Looking back to the beginning of the Spring 2020 semester, everything seemed as normal, like a regular semester would look like. But soon after the semester began, there was a breakout of an unexpected pandemic that took many lives from people around us. Going through this situation is one of the most difficult challenges that I have been though, I am sure I am not the only one, many other people are also struggling because of the situation. Regardless of these catastrophic circumstances, I can say I had a great semester and this class made it so much easier for me to keep up my motivation and manage to make it to the end.
Throughout this semester in this class, my classmates and I had the opportunity to explore and engage in many activities that allow us to think, read, and write as a social scientist. As a class, we extended our analysis beyond the common and took a step forward to fieldwork and understanding what social sciences stand for. Our course learning outcomes and the rhetorical situation were our base to maintain organization and preciseness in every assignment. As a social scientist, there were many assignments that contributed to the culmination of this semester. These included peer-review assignments or collaboration with peers, the study of subcultures, a personal artifact essay and reflection, interview with a classmate essay with reflection, position paper with reflection, discussion board assignments, personal ways to drafting, revising, and outlining, and much more.
During the semester, we were able to completely use and understand our class learning outcomes. Our first learning outcome states, “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility”. Meaning that as a class we accept and recognize that we all have different backgrounds and possibly second
languages, however, that was never an obstacle for us to collaborate with each other, instead, we used that as resources to understand different perspectives. This is one of the learning outcomes that we used in almost paper since we were required to peer review each other’s paper, we always got different perspectives to revise our work. An example of this is shown in Image 1, this shows my personal artifact peer review comments and how they differ from my writing. Another learning outcome that was put in practice every often is “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation”. This refers to our own personal strategies to read, draft, revise, edit, and self-assessment and how we incorporated the rhetorical situations in our work. An example of this is I shown in Image 2, this is one of the ways of how I like drafting my papers, one of my strategies is using the Six-Pointed Star. “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes” is another class leaning outcome that was used in class. This one refers to group work, peer review, and even the comment we gave each other in each discussion board assign. This was a big part of our class, contributing to each other’s work.
Another class learning outcome in this class is “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond”. This is a very interesting one because its language is kind of complicated. I remember in the second week of class, we were assigned one learning outcome per group and this was the one my group got. We
concluded that this one refers to all the different assignments we had and how we explored different learning styles and we found our different learning preferences. We used this learning outcome during the interview assignment and paper because each one of us found their preferred way of learning, some of us took notes, recorded, made voice recording and others just listed throughout the whole interview. Our last two class learning outcomes are “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing, practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” and “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. These were the last ones we practice because of the transition to remote learning. However, learning about them was really helpful and useful for the class and the future. We used these leaning outcomes during the position paper where we had to investigate our topic and research for peer-reviewed articles on the library website. The following image shows my reference page from my position paper, with all resources used for this assignment.
Finally, in this course, I learn the importance of the following rhetorical terms: rhetorical situation, purpose, audience, genre, stance, media/design, context, and exigence. These are important because keeping these in mind when writing a paper this would make your paper look complete and it will demonstrate your knowledge of the work. We used these in every assignment that we did in class. To break these down, the purpose is the reason of why is the writing being done; audience, individual or group who reads and takes action, in this class our audience was always professor Alyssa and my classmates; genre means the type of writing being done; stance is the attitude or tone of the paper; media/design refers to the visual and how are we communicating something through visual; context refers to the circumstances in which the text was written, and finally exigence is the issue or problem that causes the writer to create a piece of writing.
Overall, this class was an amazing experience, and like I said before regardless of the situation we are currently leaving in I think that we did a great job as a class. I learned a lot from this course and I am sure everything I learned will be very useful in the future.
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