Career Preparation Innovation

Description

A meeting of the Business and English Department faculties was scheduled during the summer. This meeting allowed both departments to express what was currently being taught in classes, when various instruction was given or needed, and the expected student outcomes. At the conclusion of this meeting, it was determined that students in Introduction to Business and Business Law would receive specific instruction in writing summary and analysis papers. Individual faculty from both departments met to develop specific presentations and handouts to help students prepare more accurate and professional business abstracts.

Sample Learning Activities

• Pretest measurement: During the first week of school, an article was assigned to be summarized.
• During week two, a photocopy of an article from Business Week was given to students. Students were instructed to write a summary and analysis to bring to class the day of the presentation. The readability level of this article was estimated to be about 11th grade.
• During week three, a joint instructional session was offered by the Business and English Departments. It included an introduction of goals, definition of plagiarism, and steps in developing a summary. Four summaries were presented, with students ranking these samples from good to poor. None of the examples were excellent. Students were asked to participate in discussing the good and poor points of each example. Students were then assigned to rewrite their summaries to practice what they had learned from the presentation and bring it to the next class period. Also students were required to complete a self-evaluation form on the presentation to help in the evaluation of the process. Both summaries were evaluated by the English Department.
• Several additional articles were assigned during the semester. Students were reminded of summarizing skills by the Business instructor.
• The last article of the semester was evaluated as a posttest.

Career Preparation Innovation

Description (Course Outline)

English 1A: Reading and Composition with the Macintosh: Emphasis on Health Issues

Working Syllabus

• Weeks 1-4: The first two essays are based on personal experience to get writing flowing
• Diagnostic (writing sample) Writing as a Process--Audience (Writing as reading)--What an essay is and does--Focusing an essay around a purpose--Paragraph
• Macintosh: Orientation, fundamentals of Microsoft Word
• Lessons: From purpose to thesis, showing, not telling; being specific
• Style work: Run-together sentences, appositives
• Weeks 5-6: Overview of the Health Care Crisis--What has created it? Contributed to it? Essay #3--Analysis essay, "The Components of the Health Care System"
• Style work: appositives reinforced, verbal phrases
• Weeks 7-10: Health Care Reform--How shall it be reformed?
• Essay #4--Comparison/contrast essay, "Which Plan Is Best?"
• Style work: Subordinators, concessions
• Weeks 11-12: Discussion of recent state ballot results
• Essay #5--How will health care reform affect my profession?
• Style work: depending on student needs; parallelism
• Weeks 13-18: Students will form groups exploring different aspects of Health Science, which will be presented to the class. Some of the areas may be Alternative Medicine; Ethics in Biomedical Research; Fetal Tissue Research; Reproductive Technologies; Genetic Engineering; Death and Dying; Euthanasia

Sample Learning Activity (In-class writing assignment)

Career Preparation Innovation

Description (Course Outline)

English 101: Workplace Based English

Sample Learning Activities

• After reading the handout entitled The Case of the Willful Whistle-Blower, write an essay in which you consider one of the following questions from each of the ethical approaches described in the Introduction to Ethical Reasoning. That is, consider it from the utilitarian approach, the deontological approach, and the human nature ethics approach.

  Questions (choose one):

  1. Should Jim have "blown the whistle" at all?
  2. Should Ken and the other engineers have informed their customers about the defect in the design of the Radon II fifteen years ago when the defect was first discovered?
  3. Should Bob have been more supportive of Jim's effort to blow the whistle even if it meant there would be a certain amount of strife at work as a result?

  Your job is to choose one of the questions above, analyze it according to the principles of the three ethical approaches and come to some conclusions about what Jim, Ken or Bob should have done. Naturally, the conclusion you come to may be different for each of the three approaches.

  Specifically, you need to display a basic understanding of the three approaches and show that you can apply that understanding to a specific situation. Technically, you need to be able to make a general statement and then support it with reasons of your own and from your reading. You also need to be able to integrate ideas and quotes from other sources into your own writing effectively and correctly.
  
  

• Define "intelligence."
  • Work in pairs or in groups of three, and use at least five sources for your information.
  • Not all of your sources need to be traditional (i.e., from the library), but some of them should be. (You must use at least one book, one magazine, and one professional journal.)
  • Make sure that your essay includes more than one definition of intelligence.
  • Choose a definition and support your choice.
  • The maximum length is six pages; the minimum is four.

Career Preparation Innovation

Description (Course Outline)

Introduction to Literature: The Literature Connection

Sample Learning Activities

• Analyze:
  1. For "Barn Burning": Abner Snopes's negative influence on his family: its causes; its manifestations; its results
  2. For "Rose for Emily": The community's unhealthy attitudes toward its past cause it to act in ways that contradict its progress
• Think about the story in a different way by developing a brief "newspaper." The newspaper will include a description of at least one event in the story as if it were a news story in the morning paper; an editorial about an attitude or behavior of a main character; a "job wanted" advertisement relevant to the story; a "job available" advertisement relevant to the story; and a letter to the editor about an issue you addressed in your theme. To create the newspaper, you'll become familiar with the newsletter template feature of Microsoft Word, and you'll create the newspaper in this format.
• Use Internet connections and sites to discover information about one of the following, depending on the story you selected:
  1. Unhealthy community attitudes that slow down community progress (or the reverse--characteristics of healthy, growing communities)
  2. Ways families can overcome the unhealthy influence of one parent on children and spouse.
• Using information from the story, ideas from the story, and information from the Internet and print resources (if needed), prepare a memorandum:
  1. For "Barn Burning," write a memorandum as if you are a Child Protective Services investigator recommending whether or not Abner should be barred from contact with Sarty. (We will assume Abner survived the de Spain fire.) You'll use the information you have about negative parental influence as a theoretical basis for your recommendation, and you'll support your stance by information regarding the relationship of father and son provided in the story.
  2. For "Rose for Emily," write a memorandum as if you were the new city planner who has been employed to assist the community of Jefferson to develop its economy. Use information from the Internet as your theoretical basis for a discussion of how successful communities develop economically. Use information about the community's relationship with Emily Grierson as data for your analysis of Jefferson's present situation, then make two recommendations to the city council.
• Conclusion: After completing this project, you will be experienced in connecting information from many kinds of sources, using this information in several ways, and coming to conclusions. These are all workplace competencies that corporations and businesses demand of college graduates. You will have "connected" the classroom to the world beyond the campus.

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DOMAIN:	Foundation Academics
MODEL:	Hybrid course
STRATEGY:	Independent faculty planning and delivery
COLLEGE:	Broome Community College, New York
CONTACT:	Roberta Williams (607/778-5363)

Career Preparation Innovation

This transfer-eligible literature course blends literary analysis with social, historical, and political perspectives of work.

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Description (Course Outline)

English 270W: 20th Century North American Working-Class Literature

Using a variety of texts in which 20th century North American writers from working-class backgrounds have explored various themes related to working-class life, this course addresses broad thematic issues: how work helps to shape values and identity, how work affects human relationships and family life, how work determines or influences people's experiences of nature, how work enables people to act upon their environment, how work constrains people, and how work frees people. In addition, students discuss the circumstances in which some of the texts were written, the writers' reasons for creating the texts, and the purposes for which the texts have been used.

Texts
Short Stories:

Hughes, Langston, Something in Common and Other Stories

Pancake, Breece D'J, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Soto, Pedro, Juan Spiks

Yezierska, Anzia, Hungry Hearts and Other Stories

Novels:

Cisneros, Sandra, The House on Mango Street

DiDonato, Pietro, Christ in Concrete

Naylor, Gloria, The Women of Brewster Place

Poetry:

Llewellyn, Chris, Fragments from the Fire

Wayman, Tom (Ed.), Going for Coffee

Anthology:

Zandy, Janet, Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings

Critical Theory:

Wayman, Tom, Inside Job

Companion Piece:

Selections from the Folkways album "A Vision Shared"

Primary Objectives

• To expose the student to a broad range of texts by 20th century North American working-class writers; to deepen the student's appreciation of working-class writing.
• To aid the student in building upon techniques of literary analysis acquired in Lit. 200.
• To provide a sociopolitical context for some of the texts.
• To facilitate a lively exchange about the creation and uses of working-class writing.
• To enhance the student's appreciation of writing as a process of exploration.
• To encourage and assist students who want to create working-class writing.

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Sample Learning Activity

For the midterm project, the student will write one of the following: (1) an analysis paper about any of the texts assigned for the course; (2) a text exploring a working-class theme: short story, scene for a play, chapter for a novel, or collection of poems; (3) an oral history project based upon an interview of a retired worker--the student will ask the worker how her or his work helped to shape the worker's life and identity and how the work enabled the worker to act upon her or his environment.

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