Projects

This illustration depicts a quote from Bruffee: “The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sort of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value.  Kenneth Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” 640

Rhetorical Analysis of PTC Research Journals

An Introduction to the Topics, Audiences, and Discourse Conventions of a Scholarly and Professional Community This assignment asks students to conduct rhetorical analysis of journals and scholarly conversations in professional and technical communication journals. Related Concepts Authority & Credibility – How to Be Credible & Authoritative in Research, Speech & Writing; Occasion, Exigency, Kairos – ...

puzzle pieces spelling out: Creatives, Designers, Interpreters, Scientists, Synthesizers, Scholars

Corpus Methods – Mapping Research in PTC

The goal of this final assignment is to address the research question, “What Methodological Communities, Research Methods, and Epistemological Assumptions Inform Theory, Research and Scholarship in PTC?” Definition of Terms In order to complete this assignment, you need to understand the following terms. Methodological Analysis Students engage in methodological analysis of the corpus to determine ...

Research-Based Student AI Policy Statement

Based on the scholarly research you have conducted throughout this semester, create an evidence informed AI Policy Statement. Beyond stating explicitly if/when/and how students can use generative AI tools for school work, explain the why your recommended policies. This will provide authority to your recommendations for critical audiences — students and teachers who want to ...

A slide that says, "How can writers compose with AI in ethical ways that uphold academic integrity, expedite composing processes, and improve the quality of reasoning and written communication?"

Team-Based Literature Reviews

This is a three-week exercise with two steps: Step #1: Integrate Existing Course Articles into a Review Working in teams, write a literature review that incorporates the sources we already referenced: Step #2: Establish Teams to Research Other Pertinent Topics Sign up for a Team. These should be new teams. Each team will engaged in ...

The picture shows students engaged in collaborative brainstorming.

How to Effectively Share Your Research Findings

The Creative Challenge – Report Research Findings & Reflect on Research Methods This final creative challenge consists of three major deliverables that build upon your earlier research proposal. The research findings report and the methodological reflection are equally weighted in terms of grading, with the peer presentation contributing to your overall assessment. Research Findings Report ...

A visualization of analysis and interpretation that identifies intellectual strategies involved in writing literature reviews, from searching to developing an argument.

Genre Analysis of Research Questions, Literature Reviews, and Citation Practices

Introduction to the Creative Challenge In this third assignment, you will apply and extend the analytical skills developed in your previous work—Rhetorical Analysis of PTC Research Journals and Information Visualization: How Do Epistemological Assumptions Shape the Research Practices of Methodological Communities?—to examine the internal structures of individual research articles in the field of Professional and ...

An image of the research process. Around six human hands, multiple research methods are displayed: quantitative empiricists, scholars, creatives, qualitative empiricists, and creatives

Key Research Terms & Concepts Across Methodological Communities

Introduction to the Creative Challenge Imagine setting out on an expedition through unfamiliar terrain. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogons—bureaucratic aliens with a flair for bad poetry—demolish Earth to clear a path for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent survives, not because he planned ahead, but because his alien friend Ford Prefect yanked ...

A bar graph illustrating manuscript rejection rates based on a survey of 459 researchers, covering 1,377 submissions. The data highlights how rejection is a common part of the academic publishing process, emphasizing the role of methodological critique in refining research and shaping scholarly discourse.

Methodological Critique – How to Critique Research Methods, Interpretations, and Conclusions

For this creative challenge, you will continue analyzing the three studies you analyzed in the previous challenge: In the previous challenges you conducted rhetorical analysis, genre analysis, and citation analysis of three research studies published in a PTC journal, analyzing how the investigators shaped research questions, wrote literature reviews, integrated citations, designed methods and gathered ...