In the spring semester of 2004, two sections of Rhetoric 105 students studied aspects of the Civil Rights Movement (with a focus on Brown v Board and its consequences) using the essays of James Baldwin as a guide. This site showcases their work.
Each student attended at least one event--a speech, lecture, performance, conference, or exhibit--connected to the campus commemoration of Brown v Board, and wrote a narrative of responses to it.
As a way of understanding how Baldwin worked, and of thinking about how their own later narratives might involve something more than plain storytelling, students started by analyzing "Notes of a Native Son," an early Baldwin essay.
By the time they started work on their second paper, students had already begun to think about their research papers for the course; this paper gave them a chance to develop potential topics and practice the research skills they'd picked up in an earlier group research project.
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Between the two sections, students discovered several hundred potential resources for their papers and (I hope) their future reading. I've arranged their findings by topic. |
Working in groups on topics they chose from a list, students completed two research projects that asked them to rely primarily on newspaper and magazine accounts of Brown v Board, and other Civil Rights-related events of the fifties and sixties, before they started research on their own topics.
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Over the last five weeks of the semester, students wrote researched papers: the advised length was 8-10 pages, and most papers fall within that range, but several papers run longer; many papers show students incorporating material from prior projects (narratives, group projects, prior papers) as they worked through their ideas. |