Emily Mildenhall Research Methods/ENGL 6401

Blog Post #4: Revising I've fallen some behind in this class because of an unexpected illness (autoimmune encephalitis, the doctors think; being in the hospital for 2.5 weeks was an experience!), but I'm finally on the mend and am working to get everything edited and submitted. I have a few citations I have to fix because I got the capitalization and page number formatting wrong, so that'll be my first task. Next I'll flesh out some of the areas that need a bit more context and cohesion for better flow. Finally, I'll finish my research proposal with either a usability test design and/or some sort of interviews. I'm reading chapter 7 today, so I should have a better idea of what I'd like to do after I play a bit of catch-up.  These past few weeks have been challenging, but I'm optimistic that I can make something out of this still. :)

Closing the Gaps During the research stage of my literature review, I didn't really have a solid idea about what gaps there might be that I could fill with primary research (or at least make suggestions for). Some sources were extremely specific to accessibility and/or universal design in technical writing courses only, while others were very general and discussed the broader implications of higher education institutions making accommodations for their students. Once I took the time to write the whole literature review, however, a couple of things stood out. One thing I noticed is that basic composition courses were not studied as often. More often than not, accessibility and universal design principles were not directly applied to English 1010 or English 2010 (or the course equivalents for other universities). Most of the research was also highly focused on online and hybrid course setups and was rather sparse in terms of suggesting how to make in-person courses more accessible.  ...

Choice Paralysis in Action Topic Discussion: Alas, we're in week 4 of the semester, and I'm still refining my topic. The good (and bad) news is that I have so many research interests! I've been digging through databases for the past week and skimming lots of articles, but keeping in mind that we're writing literature reviews before we write our proposals, I'm trying to stick to something that already has a developed body of research that I could synthesize and build onto. Since I'd like to create lesson plans for some sort of composition course, whether that be English 1010, English 2010, or a new Prof/Tech course, I looked into a number of sources regarding technical writing pedagogy. This bled into a few different possible research questions, all of which I've narrowed down to the themes of usability, accessibility, and universal design in the writing classroom. Possible research questions (I did admittedly get some help from Chat GPT for these): What role...

Getting Started While I have a general idea for what I want my research topic to be, I still have some fine tuning to do. The one thing I know for sure is that I want my final project to be redesigned curriculum for English 1010 and English 2010 that I can call my own. I've found teaching to be incredibly fulfilling, and I think that using my technical writing background to develop lesson plans and signature assignments would be an appropriate culmination of my time in this program.  I brainstormed a few research subtopics with Dr. Joy several months ago, and a few of the ones she mentioned were instructional design, visual rhetoric, and user experience (the students would be the users). I've conducted a couple of usability tests as well, so that might be something worth looking into. The two courses I took last semester also piqued my research interests considering ethics; for one, it was algorithms and terms of service agreements, and for the other, it was how technical write...