations between school and work in our high-tech, global society. To
further our investigation, for the next several weeks we’ll be reading Jean Anyon’s
“Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” along with Chapter 5 of Writing
Conventions.
With your ideas about the central theories and practices of this class in mind, read
Anyon’s text, marking passages and terms and taking notes on elements you find
particularly interesting, troubling, frustrating, confusing or important for whatever
reason; try to designate those parts of the essay that Anyon seems to consider especially
significant. As you note these statements and passages, be sure to jot down the page
numbers where you find them so that you can go back to these spots in your response to
the essay and in our class discussion.
After reviewing your notes and markings in the text, compose a journal entry in which
you explain your impression of what Anyon seems to be saying. What are her main
points? What gives you this impression? Identify the primary terms and concepts Anyon
uses in this essay and attempt to translate them into your own words. Conclude your entry
with two or three questions you’d like to pose to your classmates and me as we seek to
make meaning of Anyon’s text. Be sure to include references to the text along with page
numbers in your responses.
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Assignment 5
Read over your notes and journal entry from Assignment 4 and your and your classmates’
sample responses to Anyon’s “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” As
you read through these first impressions of Anyon’s text and think back on our class
discussion from Thursday, list those statements and passages from the essay that seemed
to be the primary points of reference in our initial responses. How might you account for
these habits of reading Anyon’s text? After reviewing your list of our collective
responses, re-read Anyon’s essay and use the practice of reverse underlining to focus
your attention on sections of the text that you did not pay special attention to the first
time around—use a different color of pen or method of marking to note these terms,
statements, and passages. Take notes on what you find striking, puzzling, significant,
enlightening, or troublesome in these initially unmarked sections. How might these
passages complicate, expand or challenge your and your classmates’ initial readings of
Anyon?
Use the notes from your second reading of Anyon to respond to two of your classmates’
sample journal entries with comments and/or further questions. What are your classmates
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doing with Anyon’s text in their original entries? What meanings do they seem to be
making from the text? In your response, seek to extend our discussion of Anyon’s text
with any new insight stemming from your re-reading of the essay.
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Assignment 6
Read and take notes (marking passages, making marginal comments, etc.) on the first half
of “Audience: Composing Ways of Reading,” Chapter 5 of Writing Conventions, pgs.
118-134. In the first half of this chapter, Lu and Horner suggest that audience might be
thought of in terms of “writers’ sense of the ways of reading they anticipate-propose
when composing a text” (121).
For this assignment, try out Lu and Horner’s idea of “anticipating and prosing an
audience” on Anyon’s text. Look back over your notes and your and your classmates’
journal entries from previous readings of the text, and compose a journal entry in which
you analyze the kinds of audience you see Anyon anticipating-proposing in this text.
What type of reader might you have to become in order to read the essay in the way
Anyon seems to anticipate-propose? In other words, what kinds of attitudes, knowledge,
beliefs, and behaviors does Anyon propose that you adopt as a reader of her text? What
about the content and form of the article leads you to these conclusions? What are some
of the strengths and limitations of the values, perspectives and attitudes that attend this
way of reading the text? How might knowing about these types of audiences be useful for
you as a writer in or outside the university? Finally, discuss the ways in which paying
attention to the kind of audience this text anticipates-proposes has influenced your
understanding of Anyon’s essay. Be sure to cite specific examples from the text along
with pages numbers.
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Assignment 7
In the second half of Ch. 5, Lu and Horner offer three general strategies for reading and
writing in response to academic texts: Looking at the form of assigned readings,
imagining an actual reader’s response to your writing, and reading a text in a different
context (135). After reading and taking notes on the second half of Ch. 5, pgs.134-156,
reread the first half of the chapter, using reverse underlining to focus on the sections you
initially glossed over. Take notes on what you find striking, puzzling, significant,
enlightening, or troublesome in these initially unmarked sections. How might these
passages complicate, expand or challenge your initial reading of the first half of the
chapter?
After reviewing all your reading notes from Ch. 5, compose a journal entry in which you
analyze the ways of reading-writing you see Lu and Horner privileging in this book.
What sort of values are embedded in the formal characteristics of their text? How have
they used things like sentence patterns, organization and visual elements to composeanticipate and propose audience? What do the length and arrangement of the chapters,
choice of words, titles of headings and subheadings, writers cited and treatment of their
texts and/or reading selections say about the audience they anticipate-propose in this text?
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How does WC position you in relation to Lu and Horner. In other words, what kinds of
attitudes, knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors do Lu and Horner propose that you adopt as
a reader of their text? For what type of student might this text be written besides you?
How does this positioning compare to other textbooks you’ve encountered? Be sure to
cite specific examples from Writing Conventions and other course texts you choose to
use, along with page numbers, to support your observations.
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Assignment 8 (Essay)
Jean Anyon concludes “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by suggesting
that “further research should be conducted in a large number of schools to investigate”
the “complex but not readily apparent connections between everyday activity in schools
and classrooms and the unequal structure of economic relationships in which we work
and live” (249). After rereading and rewriting Anyon’s article a number of times, you are
likely fairly familiar with her ideas, methods and conventions. For this assignment, draft
an essay in which you test out your familiarity with the content and form of Anyon’s text
by forwarding and/or countering her project with a test case from your own recent
schooling experience. Given Anyon’s analysis of the schools she visited and the
education provided in these schools, how might she describe your recent schooling, either
in a high school or college-level course (other than this one)?
In answering this question, you’ll need to provide more than anecdotal evidence when
analyzing your educational experience. Like Anyon, you’ll need to offer textual evidence
to support your interpretations. You might choose to analyze state and/or district
educational standards and objectives, school curricula, course descriptions, syllabi,
assignments, assigned readings, school websites, textbooks, samples of your writing from
high school or other college courses, etc. You should shoot for quality rather than
quantity in your selection of a specific schooling experience and analyses of at least
three texts. Remember, you should read and respond to these texts in a manner similar to
Anyon’s presentation and analyses of the everyday activities in the schools she observes.
This means you’ll want to select the types of texts you think Anyon would be most likely
choose to analyze. You might also choose to investigate how your experience addresses
the three aspects of production that, according to Anyon, determine social class: (1)
Ownership relations (2) Relationships between people and (3) Relations between people
and their work.
In planning and composing this essay, you should keep the following criteria in mind.
Composing
Purpose:
Your thesis should situate you as s a writer-researcher in relation
to the position Anyon takes in “Social Class and the Hidden
Curriculum of Work.” This will require you to come to terms with
Anyon’s text so that you can establish an entry point for your own
position on the relations between education and social class. Your
thesis should also introduce how you plan to draw from analyses
of your own experience to forward and/or counter Anyon’s
argument.
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Use of Sources:
Organization:
Mechanics
Works Cited
You should analyze at least three textual artifacts to illuminate
your past schooling experience. Your analyses of these sources
should parallel Anyon’s analyses of the everyday teaching and
learning activities of the schools she observes. You should also
seek to fairly and productively represent and respond to Anyon’s
text.
Because this assignment asks you to test out your familiarity with
Anyon’s methods, generic conventions, and writing style, you
should attempt to adapt the form her text to fit the content of your
essay. This will require you to experiment with the IMRAD genre.
As your course description suggests, essays require a greater
degree of formality than journal entries, so you’ll want to
proofread your essay to be sure that it is essentially free of
mistakes.
Your essay should have an MLA or APA formatted list of Works
Cited.
Assignment 9
Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll be continuing our exploration of the
shifting relations between school and work in our new capitalist, high-tech, global society
by bringing Chapter 6 of Writing Conventions, “Purpose: Composing Goals When
Reading and Writing,” and James Paul Gee’s “Shape Shifting Portfolio People” into our
conversation.
For the first part of this assignment, read and take notes on the first half of Chapter 6 of
Writing Conventions, pgs. 160-168. In this chapter, Lu and Horner suggest that “purpose
is something writers pose, compose, recompose, and revise throughout their writing
process” (161).
With this idea of purpose in mind, read Gee’s essay and respond to the text by engaging
in those reading-writing practices (rereading, reverse underlining, etc.) that you’ve
identified as particularly beneficial; be sure to note passages that you find especially
interesting, troubling, frustrating, confusing, etc. After reading, review both sets of notes
and compose a journal entry in which you investigate the purposes you see Gee
composing in this article.
_________
Assignment 10
For this assignment, read and take notes on the second half of Ch. 6, pgs. 168-184. In
this section, Lu and Horner discuss ways in which purposes for writing often emerge
during the writing process as social and personal motivations contribute to the
development of purposes other than those required by a writing assignment (170). They
suggest that by relating these “unassigned purposes” to “officially assigned purposes”
writers can “perceive and treat different areas of their lives (past, present, and future;
school, family and work) as interconnected” (172).
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After you’ve finished reading this section, reread your A8 essay draft along with any
writing you did in preparation for this draft (including relevant journal entries) to locate
potential or realized unassigned purposes in this essay. What, if any, unassigned
purposes seem to emerge in your A8 essay? How are these purposes related to what you
would identify as the officially assigned purposes of the essay? What connections do
you see between the unassigned purposes or (assigned purposes) in your essay and areas
of your life outside the context of this course? If all you find when rereading your A8
essay and related writings is “assigned purposes,” consider how you might revise these
purposes in light of related “issues in your work life, social life, family, and personal or
private life” (182).
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Assignment 14 (Essay)
Gee asserts that a virtual identity becomes a projective identity when a “learner
comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual
identity as a real-world identity” (114). He suggests that to arrive at this understanding,
students must “come to see [a] virtual identity as their own project in the making – an
identity they take on that entails a certain trajectory through time defined by their own
values, desires, choices and goals.” In this way, “what others have designed (a virtual
world in a game or classroom) becomes part of myself, my real-world identity – my own
uniqueness – when and if I engage in the virtual identity as a project of my own, and not
just a role to be played by the rules of the game/classroom (for a win or a grade)” (114).
In your Assignment 8 essay, you used Anyon’s presentation of the relations
between social class and education to investigate your own past educational or
occupational experiences. For this essay, use Gee’s “three part play of identities” to
project yourself into the future by considering how you might adapt a virtual identity
offered in a university context (perhaps your intended area of study or one you think you
may be interested in) to fit your own values, desires, choices and goals.
Part I
To accomplish this assignment, you’ll first need to flesh out a virtual identity as it
is represented in the values, norms, work and design of a specific course or field and texts
associated with it. Choose at least three textual artifacts from the same or related areas of
study and analyze the ways of being and doing (identities and practices) that these texts
invite you to take up in university contexts. You might analyze a course description,
assignment prompts and classroom interactions to investigate the roles or virtual
identities these texts invite you to assume. You may also consider interviewing a
professor, professional or upper-level student to explore the qualities, skills, behaviors
and experiences this person views as necessary to become a certain type of student or
worker.
You may choose to unpack the significance of this virtual identity by adapting
Anyon’s framework for analyzing social class: How does this proposed virtual identity
position you in relation to the work of course/program/field and the process of this work?
How does it position you in relation to other people (professors, classmates, etc.)? And
how does it position you in relation to the symbolic capital or privileged knowledge of
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the course/program/field? In this way, the focus of Part I is on analyzing a proposed
virtual identity—i.e., “what others have designed” (Gee 114).
Part II
After you’ve analyzed specific texts to unpack a virtual identity, you’ll want to
consider how it relates to your own “real-world identities” and the values, desires,
choices and goals that shape your projected future. You might start by reflecting on the
goals and desires you identified as particularly important to you in your journal entry for
Assignment 1. Where did these goals and desires come from? Why are they particularly
important to you? What is the relationship between these goals and desires and the virtual
identity you’ve chosen to investigate for this assignment? What are the relationships
among your real-world identities and this virtual identity? You can use these and other
questions to draw connections between the virtual identities from Part I and your past,
current and desired future real-world identities.
Rather than provide a general overview of future plans (a here’s-what-I-want-tobe-when-I-grow-up narrative), Part II of this assignment asks you to draw connections
between real-world, virtual and projective identities (your past, present and desired future
selves) to respond to the final question listed in our course description: “How might you
best go about composing a sustainable university and work life, given the specific,
multiple, and often conflicting affiliations, commitments, and alignments you have had,
are interested in sustaining, and hope to establish in light of the specific historical and
social conditions of your life, your education and your literacy practices?” To effectively
answer this question and meet the requirements of this assignment, you’ll need to go
beyond an expression of where and who you want to be in the future, to describe how you
plan to get there given the past, present and anticipated future conditions of your life.
Composing
Purposes:
Use of Sources:
Organization:
Your thesis should situate you as a writer-researcher in relation to
the position Gee takes up in “Shape-Shifting Portfolio People.”
This will require you to come to terms with Gee’s text so that you
can establish an entry point for your own analyses of the virtual
identities presented by your sources. Your thesis should also seek
to draw a connection between Parts I and II of this assignment.
In Part I, you should analyze at least three textual artifacts to
investigate the virtual identities available in your intended field of
study or area of occupational interest. You should also seek to
fairly and productively represent and respond to Gee’s text. In Part
II, you should provide textual evidence of your real-world
identities. You’ll want to you select self-representations to show
how specific aspects of your real-world identities might influence
your adaptation of virtual identities you unpack in Part I
You can organize this essay in any way you see fit. Just be sure to
include a section that clearly introduces your purposes for writing,
a body that analyzes your sources and puts them in conversation
with one another, and a conclusion that brings overlapping and
diverging elements of your essay together. You can continue to
experiment with the IMRAD genre if you found it useful, or you
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Mechanics
Works Cited
might try out a method of organization similar to the one used by
Gee in “Shape-Shifting Portfolio People.”
As your course description suggests, essays require a greater
degree of formality than journal entries, so you’ll want to
proofread your essay to be sure that it is essentially free of
mistakes.
Your essay should have an MLA or APA formatted list of Works
Cited.
Assignment 19
In preparation for the submission of your final portfolio, this essay asks you to reflect on
the work you’ve conducted over the course of this semester and to consider what this
work reveals about the influence of your “real-world identities” on the “virtual identities”
you’ve taken up in this course.
Begin this reflection by reviewing your reading notes, journal entries and essays and the
assignments and course texts that prompted them. As you read back through your work,
take notes on what you perceive to be the narrative of your participation in the project of
this course. What sort of student-writer identities do you perform in your journal entries
from the beginning of the semester? How does your performance change over the course
of the term? In this narrative, you should consider not only what you’ve produced but
also how you’ve produced it—what Brodkey refers to as the “labor of writing” (545).
You should quote yourself, your classmates, and/or me to help describe the readingwriting work you’ve done over the course of the semester.
You can use Anyon’s descriptions of work in each of the schools she visits to consider
how your work in this course might be represented. You can also use Gee’s three-part
play of identities to describe how you see yourself attempting to bridge your “real-world”
identities to the “virtual identities” you’ve taken up in this class. Describe the ways in
which you’ve accommodated and/or resisted the course’s virtual identities and explain
how these identities and their attendant practices have influenced your understanding of
the work of the course along with your understanding of yourself as a writer.
Ultimately, this essay should chart the trajectory of your work in this course and explain
the manners in which the identities you assume outside the confines of this class and
those you’ve adopted to accommodate its demands have shaped this trajectory.