The Extended Inquiry Project is a semester-long project that promotes critical thinking and fosters the development of students’ metacognitive and meta-rhetorical skills.

 

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The inquiry process first starts with a written project proposal and an oral pitch. You will each consider a line and question of interest and then, after taking some time to compose, pitch your inquiry idea to the class. As you develop and pitch you inquiry to the class, you should do so knowing that the class will be voting on the pitches they would most want to pursue themselves. *It is here that writing is first positioned as being consequential, and you must consider how to best appeal to an audience of peers rather than a “teacher” audience. Once the votes are in, ~23 students are divided into 5-6 groups according to interests.

 

Why compose both a written and oral pitch? The answer is twofold:

• Having to adapt the written project proposal into a “live” pitch creates an opportunity for you to begin considering how the product of an author’s purpose is shaped by audience, genre, mode, and medium.

• It is from the written proposal that both the newly formed groups and I can establish a dialogue and consider practices that will best facilitate the inquiry process.

 

The next phase of the inquiry project will be composing your Inquiry Logs, consisting of six inquiry posts and prompts. These posts are progressive: the first post does as Burke suggests and has you “listening” while the last post asks you to write a statement of contribution, such as that sent to an academic journal. It is through the process of your Inquiry Logs that I hope that you and I will find an appropriate balance between the “nurturing of [your] curiosity, will, and purpose” and “and [my] guidance” (2004, Lee, 6). While the balance is that of a teetering pole in the wind at times,  I will make every attempt to have an open dialogue about my struggles throughout the process and I hope that you will do the same so that we can learn together in our class' community of practice. The six inquiry posts are created individually by all members of an inquiry group, each taking a unique direction to a larger inquiry question and reporting back and creating a feedback loop within their inquiry group’s community of practice.

 

After undergoing the Inquiry Log sequence and reading a wealth of texts that study writing, you will come together as a composing inquiry group and are then responsible for creating a Web Text Contribution. You will need to: 1) Compare, synthesize, and negotiate within your COP as you finalize what your contribution(s) will be and how it will speak to your larger inquiry question (this is building from your sixth Inquiry Log); 2) As a group, must consider the rhetorical situation and discuss the best mode, medium, and genre to position your work; 3) All members of your group will need to move from having read as writer to writing as a reader.