Unit Two Overview

This unit turns our attention to creative works in the culture around us. We will continue to draw on readings that give us helpful concepts and perspectives, but we will be more interested in using them to analyze a cultural text than putting them into conversation with one another. As we work toward this cultural analysis, we will continue to develop our proficiency with our three main sets of writing practices.

Writing Process
In the first unit, we developed strategies for different aspects of the writing process: invention (generating ideas and content), drafting, organization, peer review, revising, and reflection. In this unit, we will expand on these strategies and include more of an emphasis on research. Specifically, our thinking on invention will expand from analyzing texts and putting them into conversation with one another to analyzing a primary text through the lens of secondary texts.

Literacy Practices
We started the first unit by making observations about our own experience and the world around us. We then shifted our attention to making observations about texts and their purposes. We considered how the concept of mindfulness could be understood through the lens of different concepts and perspectives. We analyzed texts to assess their uses and limits and to note their similarities and differences. We applied our thinking to articulate new understandings of mindfulness based on our analysis.

For this unit, we will continue to think about the literacy practices of observing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying. Our observations will focus on cultural texts, and our analysis will shift from rhetorical analysis, which helped us address the arguments and effectiveness of our readings in the first unit, to cultural analysis, which helps us better understand how cultural texts embody and negotiate different meanings and concepts.

Academic Moves
Our third set of writing practices helps us better participate in academic conversations. Harris’s “coming to terms” helped foreground the importance of understanding and responding to other authors as we develop our own ideas. In this unit, Harris’s notion of “forwarding” will help us build upon this foundation in the thinking of others. This move involves taking a helpful aspect of an author’s thinking and developing it further, opening new possibilities for how the idea could be applied or expanded upon.