Mid-term+Assignment+Guidelines

=Midterm Assignment= Your midterm assignment will be 8-10 pages (double-spaced, 12 point Times font, 1 inch margins). In this paper, you will utilize the texts from weeks 1-6 to provide an academic discussion of your understanding of urban school culture (thus far) and your understanding (and/or hopes) of who you are/were/will be as a practitioner and simply a participant within this culture. Essentially, you will be utilizing your academic, professional, and personal knowledges to make sense of the complexity of the course content. You will be graded on the quality of your work, as well as the quality of the feedback you provide to your peers.

=Guidelines= This assignment is essentially an argumentative or persuasive essay. In your paper, you must develop a thesis that responds to the question, "What is the culture of urban schools?" You are being asked to do three things: 1) develop your own definition of what urban school culture is (thesis), 2) illustrate by developing an argument using evidence from the class texts in conjunction with your experiences why your definition is plausible (support your thesis), 3) link this definition to implications for research, policy, practice and your own personal development as a scholar-practitioner (illustrate the relevance of this thesis for the field of education and social life more generally). You may use outside research to help you, but this is not a requirement.

Grading Rubric


=Rationale for Argumentative Writing and Writing Resources= In doctoral level work, you are expected to be able to take a position, assert a thesis, develop arguments, and draw forth implications from your work. In addition, you are expected to be able to synthesize and apply historical perspectives, social and local contextual information, and theoretical ideas to issues that you have identified as pressing in urban education. This will be asked of you repeatedly in your qualifying stages (Qualifying Paper Proposal, Qualifying Paper, Dissertation Proposal) and in the dissertation itself. This mid-term assignment is meant to help you begin practicing these skills by a) taking a position on what you think is the culture of urban schools, b) supporting this position with evidence from texts and experiences, and c) identifying the implications (i.e. why this is important) of your definition for practitioners and scholars of education. Sometimes students find this type of writing difficult. Therefore, I have listed some web resources below that will help you to think through how to write an argumentative paper. All of the resources below identify similar components of an argumentative/persuasive paper, but they have different takes on it and provide different advice. I recommend reading through all of them to see which resonates with you. [|University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Writing Center advice] [|Michigan State University Writing Center Advice] [|University of British Columbia Writing Center] = = =Peer Review= As part of your grade, you are required to participate in peer review activities. Peer review is helpful for receiving peer feedback and also for being exposed to other people's perspectives, ideas and writing styles. In addition, peer review is an integral part of the academic community that doctoral students should be familiar with because in the future as you publish your research or you apply for grant funding, you will be subject to peer review. If you decide to go into an academic line of work, you will also be expected to participate in peer review.


 * This section is under construction. We will discuss in class peer review guidelines.



=Deadlines= __First Draft:__ send to group members and professor by __Saturday 10/9 at 11:59pm__ __Peer Feedback__: send feedback to peers and professor by __Thursday 10/14 at 11:59pm__ __Final Draft__: send to professor by __Saturday 10/23 at 11:59pm__