In the fall of 2011 (last semester) I took REL 320 which is the Sacraments class. This class was very essential in helping me achieve these objectives of accessing, gathering, organizing, and using information from different sources. In this class we learned how the Sacraments have changed from before the Second Vatican Council and how they are now and the communal function they serve. The basis of the class was the students had to write a term paper that had the students doing different writing processes throughout the semester. The basis of the paper was to focus on one or a few of the Sacraments and discuss how there was a communal aspect to them. So for example my thesis was: “This symbolization of the sacrament (marriage) emphasizes a communal aspect that is essential for the health of the marriage and the community that surrounds it. This communal aspect is shown in Christ’s command for us to love our neighbor, the Holy Trinity and the relationship between the three Divine Persons, and procreation which is one of two goods of marriage.”
This paper had to be around at least 12 pages long. To achieve this length and to support my thesis I had to be able to do all of those objectives listed above. The final draft of my paper had 13 sources in the bibliography, but I looked at many more than that for the research of my paper. To start off we had to do an annotated bibliography at some of the sources we first looked at. While I personally do not enjoy doing annotated bibliographies because they are tedious and take forever, it was very helpful because it helped me narrow down what types of books and articles to look at more in depth. Besides all the different drafts of bibliographies we had to do, we also had to make a chart on how all of our evidence connected using a concept map tool. This was one of the most helpful things we did to organize all of our ideas and small tidbits of information we had gotten from many different sources. It showed me how in some places my ideas and evidence were very well connected and then how in other places I needed more evidence to make a good connection.
As I said before my final draft of my paper had 13 sources. I used the most variety of sources I have ever used before in a paper. I used papal encyclicals, journal articles, books, textbooks used for some of my other classes, the Catholic Rites book, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The variety of sources, while time consuming to read through, really made my paper dynamic and gave a plethora of viewpoints and connections.
Something that I think could have been changed to make the class more effective in reaching the objective that majors can access, gather, organize and use information from important primary and credible secondary sources is the peer review process. In every step of our paper we were peer reviewed and I did not find this very helpful especially for the portions about the sources we were using. While I like the idea of a peer review, most of the reviews given to me were very generic and there was not a lot of effort or insight put into them. I know the professor does not have the time to go through each step of the process and grade students on their different steps, but I think there has to be some way to make students do better a better job at peer reviewing.
Kelleryn, thank you for this detailed assessment of your Sacraments class. I found it helpful myself, and I am sure Dr. Pitt will also find it useful.
ReplyDeleteI actually want to know more about this concept map idea. That sounds like it could be very useful for students. Other students definitely run into the same problem as you, that they have good research for one area of their paper but very little for others. An assignment like that could help my students.
That was interesting to me that you did not get much use from the peer review process. I am on the Writing Across the Curriculum Working Group at Loras, and one thing that we have mentioned at a couple of our workshops is that the evidence from research shows that peer reviewing is not a very useful strategy for teaching writing. I think that your experience matches those results.