The goal of this section is to prepare students for the CAP assignment. Through the following days, we want them to be able to:
- Recognize the complexity of positions beyond a simple "pro" or "con" stance
- To realize that people hold positions for different contextual reasons, including one’s personal background (gender, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, class), professional experience, etc. As writers, they need to understand those reasons to argue persuasively to each audience
- One activity that can help them see this is to pick an issue, such as the legalization of medical marijuana, and divide them into groups with specific positions they have to identify (such as people taking chemotherapy might support this legislation because THC alleviates the nausea associated with chemo, while law enforcement officers might have a very different position)
- Also, help them to recognize that writers do not always use the "buzzwords" of many topics, such as "multiculturalism" to announce the issue they are discussing. They may have to dig a little without the essay announcing its purpose/issue. Remember this when they get to the issues grid, especially!
Class Goals: Categorizing the readings as positions/perspectives that can be taken on a given issue.
Connection to Curse Goals: Focus on synthesis and getting to know the "conversation" in a particular discourse commmunity.
Activities:
- Collect CMA.
- WTL:
Have students list all the things they hate about education, things in school they thought were unfair, things that confused them AND/OR have them list questions they have always had about why education does X. . .
- Discussion
List all the topics on the board, encouraging students to share their experiences and opinions on each topic/question that comes up. This should be a free-flowing discussion where experiences and opinions are openly shared; feel free to add your own.
- Forming Research Questions
. Once they have a full list, ask them to reframe each topic (or as many as you can get to) in terms of a question that could be researched. Encourage them to write all of these down since they may be good paper topics.
- Discussion (group or classwide)
of main points in Gatto and Anyon to bring out new issues you can add to the list on the board:
Gatto
- "I don't teach English; I teach school"
- Gatto's "seven lessons"
- "central control" of U. S. "requires compulsory schooling"
Anyon
- characteristics of school types based by class background of students
- school as functioning to reproduce "relations in society"
- personal connections to the issues
- Compare Gatto's ideas with Anyon's for similarities and differences. CSOW: They are discovering gradations of difference between positions that are more complex than "for" or "against" something.
- Discuss
implications of these points and the assumptions they present about the purpose of school in the U. S.
- what does each writer believe is the (unacknowledged) purpose of school?
- challenge these notions -- as Gatto said, few people even in the field of education can conceive of alternatives
- personal connection
Assignment: Read Tannen in PHG and Sadker and Sadker in RA (228) and write a brief source evaluation for each according to the guideline on p. 547 PHG. Read "Collecting" and "Evaluating Sources for Research Papers" in PHG
Return to Unit Three:TR