Starting off this Inquiry Project was a tad bit different than how the Literacy and Genre Project started. This project began once we got back from spring break, making it hard to focus on doing work. The composing process for the Inquiry Project was similar to the previous two projects, with having us produce individual assignments along with group oriented assignments. Having us do individual assignments helps us better our writing skills and helps us become confident with our own work. The group work helps us get input from others on our work and it improves our communication skills.
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I was not very sure what this project was going to consist of, because I was not very sure what inquiry meant beginning the Inquiry Project. This project’s composing process followed along with the previous projects, by beginning the project with completing my Graphic Journal 8. The Graphic Journal 8 required my classmates and I to use our critical reading skills to read our class textbook, WRITER/DESIGNER, and then create a muck-up of what we read. This part of the textbook spoke on finding credible sources, collecting sources and creating citations. After reading I critically reflected back on what I had read and then I created a representation of what I felt a reliable webpage would look like. I included the area for the URL, web page title, photo credit and the author or publisher’s name. I used my knowledge of conventions to apply where and how copyright information should be in a web page. This Graphic Journal 8 helped me in my composing process, because it showed me that when I look for a reliable source I have to look at more than just one area on a web page. I have to look at everything to consider the source a reliable source. This helped me get ready for the next assignment in the project.
Critical Reading 1
Critical Reading 1 assignment, is the assignment that got the composing process moving in my opinion. This assignment was the first individual writing assignment I had for the Inquiry Project. During Critical Reading 1, I first had to use my critical reading skills to read through five different articles that were discussing five different issues in education. These articles at first overwhelmed me because the length of all five were super long. I have never been one to enjoy reading long articles, but I sucked it up and read all five. The next thing I have to do after reading the articles was that I had to use my rhetorical knowledge skills to pull out the author’s claim and reasoning along with the issue or situation it discusses. Once I did my rhetorical analysis, I went back and bold the words that I felt were keywords or important. The Critical Reading 1 assignment was a great first individual assignment for the project, because the articles brought up five education issues and gave examples of them. This got me to start thinking about the five different issues.
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Start Of Teamwork
My composing process began to include group assignments and teamwork. For the Inquiry Project my group changed once again. I was still with one of the same classmate from my Literacy Project group, but I was put into a group with two new members. I know one of the new members of my group because I have a class with him, but the other I had no clue whom he was. It did not help that the day we got assigned our new groups, this group member was not present. We worked around this and created a Google doc with every group member’s name and phone number, so we could get in contact with one another. Once we met our group, we were assigned an assignment. This assignment was our Library Session assignment that we had to have complete by the next class. This assignment required the group to critically read an article that was on an issue in education. The group as a whole was required to use our rhetorical knowledge skills to pull out important information from the article. The things we pulled from the article were then put onto a document to share with the rest of the class. We used our knowledge of convention skills to know exactly how we should portray our facts to make them stand out.
The next class we had was held in the Library. This is where we presented our articles. After everyone presented, we then as a class made connections between the four different articles. This is when we learned that you can connect different sources to one another to help support one article. In the Library is where we learned exactly what we should do to look up articles on the UNCC Atkins Library Database. This helped me because I learned how to pull out keywords to search for in the search bar. I also learned once I find a source, how to tell if it is going to be helpful, by looking at the abstract. This helped prepare me for my upcoming assignments in my composing process. |
Critical Reading 2
The next part of my composing process was completing my Critical Reading 2 assignment. This was similar to the Critical Reading 1 assignment in a way, but unlike Critical Reading 1 I was required to find my own article on the UNCC Atkins Library Database. The way I came up with what type of article I was looking for was by talking to my Inquiry Project group on what issue out of the five we discussed in Critical Reading 1, we wanted to discuss on. My group came up with the idea of looking for gender bias issues. This is since when we talked about the five issues, gender bias was the one we all talked about the most. Once I knew what to look up, I had no hard time finding an article. The article that stood out to me was based on gender bias in the healthcare system. I critically read this article and then critically reflected on what it was about. For the Critical Reading 2 assignment I had to produce a summary of my article and a rhetorical analysis. I did this by critically thinking what I did and didn’t want in the summary or the rhetorical analysis. I had no trouble completing this. Once in the next class, the professor told everyone to revise their summary and make it only into 100 words. To do this I had to critically reflect what I needed to include in the summary and what I could take out. This was a lot harder then I thought. By doing the Critical Reading 2 assignment in my composing process, I learned how you look at data charts and analyse them. I learned what a gist statement is and how to pull one out of a summary.
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Teamwork Continued
Primary Research 1
The Primary Research 1 assignment was an assignment that consisted of the whole group’s help. This assignment required the group to form a survey and get data back from it. This step in our composing process ran into a few problems. First of all, my group members and I all had articles that discussed gender bias in different ways. Two articles touched on gender bias in the classroom, while one touched on gender bias in majors and mine touched on gender bias in the healthcare system. We were lost on what our survey questions should be. The other problem we had was that we did not have very much time to send out our surveys and get the results back in time to report on them for a grade. Even though, we ran into these problems we figured out solutions. The two problems’ solutions formed into one. We were going to all four conduct our own survey, so we could ask questions based on our articles and this way we would cover a larger variety of people. This worked out well. We found out that most of our data proves what our articles claimed. The Primary Research 1 was a way that I learned that when you are conducting research you should always look at more than one source. Having primary research is a good way to backup your article or your own claim.
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Primary Research 2
Primary Research 2 was another assignment in the composing process that required the entire group’s help to conduct. This assignment consisted of finding pictures on the UNCC campus or webpage that illustrated our issue at hand. The hard thing about it was that nowhere outside on campus really showed gender bias, also the day I went looking for some it was pouring down rain so it did not help. Instead we all looked on the UNCC web page for pictures of gender bias. We all found some that even fit in with our articles. We received one on how more women than men are in the Nursing Program at UNCC. Another one showed graduation and it only photographed two women professors and the rest men, showing bias toward women. The other ones show a gender bias conference, but there is only women in the picture showing that their is only women opinions in the conference not men opinions. This Primary Research helped me learn that you can find evidence to support your claim anywhere around you, you just have to look for it. This also showed me that primary research is a good tool to use when conducting your own research.
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Self-Refletion
The Inquiry Project was different than the previous two projects in my opinion, because in this project the goal was kind of hidden, but the other ones the goal was out in plain sight. This project was a good project, but it kinda felt weird to me since we did not conduct a group web page. I did enjoy this project though, because I learned how to scan an article quickly to know if it has what I need by looking as the abstract, introduction, any graphs and the conclusion. I did not know how to do that before, so I would read the whole article before realizing it was not relevant. This project also taught me what knowledge of conventions is. The overall Inquiry Project in my opinion was a good way for me to learn how to conduct multiple types of research and how I could apply it to my starting research article for support or counteract it. This project was useful.