Response Essay (Brave New Classrooms)
Writing Assignment #1 will be a response essay. Courses that fulfill the General Education Requirements (GERs) at UMUC all have a common theme—technological transformations. You will be applying this theme in our first writing assignment. The response essay asks you to examine a source or a group of sources and discuss your reactions to it. The essay will incorporate source material summary into its discussion but will also integrate your reactions to the source material. In this essay, you will write a personal response to one of the following essays. Kiefer, K. (2007). Chapter 8: Do students lose more than they gain in online writing classes? In Brave New Classrooms (pp. 141-151). Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Preparing to Write Your Response Essay: Please click here to watch a video for some advice on how to prepare for and approach the response essay. Organizing the Response Essay: You can find suggestions for organizing response essays on the following pages: Cahill, Kathleen. Writing a Reaction or Response Essay. LEO: Literacy Education Online. April 6, 1999. http://leo(dot)stcloudstate(dot)edu/acadwrite/reaction.html Writing@CSU. Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays. Colorado State University, 1993-2012. http://writing(dot)colostate(dot)edu/guides/teaching/rst/pop5i.cfm Alberdeston, J. Guidelines for Effective Response Essays. 2009. http://upraenglishhonors(dot)blogspot(dot)com/2009/09/guidelines-for-effective-response.html Samples and further explanations of response essays: McGee, Chris. Sample Response Essays. Longwood University, Virginia. July 3, 2012. http://www(dot)longwood(dot)edu/staff/mcgeecw/sampleresponsepapers.htm Avila, Melissa Marie. Trapped in the Middle: A Close Reading and Response to Gloria Anzaldua’s The Homeland. Tammi Bob’s Faculty Page. College of Du Page. July 12, 2012 http://www(dot)cod(dot)edu/people/faculty/bobtam/website/sample_personal_response_essay.htm Additional resources: In our class, in the e-reserves section, we have a chapter from the book by Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C, They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing with Readings. The chapter mentions various techniques to apply in stating what an author said and your response to the author. It is recommended that you read through that chapter so that you might apply these techniques to this essay. Submitting the assignment: Please post a rough draft of your response essay as your instructor directs you by the due date your instructor provides. After receiving feedback on your response essay, please use the comments from your instructor to help you to assess your own rough draft. Please post your final draft of the Response Essay as your instructor directs you. Length: The final draft should be approximately 700-900 words long. It should follow standard APA guidelines in citing the sources and should include a “References” page at the end of the essay to list the sources.
You've got a nice start here. It is evident that you've had some strong responses to Kiefer's assertions.
Now you have to work on developing this response essay further.
- Your first task should be to develop an introductory statement. You will want to summarize the article that you are responding to—Kiefer's article. At the end of your introduction, it will be useful to post your claim/thesis.
- Can you clarify your claim about Kiefer's article? You need a reasons to support your claim--to rest your argument upon. Generally, I think of a thesis as a claim that is supported by reasons. What is your claim about Kiefer's article? What reasons can you give to back up your claim? Remember that your responses should always be directly tied to the article itself.
- You need to organize your response. Using your claims with reasons might help you to map out the essay before hand.
- Can you cite sources throughout in APA citation? This citation should include quotes/ideas from the article to which you are responding.
- You need to eliminate sentence level errors. I have placed some information about sentence fragments and run-on sentences at the end of your essay.
- You need to bolster your ideas with quotes from some reputable sources.
Please use the rubric below to help you to clarify your essay further.
Thank you for your good work. Please see the corrected draft for further comments.
Anne Marie
Name:
Institution:
Date:
In the book "Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet" edited by Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum. Chapter 8 "Do students lose more than they gain in online writing classes?" by Kiefer represents the common and persistent argument that exists between proponents that support the traditional writing classes that require student-teacher and student-student interaction and those that support online writing teaching (Keifer, 2007).
According to Kiefer, teaching is done in small classes due to factors relating to workload and classroom management including other pedagogical and theoretical factors. These are factors related to the influential theories of language use and development, cultural, rhetorical, and sociocognitive theories, and the rhetorical principles in textual writing, and contemporary writing and learning theories (Keifer, 2007). These form the basis of why teachers who teach writing insist that the best learning occurs in small groups (15-25 students). Online classes according to Kieffer fail students as interactions are only through texts. Therefore, unless students are willing or sensitive enough to examine the different functions of a text online they may have little awareness of the writing contexts compared to their counterparts (Keifer, 2007).
Keifer provides a good thought provoking introductory statement that clear illustrates her support for the traditional classroom. She provides relevant and practical reasons for the need to teach in small classes. I have from a personal level experienced these advantages, and it is a fact that efficient and effective learning takes place when there is a smaller student-teacher ratio. I am a graduate from a private high school with approximately 30 students per class. In a study conducted at my school, the class teachers compared the learning outcomes to a neighboring public school with a higher ratio. The performance of my class was significantly higher, and this indicated the importance of small classes.
According to sociologists, education and learning is not only a social endeavor, but also provides transformative learning opportunities that allow learners to learn, live, and adapt to a particular culture via the promotion of cultural awareness and competency by encountering different cultural attitudes and the diversity of cultures. This can only occur through social and not textual interactions CITATION Fri13 \l 1033 (Frias, 2013). Pedagogically, students learn most effectively when there are multiple opportunities to practice and cultural, rhetorical, and sociocognitive perspectives emphasize construction of meaning in context. These perspectives support the need for traditional class learning methods and Kiefer presents them to support her advocacy for classroom learning CITATION Kei07 \l 1033 (Keifer, 2007).
Kiefer, admittedly does not support online learning, and she provides evidence by comparing studies from proponents on online learning and immediately provides research evidence from the opposers of the same to support her point of view. For example, Keiffer provides Faigley (1999) argument that, "students who use telecommunications across different geographic locations are more motivated and learn more." (142) ( Keifer, 2007). On the other hand, she presents arguments from other writers that support her position, for example, from Gaddis et al. (2000) who discovered that students who learned online did not value collaboration that usually contributes to learning/. They further rejected any meaningful interactions that wo...