Coop: Why are light-skinned blacks treated better than dark-skinned blacks?
Bobby: Why did the human species evolve to have emotions?
Anna: Are the media to blame when it comes to violence, or are people just weak-minded and easily influenced?
Alyssa: Why do some teenagers believe in cutting?
Serenity: Does your life control you, or do you control your life?
Vanessa: Is depression really an illness? If so, how do we know, and if not, why is that? Looking onward, why do anti-depressants not have a middle ground? Are they really considered a quick fix? Why are people for and against them?
Jazz: Why do we believe what we believe?
Victor: How can we question religion without being stigmatized?
La'Quan: Why is the hardest part of life making a decision? (How do we make decisions? What makes some decisions easier than others?)
Xochitl: Why do we believe in justice?
My students completed the same brainstorming assignment twice. With this assignment they list questions, select one or two, and explore what they already know or suspect about this question, who they could interview about the question, what questions they would ask, and what sources might provide insight into this question.
The first version was due at the beginning of Week 2. Professor and Critical Encounters Fellow Eric Scholl visited our class that day. They wrote their questions on the board. They were concerned that their questions didn't fall under the umbrella of Fact & Faith, but Professor Scholl discussed the questions with them and encouraged the students to pursue their questions with Fact & Faith in mind.
They read "The Falling Man" by Tom Junod (Esquire) and completed the same brainstorming assignment from Junod's point of view -- the process he'd undergone before and while writing this essay. (This is also an example of an essay that begins with a clear question that isn't perfectly answered at the end of the piece. "Who is the falling man? Well, turns out, he might be this guy.")
Then they completed the brainstorming assignment a second time, due at the beginning of Week 3.
They discussed both brainstorming assignments in small groups and wrote response letters to a classmate's assignments, responding to the 2-4 questions their classmate had written about thus far.
They've also read texts that have to do with my sample question, Why do we believe in race?: "Relations" by Eula Biss (from Notes from No Man's Land), the prologue to I'm Down by Mishna Wolff, and "Why Genes Don't Count (for Racial Differences in Health)" by Alan H. Goodman, PhD ( American Journal of Public Health). They've written in response to these texts, compared how they approach the question from different points of view, discussed where they fall on the spectrum from popular to scholarly, and how one might use these texts as sources in an essay that responds to this question. (more or less)
At this point, the beginning of Week 5, they've pretty well settled on the question I've typed above with their names, though some are working on how to phrase, narrow, or broaden their questions.
We've visited the library (information session with April Levy), and they are beginning their research logs and writing to understand and make plans for how to use their sources.
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