Assessment for EDEC 575: Critical Disability Studies for Education

Final grade breakdown
 The final paper and milestones share a common set of formatting requirements.

The expectation at McGill is that a 3 credit course will involve 135 hours of work (9 hours a week, 15 weeks). 3*13 (39) hours will be spent in class, leaving 96 hours of homework.

I'm expecting 26 hours will be spent on the assigned readings over the course of the term. 8 hours will be spent on preparing the nano-ethnography presentation.

There will be four milestones to prepare you for the final paper. Most of the work you'll do for the final paper will be done in the process of completing the milestones. Each milestone will be about 13 hours of work, and then revising your Milestone 4 into your final paper should be about 10 hours of work.


Participation

Each week we will have 1-2 worksheets to complete and hand in by the end of class. Class & Slack participation will also be considered under the Participation grade.


Presentation of a nano-ethnography

Starting in week 5, each class we'll have 2-3 short presentations by students and auditors.

A lot of valuable discussion about disability is happening on social media, often through hashtags (e.g. #DoctorsAreDickheads, #WhyDisabledPeopleDropOut). For a given presentantion, I want you to:
 In week 3, I will give an example presentation, and start the sign-up process.

Talk to me about accommodation needs.

Template for Assignments

Formatting requirements:
 An example word template is here for you to download. A LaTeX template for you is also available.

When submitting to me, attach pages by paper clip rather than staple. Please use double sided printing to save trees. :)

Final Paper Milestones

Each milestone will be handed in twice. The first week you hand it in you'll be giving each other peer feedback. Then you'll have a week to revise and hand in again and I will then mark the paper.


Milestone 1: Issue Proposal and Personal Reflection

In this milestone, you'll identify a disability justice related issue that is of concern to you personally. I want you to then identify three possible actions that you could undertake to actually address to this issue. For each action, describe what would be needed to carry it out before the end of term, and what effects you think it would have.

You'll need to make it clear how it relates to the learning goals of the course. I'll also ask you to do some personal reflection on why this issue matters to you personally.

You are required to use the standard paper template for this course (see above).

In your milestone I want you to answer these questions:
(You may copy/paste the questions, or just refer to them by number e.g. have a section header for Question 1, Question 2, etc)
  1. What is a disability justice related issue/topic that is of concern to you? [5-25 words]
  2. Why is this issue a disability justice issue? [50-150 words]
  3. Why does this matter to you personally? [50-200 words]
  4. What are three possible actions that you could undertake to meaningfully address the issue? These actions need to be ones that are doable by the end of term. [100-300 words]
  5. For each action:
    1. What would you need to do to carry it out? [50-200 words for each / 150-600 words] --- note if you plan on working in a group, I expect you to mention your (expected) groupmates here! :)
    2. What effects do you think it would have and how likely are they? (Positive and negative) [100-250 words for each / 300-750 words]
  6. How do your topic and proposed actions relate to the course readings and learning goals? Justify your answers and cite readings as appropriate. [300 - 700 words]

You may use point-form for your answers.

Page limit: 5 pages excluding bibliography. You will not be penalized for being concise!

In week 4, print off four copies and bring them to class. You'll give each other peer feedback on them in class.
In week 5, print off one copy revised based on peer feedback and bring it to class. Elizabeth will mark that version.


 
Milestone 2: Selecting and Contextualizing

In this milestone, I want an update on your planned action, and to push you to read up on the historical and theoretical context of your action. This will involve doing a literature review. Note if you are new to doing literature reviews, McGill librarians are here to help you!

For this milestone and subsequent milestones you are required to use a reference management tool of your choice (e.g. Zotero, Mendeley, BibTeX). You should be able to change the format of all your citations from APA to something else (e.g. Chicago) with the click of only a few buttons (or lines of code for LaTeX). It's 2020 and you should not be manually formatting your citations.

In your milestone I want you to answer these questions:
  1. What action have you settled on for your final project? Describe what you plan to do, including a schedule for carrying it out. Indicate what you have done already. [200 - 300 words]
  2. Related works: what similar actions have been done before? How does your action relate/compare to them? [150 - 300 words]
  3. What is the historical context of the action you are planning? (e.g. if you are doing an action for a specific disability, what is the history of activism for that disability?) [150 - 300 words]
  4. Pick one of {feminist DS, DisCrit, crip theory, queer crip theory, crip technoscience} and relate/apply it to your planned action. You will want to go beyond the course readings and look for existing work literature pertaining to that theory and your action [100 - 200 words]
Page limit: 5 pages excluding bibliography. You will not be penalized for being concise!

In week 7, print off four copies and bring them to class. You'll give each other peer feedback on them in class.
In week 8, print off one copy revised based on peer feedback and bring it to class. Elizabeth will mark that version.
 
Milestone 3: Progress Update

March 16, 2020: I am canceling this milestone since McGill has canceled class for two weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this milestone, I want an update on the previous milestone.
  1. How is carrying out your action going? Give a progress report. [1 page]
  2. Related works: list *three* distinct related works and relate/compare your action. If you already discussed three related works in the last milestone, you may reuse/refine that text! [1.5 pages]
  3. Historical context: list *three* pieces of historical context that are relevant to understanding your action through a sociohistorical lens. Again, you can reuse/refine text from the previous milestone. [1.5 pages]
  4. Look through the requirements for the final paper. Identify any parts of the paper that you can write already, and write/assemble at least one draft page of new material. It does not need to all be from the same section. It can be bullet-form. Give me some scaffolding to explain what the writing is, how you envision it coming together. This will be marked strictly for completion, and is only here to encourage you to start writing more of the final paper now, rather than later! [1 page]
Page limit: 6 pages excluding bibliography. You will not be penalized for being concise!

In week 10, print off four copies and bring them to class. You'll give each other peer feedback on them in class.
In week 11, print off one copy revised based on peer feedback and bring it to class. Elizabeth will mark that version.

 

Milestone 4: Draft Paper

This milestone gives you chance to get formative feedback on a rough draft of your final paper. The more complete it is, the more feedback you can get! See the details on the final paper below.

In week 13, to get peer feedback, share copies of your draft with your discussion groups (see slides of week 10 for group assignments). You'll then have a week to revise.

In week 14 submit a pdf on mycourses for Elizabeth to give you feedback on.
Page limit: 7 pages excluding bibliography.

Final Paper

Due: April 22. [Total marks: 100.]

For the final project in this course, you are expected to identify an change that you can make in this world that will advance disability justice --- and then actually make that change happen!

You can team up with classmates to collectively make change. This paper involves individual reflections, so if you are working in a group you have two options: submit separate papers, or submit one paper which contains both of your individual reflections.

In terms of content, your final paper should contain the following things [60 points]:
  1. A description of what you planned [5 points]
  2. An explanation of what motivated you personally to do this [5 points]
  3. A description of the relevant history [5 points]
  4. A description of contemporary related work [5 points]
  5. A description of what you actually did; ideally this includes a photograph or drawing to illustrate what you did, but whether that is suitable will depend on the nature of your action [5 points]
  6. The impact the action had, to the best of your knowledge --- on yourself, on your community, on others, etc [5 points]
  7. A discussion relating your action to one of the theories from this course [5 points]
  8. Meaningful citations to at least five readings from the course syllabus [5 points - 1 each]
  9. A discussion comparing your action to related/historical work [5 points]
  10. A reflection on the entire process. How did you feel? What did you learn? What surprised you? How did what you planned compare to what you actually did? What would you do differently if you did it again? How do you think your own positionality affected the action? (Etc) [15 points]
In terms of format, I expect an experience report, autoethnography, or accidental ethnography*. Whichever of those you choose, this means a first-person narrative account. I expect the paper to have these sections:
  1. An abstract, about 100-150 words [5 points]
  2. An introduction which lays out your motivation, who you are, what this paper is about. About 1 page.
  3. Background information: what should the reader know in terms of theory, history, related work, etc --- in order to appreciate your action. About 1-2 pages. [5 points]
  4. A description of your action and its impacts. About 1-2 pages.
  5. A personal reflection on the action and discussion of the action in light of theory/history/related work. About 1-3 pages.
  6. A short summary, about 100-200 words
  7. Bibliography
  8. An appendix containing any materials you think are relevant (e.g. lesson plan, handouts) to fully appreciating your action
If you are writing this as an autoethnography, you may combine Section 4 and Section 5. Additional notes on marking:
 Page expectation: 5-7 pages excluding references and appendix
If you are in a group doing a group submission, you have an extra page.

If you are comfortable doing so, I highly encourage you to upload your final paper to SocArXiv, a public repository of academic preprints. A preprint is a paper that has not (yet) been published in a journal. By sharing your report you can help spread the word of what actions people are doing and the insights you've learnt! And you can put it on your CV! (You might even consider sending it to a journal too!)


* Unfamiliar with autoethnography or accidental ethnography? You can learn about each here: