Argumentative Indian Review

[David]

Becausethis course fulfills writing in the disciplines (WID) requirements, student writing is a foundational part of this class. Writing in this course will take three forms, each serving a different purpose.

Each week, you will write and post a 500 word response to weekly readings on Blackboard. This writing is designed to be reactive, enabling you to craft your immediate response to what you have read. As such, this writing will be guided by questions.

Twice in the semester you will write a short five-seven page essay in response to guiding prompts. The first assignment aims at encouraging and developing your analytical skills, the second seeks to help strengthen your argumentative skills. These two essays will serve as a foundation for the main writing component of this course, a substantive research paper. As such, you will revise each of these essays once.

The topic of your final paper will be linked to the theme of the Self & Society section in which you are enrolled. Thematic courses offered in the past have included nations and nationalism, comparative politics, Chinese social and cultural change, modernism and fascism, women in politics, and gender and violence. This section takes as its theme modernization and development. During this semester we will examine the goals, assumptions, and processes of modernization and development. Drawing from history, sociology, economics, public policy, anthropology, and political science, course readings emphasize key questions about the process of international development, including practices, origins, theoretical assumptions, and social impact. Given the above, your final paper will have as its subject a specific development intervention in a specific country, be approximately twenty pages in length, and specifically address the following:

When you finish your final draft, you will submit a portfolio containing each of these pieces. Your final grade will take account of each step of the research process, rather than focusing only on the final draft.

One of the most difficult yet crucial research skills involves shifting from research-as-summary to research-as-practice. When you engage in summary research, you may gather, collate, and present a range of information, but never make the shift to analysis. While you may evaluate materials, you generally focus on providing an overview of who-said-what and when. In such an approach your research product mainly TELLS the reader something. In contrast, when you engage in research as practice, you first identify a question, locate relevant and reputable source materials that address this, choose reliable methods analysis, and examine knowledge-claims for accuracy, relevancy and support. By following this approach, your research paper becomes a document that SHOWS the reader not just your claims but information that supports these as well as information that complicates your claims.

If your answer to the above is A), to complete the assignment and/or show I have read the required material and B) my professor, then you are not doing authentic research. Authentic research begins with a problem, issue, question, or puzzle, not with an answer. Authentic research requires you to observe, question, explore, take chances, interpret and persuade. It above all requires you to question your own assumptions and be open to a range of claims, arguments, and interpretations.

In this section of Self & Society, while we will use source materials from a variety of social sciences, your writing and research will be anthropological. Anthropology as a discipline is characterized by an emphasis on participant-observation and fieldwork. In examining a social issue or question, anthropologists use an inductive, not a deductive approach.

Deductive research begins with a hypothesis, gathers data to measure the validity of this hypothesis, and then concludes by supporting or rejecting this hypothesis. This approach works well in the natural sciences, especially in situations in which a researcher can control many variables. So, for example, if someone claims that a diet of bananas and chocolate will lead to weight loss, a researcher can evaluate this claim by replicating this process: recruit volunteers, strictly monitor what they eat, and see what happens.

This approach does not work well when examining most social issues. Instead, an inductive approach is often more useful. Inductive research does not begin with a hypothesis (an answer) but a question. This approach requires a researcher to follow the data. This should not be a problem if you begin with a question. If you begin with an answer, you will probably spend much of your time finding selective evidence that supports your position. This works well in a debate, or in a law court, but inductive research on social issues is not about debate skills, or winning court cases. The goal is to offer a rigorous and intellectually honest analysis of your research question.

What does this mean in practice? First, accept the fact that where you begin a research project is quite likely not where you will end. Quite often, you will finish a research project with a very different question or issue than that with which you began. This is quite normal, so do not be alarmed! This does not mean you have wasted time going from A to B to C to D; it means that getting to D could only happen by first going from A to B to C.

Start with guiding criteria for this section of Self & Society: you are to analyze a development intervention in a specific place. This means you need a place and an intervention. Complete this statement:

A. I want to study the one-child population policy in China.

B. I want to study education language policies in Mauritius.

C. I want to study the tourism industry in Jamaica.

D. I want to study state language policies in Quebec.

E. I want to study micro-credit programs in Bangladesh.

Next, note what the assignment asks you to address:

If you think you already know what happened, you have a poor research topic. For example, if you are interested in finding out what effects a state-mandated one child policy has had in China, and you think you already know the answer, then why write this paper? At best, you will write a paper that resembles a legal brief more than an analysis. This does not mean you should choose a topic about which you neither know anything nor have any opinion. Why spend a semester researching an issue about which you do not really care?

Instead, begin by writing down what you already know about your topic. After this, write down why you think what you know is accurate. For example, what information serves as the basis of your beliefs? Where did you find this information?

Type in the key word 'China one child policy' in Google and you will receive 60,800,000 results. Type in 'China birth control one child policy' and you will receive 'only' 264,000 results. No one has the time to actually go though all of these sources. Even after further refining this by typing in 'China birth control one child policy social class' you will reduce this number only to 73,900 results, still unmanageable. Some people, however, think this is not a problem, because search engines rank search results by relevance.

Fact: Search engines cannot think. Pages are ranked based on a range of variables (Google claims to use more than 200) that are in turn linked to the search terms you use. When searching the general web, there is no guarantee that the top ten search results you receive are the most relevant sources for your research. This is because you have not provided any means of filtering results.

It is relatively rare that a social issue or problem has a set of universally agreed upon facts that define this problem. At best, factual information sets the parameters of the debate. For example, few researchers disagree that a gender imbalance is now found in China, or that there is a higher number of baby boys than baby girls born each year. The facts of these issues are of course important, but you should not focus only on researching and tabulating competing facts. Instead, you need to identify arguments: who says what, and why? How do different authors interpret factual data? What predictions and/or recommendations do authors make, and what evidence do they base these on? Most importantly, which authors address the issue you are concerned with? As you read articles, keep written notes of what you read. Identify the purpose of each article and the disciplinary approach of the author. Is the writer an economist, or a political scientist? Is she an anthropologist, a sociologist, a geographer, or a public health specialist? Note page numbers of key points, claims, and recommendations, rather than simply highlighting text.

Fact: Highlighting sentences is not note-taking. It is an aesthetic trick, duping people into assuming a page that has been marked up in different colors is the same as a page that has been read and analyzed. Disciplining yourself to write down in your own words important points and claims and noting page numbers serves two purposes: first, it helps you process information, and second, it provides you with cited information for the writing of your paper. Think of this as a write-down, write-up process. You first write down notes, and then write up these notes in your research paper.

As you begin to read through possible sources, it is a good idea to keep a record of what you read, even of sources you do not think fit your project. For the purposes of this course, you will submit an annotated bibliography of source materials. This will be the third document in your research portfolio. This bibliography will most likely not be the final list of your source materials, because you will submit this before you complete a draft. But it should reflect how you are approaching your research question. It should also do the following:

Peer Review: Once you have completed your draft, this will be read and commented upon by a colleague and then submitted to your teacher as the fourth and fifth parts of your portfolio. Note that the quality of your peer review will count as a part of your portfolio grade, so you need to take this seriously. Your task is very specific: read the draft of your colleague once. Then write down what you think the guiding question or claim is, as well as the types of evidence the author provides to answer or respond to this. After this, read the paper again. You should only write QUESTIONS on the draft you review.

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