Instructors: Richard Nowell & Sarka Gmiterkova This session lays a firm foundation for the remainder of the course. Students will be introduced to the course’s purpose, structure, methods, and assessment. The session also provides an opportunity for students and instructors to meet one on a more human level, giving everyone a sense of our backgrounds, interests, and personalities.
Instructors: Richard Nowell & Sarka Gmiterkova This session lays a firm foundation for the remainder of the course. Students will be introduced to the course’s purpose, structure, methods, and assessment. The session also provides an opportunity for students and instructors to meet one on a more human level, giving everyone a sense of our backgrounds, interests, and personalities.
Instructor: Sarka Gmiterkova Without primary sources – principal objects of analysis like films, news media, marketing materials, plays, and so on – we have no research projects. Accordingly, the second of the three Project Development Seminars introduces students to the practicalities of securing suitable objects of analysis that will form the basis of their projects. In particular, students will be encouraged to take account of the importance of time-management, language competency, and availability, whether working with physical sources or online ones.
Concluding the series of Project Development Seminars, this session focuses on secondary sources; academic books and articles, and other types of literature, that can be used to elevate our work. Accordingly, the session invites students to consider the different ways they use these essential texts, and how they can go about securing them either in physical form or from online databases available from the University library and elsewhere.
Instructor: Richard Nowell Given students are required to analyze, rather than merely describe, their primary sources, this week hosts one of two sessions devoted to encouraging students to apply critical thinking to primary sources. Notice will be given in advance of precisely what students will be examining, based as far as possible on object and topics that compliment at least some of the students’ research projects.
Instructor: Sarka Gmiterkova This week hosts the first of two Work-in-Progress Seminars included on this course to help students gage how their projects are shaping up. Students will each briefly discuss how they have incorporated aspects of the Project Development Seminars into their projects. This will provide them will the opportunity to unpack their thinking and consider the feedback of the other students and the instructor.
Instructor: Richard Nowell The first of two Project Execution Seminars, this week focuses on arguably the single most important aspect of producing academic work: arguments. After all, academic work is not expected to be encyclopedic but rather offer a position on a topic, one that it characterized by clear assertion and convincing evidence. In this session, students will consider how to produce this type of argument-driven work, by appreciating that argumentation is a key part of everyday life that can be transferred to academic life.
Instructor: Sarka Gmiterkova This week hosts the second of the two Analysis Refresher Seminars included on this course to help sharpen students’ critical analysis skills. In order to provide a degree of plurality in light of Richard Nowell hosting the first, Sarka Gmiterkova will host this one. Again, students will be notified in good time of the topic, one that will be chosen to complement at least some student research projects.
Instructor: Richard Nowell The greatest ideas can only go so far if they are not presented in a coherent fashion, and this – the second of the two Project Execution Seminars – aims to help students organize their arguments in accessible and impactful ways. In particular, students will be invited to consider how best to arrange their work into argument-supporting sections, and those sections into powerful evidence-based paragraphs.
Instructor: Sarka Gmiterkova Because our projects usually change overtime, it is important we receive ongoing feedback about their development. Accordingly, in the second of the two Work-in-Progress Seminars, students will briefly explain to the group how their work has developed since the first Work-in-Progress Seminar. In particular, they will discuss how they responded to any initial concerns, spotlight what they wish to argue in their projects, and explain how they might organize them into sections.
Instructor: Richard Nowell How we present our work influences how it is received (and graded). Accordingly, the final two sessions of this course focus on how to present our projects in a manner that maximizes our grade potential. In this session, students focus on writing style. In particular, this session aims to foreclose the commonplace misconception that “good” academic writing really means complex, inaccessible wordage. Instead, it encourages students to aspire to qualities that put the reader first.
Instructor: Sarka Gmiterkova Let’s be real for a moment: you would be hard pressed to find a student or in fact a professor who really enjoys referencing their work. But, the truth of the matter is that it is our responsibility to appropriately cite our sources. This, the second Project Presentation Seminar, communicates to students the protocols of academic citation, its systems, and the reasons why it is so important we do it.