Topic Proposal?

The couple-weeks-in doubts are starting to over come me.  Initially I was really excited about connections between institutional psychology and Rhet/Comp/Labor studies, but now that I look at the syllabus, I can see that there's not going to be much about this.

So, now I'm wondering if I should go with something else that relates more to our readings and the lectures we're listening to.

For example, the Jennifer Crocker lecture got me thinking about compassion and collaboration in the writing classroom, and it reminded me that in my master's thesis on Collaborative and Cooperative Learning, I relied on cognitive science a little bit.  Part of my argument (although quite undeveloped) was that college freshman aren't all that different cognitively from high school seniors.  So, the divide that I saw in the literature that suggested that cooperative learning was for K-12 and collaborative learning for Higher Ed was really just artificial.  So, I advocated for starting with cooperative learning in Freshman Comp and then teach students how to work collaboratively without as much supervision.  I could go in this route again, perhaps delving into psychological research more than I did for my thesis.

Or, after reading Hayes and Flower, I could do some exploring with protocol analysis.  It might be fun to figure out who's used it and when, and then try some 2013 protocol analysis research on my own.  I could even just study myself and a peer or two and see what happens...?

I could also look more into Rhet/Comp history and read articles from the 1980s.  This might even help me with my Comps.  My goal could be to understand the complexities of the cognitive turn int he 1980s and puzzle through why it fizzled out?

Bagh, I'm not sure.  I am still interested in institutional psychology, but I'm not sure where to go from here.  Maybe read the wikipedia page for it in detail and start to follow links?  Get a bigger picture of what it is and what I could do with it?

I think I might do that for my next post.  Maybe that'll clear up whether I should stick with it or move on to something else.