Dr. Dean Taciuch
George Mason University

Spring 2021

English 302: Students as Scholars

• Students will be able to analyze rhetorical situations–audience, purpose, and context–in order to recognize the expectations of readers and understand the main purposes of composing across multiple contexts relevant to their fields of study.
• Students will understand the conventions of academic and non-academic genres, to include usage, specialized vocabulary, format, and attribution/citation systems.
• Students will be able to apply critical reading strategies that are appropriate to advanced academic and non-academic texts of relevance to their fields of study.
• Students will identify and synthesize multiple perspectives in articulating and refining a research question relevant to their fields of study.
• Students will engage in a recursive process of inventing, investigating, shaping, drafting, revising, and editing to produce a range of academic and non-academic texts of relevance to their fields of study.

Students as Scholars (SaS) Learning Goals

This course participates in the Students as Scholars (SaS) program, a university-wide initiative that encourages undergraduate students to engage in scholarly research.  Across campus, students now have increased opportunities to work with faculty on original scholarship, research, and creative activities, through their individual departments and the OSCAR office (http://oscar.gmu.edu).

At the end of the course, the Office of Institutional Assessment and the Composition Program will collect random samples of students’ final research projects to assess the effectiveness of the Students as Scholars Program. This assessment has no bearing on your grade in the course.

As a Mason Impact course, ENGH 302 teaches students to understand knowledge creation and to investigate a meaningful question through the development of an inquiry-based research project that evaluates, synthesizes, and incorporates multiple perspectives.