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General Suggestions for Planning a CourseIn this section we provide general suggestions for understanding the key features of Composing Inquiry and the resources we've included on this site.Chapter 1 will give you and your students an overview of the text. We usually assign Chapter 1 to students for the second class meeting, but we also return to it at various points during the course. You'll find suggestions for working with this initial chapter in the Teaching Inquiry section of this website. As you read Chapter 1, take a few minutes to notice how Composing Inquiry is organized.
Notice that Composing Inquiry has two ways of organizing the reading and writing work that students will do during a course: Assignment Sequences (most linked to readings) and Sample Projects. Whichever way you organize the course, you will then teach the methods chapters as your students need them. Choose a sequence approach to your course if:
Choose a project approach to your course if:
Each Assignment Sequence includes multiple writing assignments, and these assignments are designed to help students consider an overarching theme from different perspectives and with different methods. This approach allows students to gain a deeper understanding of the theme issue, an issue that does not have pre-determined answers because scholars are still actively investigating questions suggested by the theme. But, the theme is often just a starting place and students discover, and are encouraged to pursue, questions that are of more genuine interest to them but that would not have arisen without the initial themed work. Likewise, each Sample Project is built out of real questions that researchers are actively pursuing. The projects are not as highly structured as the Assignment Sequences, and except in the case of the Organizational Needs Assessment, the specific suggestions are not sequenced together. Instead, teachers and students have to decide what steps to take next; we provide some starting points and some suggestions for ways to think about developing the projects, but the specifics have to arise from the work students actually do. We include Assignment Sequences that work with
If you know which methods you are interested in working with, the Sequence Overview Chart might be helpful and that section will lead you to detailed overviews of each of the Assignment Sequences. We include projects that invite students to
For more details about each of the projects see the Projects Overview section of this site. Assignment Sequences have assignments that build naturally on one another and later assignments often make use of work the student has already done, or encourage students to blend their work, test the work of classmates, or shift the audience for their research. But every assignment in the sequence requires the students to actively investigate and present their findings in writing. In other words, these are not sequences that begin with sentences, build to paragraphs or whole essays and finish with the full research paper. The assignments leave the form of the written presentation open ended so that students or teachers can decide to customize in ways that make sense to them and fit the research they've done. Even when a sequence suggests shifting to an audience outside the classroom, the form of presentation -- a travel guide, a brochure, a formal report, an editorial -- is never dictated. Teachers who choose a pre-existing sequence can thus be certain of a coherent course AND plenty of opportunities to customize along the way. We've known some beginning teachers who worry that they aren't doing all they should if they don't design their own sequence or write their own assignments. They think that somehow the course won't really be theirs if they follow an existing assignment sequence. We know from experience, however, that there's plenty to do the first time you teach an inquiry-based course, that you can't help but make the course your own as you work with your students, and that writing an assignment or designing an effective sequence actually takes considerable experience. Bad assignments will be difficult for you and your students to work with, so we think you'll be wise to avoid the temptation to strike out on your own too soon. Sample Projects can sometimes be adapted to work as a final assignment in a course that has been organized primarily around an Assignment Sequence, but they still require considerable work on the part of the teacher. There are some obvious connections between the various history-based sequences and the local history project, and the documentary film One Water from The Water Project can be incorporated into the sequences working with visual materials. Sometimes teachers work together to design the specific assignments that will make these projects work for their courses, and such collaborations can be especially fruitful in programs that link writing courses with disciplinary courses. In fact, we think of the projects as samples because in the best cases teachers will find on-going research projects at their own institutions that will welcome the contributions of undergraduate researchers. Some more things to know about Sequences:
See other sections in Planning the Course
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