english

Collaboration

The professional world is abuzz with collaborators who use their intellects and creative energy to solve problems and make change. In school or in the workplace, each of you has likely participated in collaboration: you had to work toward a common goal, responsibly and efficiently distribute the labor, observe one another’s progress, and be evaluated as a collective. Project 2 will build on the rhetorical awareness skills you cultivated in Project 1, and help you to strengthen skills with collaboration as you work in groups to think about a local or global problem you care about. This problem can be specific to your discipline, to your social lives, or to your academic lives. Together, your group will:

1. Identify a problem

2. Articulate its importance

3. Analyze causes and effects of the problem

4. Propose a clear solution to an appropriate audience

Here are important components of this composition:

The Group Contract

Your first collaborative project will be to create a group contract. How will you divide responsibilities? How will you monitor the efforts of your peers? How will you make sure that all are abiding by the expectations of deadlines, proper research, and productive communication? This contract will articulate the ethical practices and commitments of your group. Your contract should address the following elements: communication, reliability, effort, quality, adherence to deadlines, academic integrity.

The Composition

1. Choose a topic. a. Brainstorm and identify issues that you care about at Drexel, in Philadelphia, or beyond. b. Uncover a problem that is most pertinent to your group’s interests.

2. Write a proposal. a. Together, your group will compose a brief topic proposal in which you make a case for the importance of the problem you want to explore, discuss your research strategies, and describe the intended audience for your composition.

3. Gather sources and compose an annotated bibliography. a. You and your group members will work together to gather sources and compose an annotated bibliography. b. Your sources should include your own primary research (interview, survey, observation report), secondary research (journals, newspapers, film, music), and at least one type of visual (chart, graph, photo, drawing).

4. Choose a form and begin composing.

a. Your group will decide on the form that your project will take (report, Website, blog, brochure, article for a specific publication, TV or radio commercial, podcast, advertising campaign, short film, grant proposal, etc.). Drexel University Dept. of English and Philosophy 7

b. Audio/visual projects with minimal text should be accompanied by a 750-word rhetorical analysis in which you discuss the rhetorical situation, role of the writers in the project, and reason for the chosen format.

Project Reports

Four times over the course of this collaborative project, individual students will email the professor a brief report about how the project is going thus far. These reports will reflect on how the group is working together toward their goal: Successes? Challenges? Questions?

Group Presentation

Once your final product is completed, your group will present it to the class. Keeping in mind that written and multimedia compositions and oral presentations can be very different rhetorical situations, your group will decide on the best format for your presentation to your peers and professor.

Reflective Analysis

At the completion of the project (final product and presentation), members of your group will each compose a reflective analysis, in which you look back on the project, think about its many facets, and evaluate how it has impacted you, your learning, and your perspective on collaboration. You will share these reflections with one another in class.

As you draft and revise, utilize peer review feedback, office hours, and The Drexel Writing Cent