As part of being in a learning community, all students will participate in an integrated assignment.  This assignment will count as a portion of your grade in Seminar, Composition, and Political Science.  

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      For your integrated assignment, students will use what they learn in each of the classes of the Learning Community to advocate, organize, and/or promote some kind of political change through writing. The issue you choose to explore should either come from a national political issue with local implications, or a local issue with national political implications (perhaps a national issue that is implemented locally, or a local issue that is part of a national problem). This project will require you to perform policy research and analysis.

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      Your writing will take the form of a real political genre of writing such as a position statement, press release, advocacy report, or strategic plan of action.  (this is not an exhaustive list, as which genre you choose to use will depend on your research and rhetorical situation). 

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      This project should demonstrate your ability to analyze rhetorical situations in order to identify options and make appropriate choices that will enable you to use writing to achieve specific purposes; demonstrate their ability to locate, read, evaluate, select, use, and effectively integrate information from appropriate sources with your own ideas.  Finally, you should be able to demonstrate control of situation-appropriate conventions of writing.

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To begin the process of figuring out what you want to focus on for your political change, we will complete Discovery Log entries! 

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Proposal 

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For your proposal, we will be working on this in class as well as outside of class. This will be due on October 31st by the end of class! (1 page; 4-5 sources: 1 Newspaper, 1 scholarly source, all MUST be credible)

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What are the parts that go into the proposal?

• Need: What's the need for the issue you are researching? What change are you advocating for?

• Evidence: What evidence (research) demonstrates this need?

  • Have at least 2 sources​

• Audience: Who or what groups are you addressing? 

• Genre: What genre do you propose that will fulfill that need?

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What is the Discovery Log?

To help you remain on-track, and to help me make sure that you are not falling behind, you will keep an up to date research log. This is simply a log to help you keep track of the information you find as you continually research and discover this semester.

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For the template, click here. 

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You will need at least 8-10 Discovery Logs. This includes the 4-5 sources needed for the Final Integrated Assignment and research done on Background Information.

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Entries

1. For your first Discovery Log entry, download the template and save to an Online Folder. 

The Research Question is simply: What issues are you interested in and how are they politically related?

• Be sure to work on this Discovery Log entry! It does not have to completed by 9/28 but you should be able to show me some sort of update!