The following last weeks of the course should concentrate on getting them through preparing, drafting, and revising their EIP essays. Here are some goals to keep in mind:
- Keep highlighting focus! It’s so easy for students to stray into a variety of topics, especially since
- We are stressing the complexity of the issues involved, and
- This will be the longest paper most of them have ever had to write, and they will find it very hard to believe they will make the page requirement with a sufficiently narrow focus.
- Often students get frustrated when they feel they have focused their essay. For example, s/he may have spent days discerning that they want to focus on "standardized testing", which is certainly narrowing things down from the vast field of topics they could discuss. But they still want to refine this a bit more, by narrowing the topic to "standardized testing at the secondary level", for example.
- They should learn to use modes of development appropriate to certain types of claims. For example, if you’re going to make a claim of value, such as "Bullfighting is a barbaric sport and must be stopped", you will need criteria to support this claim (ie., to define "barbaric" in your terms for the essay).
Class Goals: Practicing what they will need to do for the CAP - identifying perspectives, differences between positions, the context informing one’s position. Introduce claims.
Connection to Course Goals: Shows how to define claims and evaluating the efficacy of claims they will encounter as critical readers. Continues with context and begins synthesizing viewpoints and information.
Activities:
- Pass back in-class topic ideas with comments.
- Group activity
: Using a grid like the sample (appendix), have each group fill out the author’s positions on one given issue using both the class readings and students’ annotations (eg. One group will do multiculuralism, another will do single-sex classrooms, etc.). They will also want to be aware of what audiences are concerned with each position taken on the issue. Draw up an OH or handouts to present the questions you want them to answer. (15 min.)
- Groups present their findings. Keep track of them on the board and encourage the class to fill in the grid with the groups’ ideas. (25 min.) You will most likely not get to all of the groups - this is not a problem!
- Class discussion
: Which audiences would be concerned with each issue? For example, who would be concerned about multicultural teaching? (Ethnic Americans might support it, conservative teachers and administrators might believe we should teach only "classic" works of great Western thought . . . ) (10 min.)
Transition to next activity:
- Discussion of different types of claims to clarify definitions.
Remind them that types of claims will suggest different types of proof. The PHG is set up to focus on different types of claims in different chapters:
Type of claim |
Chapter |
Value |
"Evaluating" |
Solution/policy |
"Problem-solving" |
Cause-effect |
"Cause-effect" |
Fact |
"Informing" |
- WTL
: Have each student write down what claims they will be making in their EIP.
- Group activity
.
- Have groups identify the types of claims they see on each person’s list of their claims. Most likely they will see a confusing variety.
- The group then helps each writer to narrow down the types of claims that would be most effective given their audience, purpose, focus . . .
- After each person’s claims have been evaluated, have the group help each other decide what evidence will be needed to support each claim.
CSOW: They are then moving into the important activity of developing their argument, which will be the focus of the next few classes.
Assignment: Read in PHG about appeals and support. Finish CAP for Thursday.