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.