This book contains the essays students wrote and revise as one of the two summative assessment options for the course ENG-L 223 Intro to Ethnic American Literature, with the theme “Writing the Midwest into Being.”

The goal of our class was to think through the ways in which the Midwest is home to a more heterogeneous population than most public discourse about the region ever acknowledges. Duing the course of the semester, we studied literary works (novels, stories, poems), as well as a a variety of non-fiction texts like podcasts, news stories, and ethnographic writing by and about a variety of ethnic groups who live across a range of the states that make up the American Midwest.

In the summative assignments, students were encouraged to pursue small-scale independent research to find out more about a specific Midwestern state, ethnic group, religious community, or other identifiable community within the Midwest and make explicit connections to the topics we had discussed in class. After revision, I uploaded student essays here and arranged them thematically by ethnic or other group identity.

My goal in creating this assignment was to give students autonomy to end the class by focusing on knowledge they created, presented, and taught to both me and their peers. So, this collection represents the assembled insight of this particular class, written under the strange conditions of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. I am very pleased with the results.

Here was the prompt for the draft of the essay:

Prompt

Based on your reading and interests, do one of the following:

• put together a 5 minute Power Point presentation or
• write a a 1,200 word essay

that makes an argument about the importance of knowing more about topic X [whatever you chose] in order to better understand the role of Ethnicity Y to State Z.

Regardless of which you choose,  the presentation and the essay must prove their respective argument (the thesis) through reference to appropriate sources.

Formatting Criteria

Regardless of format, your summative assessment assignment must comply with the following criteria:

1. Have your full name and a descriptive title of your project (Essay for L223 or Presentation for L223 won’t cut it.)
2. Include a List of Works cited (as last slide in Zoom PPT or following last page in essay. Word count for Works cited won’t count against your 1,200 word).
3. Focus on a topic with some explicit connection to the assigned material for class.

II. Individual Essay Drafts

• The essay should have a descriptive title that lets us know what the essay’s argument will be about.
• Essay length (not counting Works Cited):  1150-1250 words for an A range grade; 950-1050 for a B range grade; 700-800 words for a C range grade. We are strict on these. No essay that has fewer than the specified minimums may earn a grade in the range.
• Essays must have an underlined thesis.
• Essays must be broken into more than 1 paragraph.
• Claims/direct quotes:  4 claims/quotes for an A range grade; 3 for a B range grade; 2 for a C range grade.  Quotes must include parenthetical info (last name and page # if available).  At least 1 quote must be from the text that corresponds with it.