Week 11 Assignments

• WEEK  11  ASSIGNMENTS

During Week 11, we are going to continue working on the research projects.  Here is a copy of the  Description and Overview of the Research Project for our course.

• LEARNING JOURNAL 11
  Please develop your own topic for this reading journal.

RWA18:  Reviewing and Reading Source Materials and Preparing a Draft Project Overview

For each source that you plan to use for your project, please complete a Research Source Cover Sheet.

Then please develop a title for your project and write a one paragraph project overview based on the following model research proposal.

A good project overview serves several purposes.  It introduces your topic to your reader, creates some interest in the topic for your reader,  gives some background about why the topic is important, and finally lays out what you will be researching in your research essay.  The last sentence(s) of a project overview is/are a working thesis statement for the project.

For those looking for read more about college-level research, I would suggest taking a look at the following resources:

Bazerman on College Research (this is a FREE resource):  Chapter 9 of Bazerman’s The Informed Writer:  http://writing.colostate.edu/textbooks/informedwriter/

Raimes/Jersky on College Research (you can purchase this chapter (eChapter 2 of the book Keys for Writers for $9)

RWA19:  Drafting a Source Overview and Revising Your Project Proposal

DUE: Monday, May 13

Here is a link to a Sample Source Overview .  I’d like you to use this as a model to draft an overview of your sources.  In this short essay, you will discuss the various sources that you’ve located and how they relate to your research question.  At a minimum: please write a one paragraph summary of each one of your sources.  Alternately, you can draft a thesis statement to organize the discussion of your sources based on some other taxonomy.   This essay should have a brief introduction to your topic, an approach to categorizing/discussing your sources, and then a discussion of the sources themselves.  Please try to discuss all three sources in each paragraph.

Also, please REVISE your Project Overview and draft your Annotated Bibliography.   Below is a sample.

Here is a Sample of what you will be handing in as your FINAL RESEARCH PROPOSAL:

Assessing the Success of Brown v. Board of Education in New York State in the 21st Century

Jonathan Kozol

English 110

Project Overview

Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance, as a result of years of federal policies that started in the early 1990s when the U.S. Supreme Court and the local federal courts began to rip apart the legacy of the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since 1968. New York State is the most segregated state for black and Latino children in America: seven out of eight black and Latino kids in New York go to segregated schools. The majority of them go to schools where no more than two to four percent of the children are white. How is it possible that more than fifty years after the Brown decision, New York’s public schools are actually less integrated than they were at the end of the 1960s?  What factors have contributed to this?  What, if anything, is being done to reverse this trend?

Annotated Bibliography

Balkin, Jack M., ed. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
A group of constitutional scholars rewrites the Brown decision, looking back over the 50 years of American history and race relations that have passed since the decision was first announced.

Cottrol, Robert J., Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Brown v. Board of Education: Case, Culture, and the Constitution. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Intended for students and general readers, this book tells the dramatic story of the road to and from Brown. Argues that “Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste—it also changed our view of the Court’s role in American life.”

Irons, Peter. Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking, 2002.
Argues that Supreme Court decisions over the past few decades have significantly reduced the promise of the Brown decision, contributing to trends of “resegregation” and persistent racial gaps in education today.