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welcome to reteach a place where professors know that student equity gap can be closed. And I willing to put in the work to figure it out. We are dedicated to our teaching, and our students were passionate about improving our classrooms and our communities. We can make a difference. We will make a difference. I am your host, Bruce Hoskins, in my mind and heart are ready to learn. So what's up, everyone? So hey, so this episode we're gonna talk about research papers and presentations. I'm going to spend much more time on the research papers, part of it versus the presentations. And, you know, look, like I said, this is ah, you know, equity inspired space, right equity inspired community college teaching. So my my first question to anyone who's talking about doing a research paper off for their, you know, research paper or research presentation for their class at the community college level. My first question to you is gonna be why, like, why? Why would you I want to do that at the community college level. Please don't misunderstand. This is that writing a research paper is a skill that anyone can learn the question I have is really about. Are you willing to teach it right? Are you willing to teach the skill? All right, in a research paper? Because if you if you're doing this because you expect students to be able to do this already at the community calls level, you're going to be sadly mistaken. This is not disrespectful. This is reality. For our space. We have farm or community college students who at the lower social economic level, right, far more students in this space for that that generally means is that those students came from lower social economic schools. Lower social economic schools do not, Generally speaking, teach the skill set of writing a research paper. Therefore, if we focus on things like research papers at the community college level, what we're doing is we're literally setting up our students to fail if if If If, If If, if we're not willing to teach the skill set, hopefully that actually makes perfect sense in the spaces. Like we, I need to be willing to teach what it is. We want them to learn right and experience and things like that. And so if your goal is to teach them to write a research paper that I am all for it all in move all the chips and folks like for real. Um, really want us to, you know, to think about, though, how we would teach writing a research paper because this Look, look, I'm a freakin ethnic studies, you know, have my being ethnic studies. I have my PhD in sociology, master's and PhD in sociology. So I wrote really big papers in those bases. And so it is It is so important to understand, right? Yes. This is something that is important to be able to ride a research paper. It is important at the community college level. Like I said, I would always come to the space of saying it's important to teach, but are you willing to teach it right? S so because of you assume that they have the skill set I'm gonna break. I'm going to say this again. If you assumed to have the school said you were gonna be sorely mistaken and all you're gonna do it, just get bitter and angry and things like that. And then, um and then, you know, a whole bunch of bad things happen when you start assuming that students have a skill set, right? It's like one students are gonna fail your class straight up or they're gonna fail this assignment straight up. There's no if ands or buts about it, and then you're going to get mad. You're going to get mad. You're gonna get bitter or whatever, or you can do this. And quite honestly, I think this is equally as bad. And that is you're going to say, Oh, well, um well, I have his research paper due, and I'm not going to teach him how to do it. They need to go out and figure it out for themselves. They need to go out to the writing center and help and have them help figure it out and stuff like that. And I'm like, You know what this is? This is a thing. I need you to really understand where I'm coming from as a as a person, as a professor and in this podcast. I really need you to understand that that not to me is just like brutally bad teaching all right to say, Hey, I'm gonna have someone else teach this skill that I really value, but I'm not gonna teach the students how to how to do it. And so, what do you setting them up for? Literally. Like, What are you setting them up for? What you're saying them up to four is if a student doesn't come in with the skill set to do you expect you're setting them up for failure, period Point blank if ends buts about it. And so then we're talking about this, and then I mean, like, think about this, right? You're gonna You're gonna form out the idea of of them learning this skill in your class. Well, imagine if you had spent $150 for a nutritionist, right? It's a year. And you're getting a nutritionist and a nutritionist. The first thing that they tell you is like, Hey, we're going to spend this whole time for you and I What? I we're gonna spend all this time together, but what I need you to do The big thing about this classic for you to design a meal meal plans for yourself, right? And take months, You know, a month long meal plan if you come into the space in your life. Well, what's a meal plan, which is a completely honest question. Right? Um, especially to a nutritionist. Why would a nutritionist expect you'd already know what a meal plan is? That I was gonna be one of the big things that they're gonna cover in the class. And what did the nutritionist said? Hey, Well, I'm not gonna teach you how to do it. Meal plan? Why don't you go and figure it out from somebody else, right? You just got finished paying you $150. For what? I'm just putting that in perspective, like just giving you a different way of thinking about that. Like, yo u we Are we really gonna do that to our students? Is that what we really going to do? If so, I don't Look, I'm gonna question that like that as a teaching strategy, straight up straight to your face. Right? And And I love you. I love folks. Get at the same time, right? You know, we all need to be questioned about our motives about certain projects and what's going on. And so, you know, when it comes to research papers, right? This is this. That that big, overarching question should be Why are we going to do this When? Especially that we know that students are not coming in with skill set. Cool. If you want to teach them to skill set. If you want them to know this skill said then you better teach it to him. Right? You better structure the class so that you're going to actually teach them to skill set. And then, like I said, all in, go all in on the thing and something else now, right? So now going into the next layer is like why I put this into an introduction to sociology. Classes are gonna say introduction like just like an introductory class. Why would we put a research paper in an introduction class? Right. And so for me, I'm gonna just speak introduction to sociology. Now, just say, like, you know, there are so few majors in that space. And there's so few student, the vast majority of students who are taking the introduction of sociology class, which for us here, America Costa were really blessed here that that introduction to sociology is the second most likely class that students will take when they first get to Mira Costa. I'm sure does different across campus is over here, though is like the first, most likely classes for them to take in English class. And then the next most likely class is introduction to sociology. Were really blessed to have built a strong reputation of that in the general studies department and everything right? Oh, but what? Why? I'm saying this is it. We're going to get first time. First semester students who barely know if know it all what their major is. Why are we gonna put a research paper into that space Right again? Big question, mark Big. Why? Why are you going to do this? And remember, I'm always backing into this space to say, if you're willing to teach the skill, by all means, do it. Just make sure that you keep enough time for it right as we're going along. And so then, when it comes to intro classes, I'm like, man, that's not even enough majors into space. In order for me to like, think about a research paper the place where I would even I still wouldn't even do research papers at the community college life. I still wouldn't even do research papers unless I was willing to teach the skill. I wouldn't even think about research papers even in, like social problems or social psychology or, you know, all all of our other classes. I wouldn't think about it in that space either because I would prefer, like article summaries or entertain a bibliography. Tze, that's the way that I would go in that space is like, you know, for students to gain knowledge about a topic that they're interested in again. Look, this is this is about learning. This is about learning. If it's not about learning, what is it about? Right? And so the students are excited about learning. They will do and they will read and they will. Whatever right, all this stuff. But we set it up to where we're putting in the skill set, right that they're focusing on this skill set rather than learning about what they're interested in. Then you know, that's that's a harder road, the hall and and I you know, I appreciate the you know, the you know, the teaching ability that goes, and all of this. And yet at the same time, I would question the structure right? And so, like I said, it were in the social problems class. Well, I mean, that man, that's easy, that we could go all day on, You know, a student just investigating investigating a topic that they're really interested in. Um and, you know, and just have him write article summaries. Or like I said, annotated bibliography is dependent on how structure do you want to do it? You know that that to me is a much more reasonable thing to do. And, you know, it's like I say five other people. If you want to make it more rigorous, do 10 I would say. Definitely put it on. The five were doing annotated bibliography is just because if you're demanding, um, right graduate school level articles and stuff like that, just understand it takes a lot of time to digest. It takes a lot of time to digest, even for us as professors. Why would we expect our students again? Right. Reading graduate school level articles is a skill set. And if you write, if you do that, if you if you have that as an assignment, then you better be willing to teach it, right? Right, So So again. Look, anyway, I feel like I keep repeating myself. If you're going to do it, be willing to teach it. That's rule number one, right? If you're going to do it, be willing to teach it. And if you're going to do and if you're willing to teach it, make sure you put the time, energy and effort into teaching it. That's going to be necessary, Right, s So then you know what annotated bibliography is doing it once a week. While I wouldn't have students read graduate school level articles, you know, once a week that would be I wouldn't be happy with that. And like I said, I have my PhD but newspaper articles, newspaper magazine articles you could definitely do something once a week is something like that. And just understand folks like really, there is a lot of value, you know. Not only is their value in the newspaper articles and magazine articles, but that's what people are most likely going to read for the rest of their life. Who, besides us, reads academic, gradual school level research articles past college, right? It's like I know someone goes there. Well, I do is whatever this for real like on a day to day like what's the most useful skill in order for us to toe impart upon our students is to read what they're gonna be reading on an everyday basis and whatnot. It helped him analyze and break that stuff down. It's so like I said, newspaper magazine articles that, to me is way more accessible, Um, and again builds an excitement because they're not wondering what the articles read you know is all about. I just got finished reading like a 10 page article about, like, the theory of, like, knowledge, theory and knowledge of elements or something like that, and that almost worked my mind, and it was only 10 pages long. I'm just saying this. I just just going head out there, um, you know, as an idea, right? And just saying Like, what? Do you really want the students to get excited about what you want them to learn, right? They can learn a lot better and get excited a lot. Maur with newspaper and magazine articles and over the long run is gonna be a lot more useful to them in their life. That's something to think about. Right? Um, if you're going to do annotated bibliography, right? If you do these graduate school level articles once every two weeks is great, I think is much more humane, right? And then it also gives a students a chance rave to give a rewrite. Right? So remember, we're talking about growth here. We're talking about teaching the skill set, and so you've got to give opportunities for mistakes and stuff like that. And article, Summers article. Some reason annotated bibliography is that way more manageable. You can give unexamined, all right. It's like a short example of what's going on into space. I wouldn't do more than two pages, but, you know, if you wanted to to amp it up, you could make it more than two pages. I would look, I would encourage you to actually keep the number of pages low, because if students get excited, they'll write Maur. That's what I've been experiencing. I have this assignment of media analysis in my class where I give 100 words like I tell him you need to write 100 words, which is, you know, paragraph right za shorter paragraph. I mean, what not But what I do that you know, there's there's very few people, first of all, that only write 100 words, and most of them are writing anywhere between 200 to 400 words. And I'm like If I would have made the assignment 200 to 400 words, they would have just stressed out and it's like, Look, I want them to be excited about learning. I want himto right for the joy of writing and learning. And so that's that's That's why I would say hey two pages if they right more than right more than right. Well, you don't want him to write too much less than that. But, um, they write Maur Amazing, right? That's what we're here to do to get them excited about learning. And then it is in my research methods class that I do a paper right, and so that's and so so right. And so I'm thinking about the progression. Thinking about what we're doing here at the community college is level is like, really to build them up, to be able to succeed at the CSU and you see level right, that's that's That's the progression and so have you. If you assume that the student had all those skills already. Most likely they would be at a CSU or you see already, right? And so is so. You know, for anybody who's really having a hard time with that, it's like, Look, just I mean, real talk, right? And so yes, And you know what? I get it If you haven't a P I b student in your class. Um, yeah, you're right. They're gonna Maybe they do know about this stuff, but remember again. But just because they know it doesn't mean that they want appreciate a refresher and and then because they know the style doesn't mean that they appreciate all the nuances of it as your teaching it. And so, you know, really embrace the idea of teaching the skill set, right? And so now let's talk about the paper Already gave you the punchline in the in the shorter ones, like you got a scaffold scaffold. It means that you give this thing. You know, it's a big fancy word for Well, it's not that big, but it's a word just to say it's like, you got to give the paper out in pieces. You got to give the paper out in pieces. Don't Don't give it to all at once. You want to know why you don't give it out to him all at once or you don't get it? It's like if you don't scaffold it, you're going to encourage cheating. It's gonna you're gonna encourage cheating. And the students with the resource is are going to be the ones that are going to cheat, period point blank. No, if I know that's not all of them, but for real, If you don't structure it, you're gonna encourage cheating. Like, literally you're gonna encourage cheating. And, you know, look, I'm gonna tell you the weight of people cheat now you ain't never gonna catch them cheating Well, lost a stupid and don't have a lot of money S O s. Oh, that s o again. You're setting up the system for low socioeconomic students to fail because they don't have the resources to cheat the way that they need to in order to pass the damn class. But if you give you structure your class differently if you structure your class differently, you will encourage learning rather than cheating. You will encourage learning rather than get done with this paper right. So that's you know that's the thing, right? Um, s seldom When you Scott for this. The first thing that you got to do is you gotta go to the library, spent all day at the library, spend your whole class period of the library. Do not short this because librarians are freaking amazing. Librarians are amazing. They save my graduate school career because I didn't know the words that I needed to type in in order to even figure out my topic about multiracial people about multi racial identity formation. And so because I kept on typing in multiracial identities are multiracial people on what I kept on coming up with. And the research was like multiracial cities, like people, cities with different races in it. And I'm like, What the heck is going on here? And then I talked to a librarian. They were amazing. And they said, Well, why don't you try? Admits, raise people? And unlike mixed race, that what kind of terms? That is like, I mean, I've seen it before, but who uses that anymore? And then boom, I put it in and all the research pops up amazing. And it was a library that helped me do that. Librarians are amazing. Amazing. Amazing Use the librarians talk to the library's before you go into the library to make sure, right. But before you bring your class in there, it's, like, normal. You're gonna have to, you know, structure the time and everything, but be as detailed as you can when you're talking to the library is because they want to help you. They My God, my goodness, they love helping people. Research, it's amazing, is absolutely amazing what they can do s so, you know, be as detailed as possible. But also, be honest, it's like, Yo, it's like, you know, can you help me with this? And I guarantee you that these libraries, they will go all in for you. Um, you know, if you treat him nice and then, you know, bombs and chocolate, they love chocolate anyway. Oh, topic, um, toe limit or not, limit the topic. That's a real big question in the space, right? It s o the library. That's one. That's one week the next week. It's topic, you know? Right? Said limit or not, Limit right. Meaning this is that. You can say Hey, this this topic has to be in sociology, but that's not limiting at all, right? It's like, literally, you can study almost anything. A sociology. But if you wanted to do something like me, me, I do like I tell them. It's like it has to be social justice focused. That narrows things down where I was like, I want people in my class to think about how to make positive change in the world. So that's that's That's a way to do something right? And so you know, if you want to get more restrictive, you can say, you know, you can be more restrictive. Just understand when you get more restrictive, you have just eliminated student interest, not eliminated. It totally is right because there's always gonna out of, you know, 40 students just gonna always be some students that are going to rock with you. It's like they want to know what you know. They want to learn what you wantto want them to mine. That's cool. But those other 30 students or so they're gonna be like, Yeah, I wish I would have been able to look at my own topic right now, so and so you know. Just think about it like that, right? Me? Ay dio. Then the next week, I have him do 10 citations. All right, 10 citations. Give me 10 citations of articles that you could possibly look at before doing your literature review and whatnot. Incident. That's the 10 citations. Be ready for this. They're gonna half ass this assignment because look to me. I don't even mind the hustle. I don't I don't mind a hustle when people hustle. I always appreciate the hustle. I meaning that you know why they're gonna look at the first like they're gonna google their, you know, topic or they're gonna go to J store, whatever. And they're gonna go to their topic, and they're gonna write down the 1st 10 articles or something like that. And I'm like, I can't be mad at that. But what I want to make sure is for youto just a brace yourself for the fact that once they do this, they're gonna have a harder time with the literature review because those 10 citations are supposed to be used to, you know, narrow down your what you're gonna focus on in your literature review, but they don't appreciate that. And so they're gonna hustle through those 10 citations, and then they're going to get to a space where they're like, Oh, my goodness. I wish I would have spent more time on those 10 citations to figure out if this is article Was some tonight? I really needed or really was gonna be useful, right? And so be ready for that. And be ready to make it a teaching moment. Be ready to give them more time t do to 10 citations or be ready for them to have more time to do the literature review. Right? And so you know what I'm talking about. There s So the next part is literature review again. I know the week, maybe two weeks, depending on how you want to scaffold that. And I tell them in this base, like, you know, what's the difference between a master's and a PhD? I don't want them to, you know, spend. You know, it's like they are trying to get their PhD right now, right? It's like you gotta remind some of the big you know, the students who are overachievers is like, I don't need you to write a dissertation here. I need to just do this and I wanna you know, I want you to focus in on this and whatnot, and I and I talk to them about the difference between, you know, because it's a research methods classes. So I really feel like it's important to talk about, you know, master's thesis. You know, a lot of people create original eye or a state estate original ideas in the master's thesis, but it's like with a master's program like the thesis is not necessarily like new thought, and stuff like that is contributing to academia. But it's not, is not necessarily the burden is not necessarily to be a new fresh thing. If you would wall a PhD, yes, you have to contribute some original thought or whatever and what not? And so that's something that's very useful to say in this base for for the students. And so this is why we do. A literature review is like we need to see what other people have done in the space on DDE. What not? And so the next part of it is that I give is the introduction and, you know, introductions. Last decent look for me. This may be very different for for you, but for me and the style that I have, I'm very much I very much embraced the me search, right? I don't know if anybody's heard that phrase before, right, that researchers actually me search right that you're researching yourself as your You know what? You're concerned about what you're thinking about things that you experience. Um, because that was my dissertation. My dissertation was entirely about how did myself, a CZ present as black and Japanese developed a new identity of being racially identify myself as black solely is black. Um, while my Japanese and white friends were much more likely to identify with being Japanese or white, and I didn't understand where that was coming from. And so that was me. That was my me search, right? I was. I was literally researching me. And so therefore, my introduction all of this to say that my introduction, it was very personal to me. It was a personal story that helped me get to, you know, to talk about my thesis. I mean, why not? It's so Then I embrace me search. I embrace using personal narratives in order to introduce the topic. If your students don't have that whatever right, they cannot do it that way. Um, but like I said for me, I really encourage students to start with the personal story. If they have one to really start with a personal story especially have to do in a social justice topic or they're talking about student equity or something like that. It's like, That's that's it's really important to center themselves in the work. Um, and then the next part is the discussion analysis. This is a lot of work in my research methods class. This is like half like the half of the class. I'm checking in with them. Um, you know, once a week or so, uh, checking in with them and regressive progress. I'm helping them. I'm breaking stuff down, you know, just really making sure that you spend individual time Now, if you can in the discussion analysis, especially if you give, like, individualized top it like two students are allowed to pick their own topics because you really wanted to, you know, spend time and help them out. What? Not now. If you have much more of a class room project, right It's like it's much more centered on a certain thing on the something specific that you can take this class time in order to do something right, s So this is what I do right now. So that's that's my structure through the class I scaffold, right, A scaffolding. This whole thing is like it takes the entire semester to do this. If you have you, have you map this out through the entire semester. It takes an entire semester for me to do this. And while I do that, I teach them research methods. Hopefully, that actually makes sense as a structure for the class. I could talk much more about that. Hit me up on the email if you need, if you want to talk about that more personally and whatnot. But here's another part right is like it's a point distribution that if you focus on the process, which I would strongly encourage community college in the community college space process, process, process think more about the process. Well, honestly, I think more about the process in a lot of different bases, but Community college, I really think that stressing the process is way more important on the stress in the product and saw all of you. If you stress the process when you do the point values on, you know the topic 10 citations there should review introduction pieces. Then that should be as like as many points as the paper itself. Right? And so is like if you're gonna have like, there should be 100 points of value in all the process and then 100 points of value in the paper itself, right? And putting it all together and everything. And so that's that's what I would argue. If you're focusing on the process, you definitely you may even want away. It Maur the process more. You may want to make it, you know, 150 points his process and you know, 50 points is paper. Of course, right. You can do the points differently. I mean, what not in scale it up to whatever it is you're doing. But that's, you know, just to give you a general idea of how you could do that, while if you focus on product and that means that write the paper is going to be more of the points than off in the process And so that means that out of 200 points, right, 50 points will be on the process, and then 150 points will be on the actual paper itself. And like I said, you know, everybody different strokes for different folks. But when we do something like this, it's like I said, it's a thing. It's a thing. Thio, understand that students are going to be more likely to cheat if you focus on the product. Right? But if you piece these things together, students are more likely to do these things when they're small and manageable, relatively small and manageable on what not? And so right. So we want to think about that all the way through this as we're going along. So hey, folks like, Look, I talked about that the research paper part way longer than what I thought I was gonna talk about it and so sorry. Not sorry about that. I think I said some really good things in. That's basically we got. We're in a really good space with that. And so I'm going to save the the presentations, poster presentations part. I'm gonna put that I'm gonna combine that with the group projects. I think now, now that I'm going through it, I think it might actually fit better. Um, honestly, I didn't realize that. So much to say about research papers. I'm not gonna lie about that. Would that being the case? I hope you learned something. Peace. Thank you for listening to this episode of re teach. If you want to learn more about me or my open source introduction to sociology textbook, please go to Bruce Hoskins dot com In closing. I want to leave us all with the question. If you learn something today that you think would help closure student equity gaps, how long will it take to incorporate this into your classroom? A year? A semester? Next month. Today, no matter the time table, we must commit ourselves to becoming better teachers. Our students deserve it. All of them, not just the ones that are good. Already