final drafts

Annotated Bibliography

"> Exploratory Essay

"> Step 3

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Final Reflection

Kiara Shuford

Meagan Keaton

English 1102

29 April 2013 

Final Reflection

The journey that I’ve achieved this semester in this English was the journey of fine tuning my inquiry topic. From the little idea I had to this topic becoming what most of my assignments were based on. Knowing that I had to choose a topic that would be the basis for a lot of my assignments I wanted to pick something that I was interested in and was somewhat interesting to my classmates. The topic I choose was how education can aid in low income students’ social mobility.

Most of my questions came from the reading that we did for homework in the beginning of the semester. The starting point to this whole process was when we read “SocialClass and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”. The author of this passage visited schools in different areas that were on different rungs of the social ladder. She concluded that the children in these schools were receiving a different education, whether it is worse for low class and great for higher class students. This reading brought me to a lot of questions, things like does the curriculum for different classes ever change? Or can students change it themselves? This passage really interested me because it opened a door to many questions that I had about this topic. I could also relate to the passage as well, so I knew if this topic interested I could put some of my personal experiences in these assignments. Some more readings also stood out to me and related to “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work, these were “On the Uses of Liberal Education”, and “Women without Class”.

As we read more passages in class I began to notice more connections to several of the readings. These connections to the passages had to be discovered and put that in my exploratory essay. In writing this essay it helped me explore and discover what interested me about these readings and what I wanted to my inquiry question to be. Many of the readings focused on students that went to school in low income areas and were very underprivileged. So, this meant magnifying minorities of race and gender. So as my inquiry question was evolving in my head I knew that I wanted to focus on the underprivileged students. As soon as I knew what my inquiry question was or what I wanted to focus on for my inquiry, I was assigned a research proposal. I then conferenced this letter to get the opinion of my conference group, as we conferenced my paper I realized what inquiry question I wanted to ask. The question I came up with is, “How can education help low socioeconomic students with social mobility?”

Now that I had my inquiry question I had to find reliable legitamint sources to answer my question and help prove my suspicions. I had to find print sources and web sources to place in a annotated bibliography before writing any papers on this topic. I believe that the sources I found were really interesting and provided me with a lot of facts that I could use in my papers and assignments to come. To analyze my sources better I performed some active reading excersises, dialogic journal 1 and 2. Doing this really made me read my sources and understand them on a more critical thinking type of way. These exercises also made it easier to begin to write my annotated bibliography. Before this annotated bibliography I hadn’t written one before, the preparations that I made for this assignment made it less intimidating. Also, writing the annotated bibliography before doing any inquiry assignments because it made me understand the sources, so that when I went to write these assignments I could focus on my writing instead of going back and forth between writing and the sources. 

After the annotated bibliography was finished I could begin to write my inquiry question papers. For the first step of the inquiry project we had to write a dialect between our sources in the layout of a play script. This made me see the common thread between my sources, the connections they share between one another. This assignment was challenging for me because I wasn’t used to writing dialect as much as formal writing. So, in this paper I didn’t have a lot of humor or dialect as there should have been. This is why step 2 was much easier for me. For this assignment we had to take our dialect from step 1 and put it into a formal writing style, but with the same connections. I enjoyed writing this paper because I could put the facts that I found from my sources in it and also my personal experiences, I could also put in my personal experiences which I think really tells my audience why I’m interested in this topic. From this point we the class was divided up into group based on our inquiry topics. We had to put together a multimodal project that combined all of our topics to present to our class. All the ladies topics in my group magnified the low income students and how their resources were so much lower than students of higher classes. We are doing a video to show our class the difference between these different schools. Coming together with our topics especially since there are related and connected has made this project more interesting because I’m not only working with the topic that interested me, but I can see other peoples topics and see what interested them.

The journey that I’ve taken in English 1102 has been filled with a lot of work, but I believe has made me a better writer. In this class I was introduced to a lot of different writing assignments, writing styles, and writing online. I discovered all this all the while working on something that I picked and was interested in. My inquiry topic interested me and by finding out the facts about this topic, I now know how to fix the problem that my inquiry question brings up.

journal entry 2-18-13

journal entry 2-6-13

Joining the Conversation: Step 3

Kiara Shuford

Megan Keaton

English 1102

10 April 2013

           

Joining the Conversation: Step 2

            When we read the article “Social Class and the hidden Curriculum of Work”, in class it focused on the negative impact that low social class has on a student’s education. It described how growing up in a low class meant you would stay there because of the education you received this also included students of a higher class.  So for this paper I wanted to focus on how a student’s social class contributes to their education and how they can use education for social mobility. My research took me in a lot of different directions, but this is what I thought answered my question, how can education help low SES students with social mobility?, the best.

To begin you have to define social mobility and how it’s actually related to education. Zefang the author of the article, “Social Mobility and Educational Selection” defines social mobility as, “a phenomenon in which enables, in the structure of social stratification an individual or group’s social status to move up or down their occupations to be transformed.” (Zefang 610) Social mobility can be divided up into categories horizontal, vertical, intergenerational, and intra-generational, but for this question I only focused on intergenerational, which means in the same generation. So now how is social mobility related to education? The article “Social Mobility and Educational Selection” says that social class impacts the choices people make including education selection and what career people choose as well. The authors of the article define educational selection as “Education selection refers school system examinations, assessment, evaluation and classification.” But students that have a low socioeconomic status don’t have the resources than those students that belong to a higher class, so they tend to fall behind because of their lack of resources. “Education is a bridge to social mobility and can give underprivileged people the way to a more privileged life” (Zefang 611) and could be the only option for some students.

Three specific factors can contribute to the social mobility and education selections these students make according to the article. The first factor is your family's income; students are born into their social class and the income of their family’s impact them tremendously. So if other generations in your family have low incomes they most likely received a low education and this will ultimately be your fate as well. Another factor that contributes is your parents IQ; there is a direct relationship between your parents IQ and yours. The higher an IQ a student has the further they will go with their education. The last factor that contributes to social mobility and education you choose is what the author, Paul Attewell, calls high-mastery. The book describes high-mastery as “a sense that controls one’s own fate” (Attewell). These three things combine to predict how a student’s educational career will possibly turn out compared to their relationship. According to this research being in a low class will not keep you from going to college or higher education opportunities.

Not everyone thinks that being raised in a lower class actually hinders students educationally, the authors of the book Mobility and Inequality, they believe that underprivileged students have more drive to finish high school and to pursue higher education. And because they can choose what education they receive and where, as we learned from “Social Mobility and Educational Selection”, these students are choosing careers and schools they’re interested in not the ones chosen for them. Saying that “Wealth differences across families are interpreted more broadly, either as indicators of differential behavioral orientations correlated with savings behavior and lifetime success or reasons families to pursue alternative strategies for human capital investment in their offspring”.(Stanford University Press) And in the article, “Social Class in Family Therapy Education: Experiences of Low SES Students” they actually say that students from lower social classes are also targeted for things like graduate school and higher degree programs. And because they can choose what education they receive and where, as we learned from “Social Mobility and Educational Selection”, these students are choosing careers and schools they’re interested in not the ones chosen for them. They also believe that these students will be more inclined to work with students with low socioeconomic statuses’ in their career choices.

So, what can happen to give lower class students better resources and a better understanding of their curriculum? In the book A Notion at Risk, the authors give a few suggestions on how we as a country could make the education provided in our public schools better for these students. The first thing they think would help is summer school or an extended year for these students. As you can imagine all students loose most of what they learn during the school year when they have summer break, so if summer school or an extended year was enforced this wouldn’t happen as much and these students can advance. They say “summer programs should provide poor children with the types of enriching experiences that middle-class children receive during the summer, as opposed to the traditional approach of reviewing curriculum taught during the year.”(Century Foundation), so not teaching the same subjects twice, but going more in depth with these subjects. The other thing they believe will give lower class students more of a chance for social mobility is increased funding in their schools. The authors of this book say that funding should go to the people that are in dire need of it, individual classrooms could receive it. This funding could buy the resources and materials needed by school systems and teachers to raise the standard of learning in these underprivileged neighborhoods. These funds wouldn’t be to just increase the resources students have at school, but to also help their families at home, so they have a better environment there as well. Money for things like food and housing would be given because they are conducive to a good learning environment and because the student would only have to worry about their studies.

To conclude this paper I thought it would be appropriate to tell some success stories of just how far education can take someone. There is hope for everyone in the world that thinks their life can’t get any better. The story of Oprah Winfrey is a good place to start. When she was a young girl she lived in a very poor area of Mississippi with her grandmother while her mother looked for work in the North. When her mother did find a job she went from living in a poor area of Mississippi, to living in a poor area of Milwaukee. From the ages of 9-13 she was molested and sexually abused by male relatives when her mother was working. Oprah was emotionally distraught by all this pain that she had suffered from the early years of her life, so she ran away from that situation and went to live with her father. She then began to focus more on her studies, not because she wanted to, but her father was very strict and wanted the best for her. Vernon Winfrey wanted the best for his daughter, so he made her read a book and write a book report every week. Oprah began excel in school, she was an honor student and won oratory awards. Doing well in school ultimately led to Oprah receiving a full scholarship to Tennessee State University and a job at a local new station being a correspondent. Since going to college Oprah has done so much, things like having her own show showing in 140 different countries, being in movies, and owning a couple of different businesses. She reached her goals by getting the education she needed and turning her bad situation into a place she didn’t want to go back to. She is now one of the richest people in the United States, and she is a black woman which makes what she has done and even greater feat.

Another very inspiring story about a black woman that used education to get ahead in life is someone you probably never heard of. Ursula Burns, now the CEO and Chairman of Xerox, was raised in the projects of the lower east side of Manhattan. “Many people told me I had three strikes against me. I was black. I was a girl. And I was poor.”(Burns) Her mother reassured her that that was not the case and encouraged her that the only way to get out of this situation was to get and education. She would tell Ursula, “Where she was didn’t define who she was” (Burns). Even though her mother didn’t make that much money she still thought it was necessary to send Ursula to good catholic schools. She finally found her love of Mechanical engineering when she was offered a spot in the freshman class of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. After this opportunity popped up more started to emerge, things like: taking an internship with Xerox in upstate New York, going to an Ivy League school for a graduate degree, and signing on with Xerox. Making her way to the top wasn’t an easy job, but Ursula Burns did it with “a good education, a strong work ethic and the courage to lean in.”(Burns)

These stories are very inspiring for anyone in the same situation these women were or even someone trying to get a perception of what their life was like. And after doing all this research and what I‘ve witnessed I’ve acquired an opinion on education and social mobility. For me I would say that I didn’t grow up as bad as the students that I’m writing about or even Oprah and Ursula’s life, but I know some people that did and have made, something out of their life with education. Having more resources than others can help, but it shouldn’t hold anyone back. People that work hard to overcome their shortcomings I believe deserve what they strive for and as a country if we can help give students more of a chance to overcome these short comings we should.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

A Century Foundation Book. A Notion at Risk. New York: Richard D. Kahlenberg, 2000, Print.

Anyon, Jean. “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” Journal of Education. Vol. 162, no. 1(1980): 1-11. Print.

Attewell, Paul and David E. Lavin. Passing the Torch. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. Print.

Dong Zefang, Wang Yanbin, Chen Wenijiao. “Social Mobility and Educational Selection.” Educational Research and Experiment vol. 1 (2009): 13-18. Electronic.

“Oprah Winfrey.” Academy of Achievement. American Academy of Achievement, 1996-2013. Web. 28 Nov 2011.

Stanford University Press. Mobility and Inequality. Stanford, California: Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford, 2006. Print.

Teresa McDowell, Andrae’ L. Brown, Nicole Cullen, and April Duyn. “Social Class in Family Therapy Education: Experiences of Low SES Students” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy Vol. 39 (2013): 72-__. Electronic.

 “Ursula M. Burns.” Lean In. Leanin.Org. 2013 Web.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self-Assesment Reflection: Joining the Conversation Step 3

1. My goals for this paper were to get my inquiry question across to the audience and show them my extensive research.
2. Step 1 and 2 really helped me develop this paper, so writing them first helped me see what I really wanted to write.
3. My writing changed by becoming more focused on the topic and my peers gave me good ideas with things to add.
4. The people that stories I put in my paper really helped because their stories inspired me to write this paper to help inspire others.
5. I've learned about myself as a writer that if I do the research about a topic anything can become interesting to me.
6. The hardest part of writing this paper was adding more after writing the first draft. The easiest part was putting together the ideas of my sources.
7. The part of the paper I'm proudest of is the body of the paper. The connections made are what I'm proud of.
8. The parts I need work on is the introduction. I've added more facts about my topic to it I just don't know if it goes with the assignment that you gave us.
9. My brainstorming was to first write the play with dialogue. Then strip the dialogue part to make academic paper and then add more and stories to my final draft.
  

Workshop Reflection: Joining the Conversation Step 2

1. Isai- Needed to add more facts that I had in my play
Brian- Get rid of the word "so" in my paper and maybe add some stories about people that have lived through this
Leaslie-Likes the facts that I have already in my paper, but I need to add more to my introduction.
2. The most helpful piece of advice was to add stories, I was worried about not being able to add two more pages to my paper with what I had so this was very helpful.
3. The least helpful advice was adding more to my introduction, just because I already knew that it needed help.
4. My plans for revision is to add more to my introduction and to add stories to my paper.