The purpose of the final essay and presentation is to reflect on your own service work, share your experiences with others, make connections between public health and environmental studies theory (literature) and practice (actions, service learning), and to strengthen communications skills, including: formal writing, development of arguments with supporting evidence (research), and visual and oral presentations. To accomplish these objectives, this rubric outlines the characteristics of a successful essay and presentation, and describes how your essay and presentation will be assessed.
Essay:
The structure of the essay should include a descriptive title, introductory paragraph with a thesis statement and preview, a body that consists of paragraphs that make arguments supported by evidence, and a conclusion that reviews the main purpose of the essay and summarizes the key take away points from the body.
The final essay should be 2,500 words, which is roughly 10 pages double spaced, plus a page with the bibliography. The bibliography is not included in the word count. You may choose the font, page margins, spacing (single, 1.5, or double), and number of columns (one or two). However, all papers should include a title, your name, page numbers and bibliography.
My expectation is that the final essay builds on the midterm essay. All of the content in the midterm essay may be included in the final essay, with the exceptions that I will be evaluating your final essay to see if recommendations for the midterm essay are adopted in the final essay, and any prescriptive statements (e.g. I plan to engage in service work with…) are change to past tense (e.g. I completed service work with …, or I had planned to complete service work with …, but needed to change ….). Copy-edits or comments about spelling corrections in the midterm essay content should be corrected. If I commented that the midterm essay thesis statement was unclear or needed to be rewritten, I will look to see that the final essay makes an effort to accommodate those changes.
Content:
The first paragraph should be the introduction, describing briefly your service work and how it relates to ideas in the course (thesis), and how the coming paragraphs will provide more detail about your experience in practice and theory (preview). To see examples of thesis statements and preview statements, please see the midterm rubrics. Keep in mind, to include the updates to the body, which are required, you will likely need to edit your preview statement and possibly your thesis statement, to include additional readings, e.g. Shiva (2008), Davis (2023), and one from the following – Sowards (2018), Fitzsimmons (2018), Embrey (2018), or Whyte (2018).
The body of the essay should provide more details about the service work you have done over the semester. There is flexibility in how you communicate about your work and how you connect your work to the course readings and discussion. You could introduce key theories and definitions and then explore how those theories relate to your service work practice, or you could describe your service work first and relate your work to theories from class. You could have several sub-headings describing different types of work, and in each sub-section connect theory and practice. However, it is necessary to connect your service learning to the public health literature. I would expect that most essays would engage the definition of environmental justice, such as the one used by the EPA.
For the final essay, it is important to cite all of the course texts: Shiva (2008), Davis (2023), two examples from Project 562, and three separate chapters from The Nature of Hope. In addition to these sources, you will need to collect a minimum of four additional sources. One of these sources should relate to your work: it should be an organization’s website. One source should be from peer-reviewed literature. Peer-reviewed literature has undergone peer-review, and includes books, or journal articles that are referenced in citation indexes, such as the Web of Science or JSTOR. One source should be one example from a newspaper, digital news source, or documentary. The last source should be from the visual and performing arts, film and/or humanities (such as literature or poetry). Altogether, I expect a minimum of ten sources: Shiva, Davis, three different authors from The Nature of Hope, Project 562, the organization website most closely related to your service work, a peer-reviewed source, a news source, and an artistic source. Remember, though, you should have already had six sources in the midterm essay, making the final essay a revision that includes four additional sources. Of course other sources are encouraged, but not required, such as adding or citing advocacy writing (letters to the editors or op-eds).
The purpose of the external sources is to demonstrate the connection between public health theory and practice. These sources should be used to provide supporting evidence connected to your service learning. As with the midterm essay, you may identify content from your own reading responses to also use in your essay, if you feel that it is appropriate. For example, you can use the quotes you found from Project 562 and Kyle Powys Whyte from Reading Response #7, which we did in class, or the example from the film we watched and wrote about in Reading Response #8.
The conclusion is the last paragraph. The last paragraph should recap your arguments and end with a well thought out last sentence that includes what you believe is a key take-away message from your essay.
Figures:
In addition to your text and citations, you should plan to include one or more pieces of visual information, such as photos, maps, charts or tables. Photos, maps or charts that you do include should have a feature in a meaningful way in your essay, and they should be referenced using a figure caption title and number (e.g. refer to the figure in the text as Figure 1, and include a caption under the figure with that includes both the figure number and title).
Key Components:
Expectations and Grade Values (out of 100 points):
Content
(60 percent)
Essay contains a descriptive title, and an introductory paragraph with a clear thesis and preview statement, all of which connect service work to readings in environmental justice (12 percent).
The body of the essay develops arguments that are supported by evidence from Shiva, Davis, three chapters from The Nature of Hope, and Project 562 (15 percent).
The body of the essay includes a description of service work (completed this semester), and cites at least one organizational website related to service work (15 percent).
The body of the essay contains one example of a peer reviewed source, a news source, and an artistic source (12 percent).
The essay finishes with a concluding paragraph that highlights key arguments of the essay (6 percent).
Style
(25 percent)
The essay is a minimum of 2,500 words, but does not exceed 3,000 words (5 percent).
The essay includes a minimum of one visual element that is referenced in the text and included with a figure or table caption (5 percent).
The essay has been proof-read, contains no spelling or grammatical errors, and includes page numbers (5 percent).
The essay adopts appropriate corrections and edits from the midterm to transform the essay into a compelling final essay (10 points)
Bibliography
(15 percent)
The bibliography is alphabetized and formatted in Harvard style (5 percent).
The bibliography contains a minimum of ten sources, whose criteria are specified in the instructions above. If the source is not included in both the text and the bibliography, then it is not counted as a source (5 percent).
The essay includes in-text citations for a minimum of ten sources that are formatted properly in Harvard style (remember the period comes after the parentheses) (5 percent).
Just add on information to midterm paper which is all ready 5 pages i need another 5 pages.Please follow the rubrics very carefully.
