WAYS 102 - Real Teachers Please Stand Up - Lynn Hall Fall 2023

Fall 2023 - Argumentative Essay from Dr. Lynn Hall

This 5-6-page essay will draw from all that you have learned about finding, evaluating, and critically reading a variety of sources to inform your ideas to then compose a focused, credibly evidenced, cohesive argument about who teachers need to be, and how they need to teach to bring change in education -- to stand up for equity. In your argumentative essay, you will first establish how certain characterizations, assumptions, and/or stereotypes about teachers and teaching (e.g., the “hero teacher” myth) have contributed to social inequities in education. You will then argue which characterizations of a teacher and teaching are needed to reform public education to address social inequity in society as it relates to your topic of interest.

Step 1: Choose a topic and craft a research question.  This will lead to your statement of scope for the bibliography assignment.

Step 2: Find 6 RELEVANT scholarly sources THAT YOU CAN UNDERSTAND (if you can't follow the abstract, don't choose it)

Step 3: For each of the 6 sources, write an annotation per the directions in the bibliography assignment.

Step 4: Look for the commonalities in your annotations.  You will be crafting your essay around these commonalities, NOT around the citation list.

Step 1: Topic Analysis

Step 2: Choose a database

Decide whether you need a:

• General Database that covers lots of disciplines.
  • The quick search box on the library home page
  • Academic Search Complete
• Or a focused database that narrows in to the sources for just that discipline
  • On the library home page, click on "choose databases by subject and type"
  • Choose the subject and type of sources you want and see what databases are suggested.

for this assignment, a focused database will be more effective because you need discipline specific scholarly articles.

Step 3: Search the database effectively

• Use the four main search techniques
  • AND - to connect different ideas 
    • disabilities and stigma
  • ( OR ) - to contain synonym in a group to be searched together 
    • (disabilities or special education) and (stigma or stereotypes)
  • quotation marks - to keep words together that express a single idea
    • "(disabilities or special education) and (stigma or stereotypes) and "support services"
  • Wildcard character - to catch multiple endings of a word.
    • (disab* or "special education") and (stigma or stereotyp*) and "support services"
• Use the limiters on the left side of the results lists to hone in on useful items, e.g.
  • Recent
  • Articles from Academic Journal
  • in English

Step 4: Evaluate your results and revise your search as necessary

Step 5: Retrieve the articles you choose

A Periodical is anything that is published regularly and includes newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, as well as some less well-known categories.  You will be required by faculty to use articles from scholarly sources and  peer-reviewed journals in your academic work.  What does that mean?  How do you know that what you are finding is acceptable?

• name of the periodical (journal, bulletin, quarterly, review...)
• more pages in the article than in a magazine article
• abstract present in the article (not just the database record)
• author affiliation given
• presence of a bibliography or references

And how do you find them in the first place?  The best way is to use a database designed to locate scholarly articles in your field of interest.

1. Try a title or keyword search
2. Some databases have a list of suggested subject words on the initial results page. Look at them and copy the useful ones. If there is no list, then look at a number of potentially useful records and copy down words and phrases from the "subject" or "descriptor" area of single record. Some databases provide a thesaurus of terms which can lead to broader, related, or narrower terms you may not have thought of.
3. Go back to the search screen and search BY SUBJECT/DESCRIPTOR using the words you learned about as a result of your first search.
4. Be sure to connect search terms correctly using the following techniques

• Boolean connectors
  • AND connects different concepts and narrows a search: Fish AND chips
  • OR, with parentheses, combines synonyms/related terms and broadens a search: Fish AND (chips OR fries)
• Use quotation marks for phrases: Fish AND (chips OR "french fries")
• Use the asterisk as a wildcard character to retrieve variations on a common stem: educat* retrieves educate, education, educating, educated, etc. Very useful for capturing plurals