Major Writing One:
Reading Critically, Summarizing Accurately, Responding Argumentatively
Topic: Why are we here? Thinking & writing critically about higher education – in a pandemic
Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to read a text critically, summarize it accurately, and respond to it argumentatively. Further, our specific writing tasks will focus on:
-identifying & summarizing accurately the
position held by another;
-arguing your position as it responds in conversation to a position held by another;
-entering into conversation with another text through the use of properly packaged direct quotations;
-developing an original thesis; and
-defending your perspectives with specific support from written sources and your experiences.
Description: Respond to one of the essays
or articles provided by Mr. Smith about learning during the pandemic. You are also required to find two additional sources that address your topic, in addition to the main essay. You may also choose another “main essay” on the topic of education in the pandemic, to which you may respond, but that essay must be approved by the instructor in advance.
Once
you find an essay you want to respond to as your main essay, read it multiple times, carefully annotating & clearly identifying the thesis/position. Choose to (1) agree, (2) disagree, or (3) agree/disagree simultaneously with the author’s stance. Write an essay that accurately summarizes and persuasively responds to your chosen text.
Required Research: Each essay requires at least three secondary sources: (1) conversation partner piece (preferably from TSIS) with which you will agree or disagree or agree/disagree simultaneously; (2) another that supports your position implicitly or explicitly; (3) a third that provides essential evidence; it either supports your position or the position you disagree with or appears to hold no position. You will need to examine more sources than you ultimately use.
Readings:
Read all assigned pages in They Say/I Say for this unit and at least two articles online about your topic, once you have determined your topic and approach.
Basic features of your paper:
A thesis that clearly articulates your position.
Logical support and evidence for your position
Direct quotes and paraphrases, properly introduced and attributed, from your outside sources.
Consideration of (but not concession to) a counterargument.
Word length & MLA format: 800-1200 words (3-5 pages); 12-point Times New Roman font; Works Cited page
Audience: College students living in the southeast. They are familiar with pandemic learning, but not the specifics of your sources or your response.
Due Dates: -Blog 1 response – the ‘Believing
Game’ on page 41 due on Ning at 11:59 on 1-25-21.
-Blog 2 response – summary/response to Freire handout (separate attachment) on Ning at 11:59 on 1-27-21
-Blog 3 argumentative response to one main essay, practicing “agree,” “disagree,” or
“agree/disagree” simultaneously. Due at 11:59 on 1-29-21’/
-Workshop Drafts: Due the week of Feb 1-5, sign up if you want to read your essay in class
-Workshop Revision Draft 2 due Feb 8
For Blog 2 (due on Wednesday, January 27 by 11:59pm)
--Please read this excerpt for class on Wednesday, January 27, 2021
--Summarize this excerpt by Paulo Freire by describing the meaning of the text in your own words (paraphrase).
--Also quote the article directly and briefly at least two times. Try to use signal verbs and quote sandwiches
--Use as many templates from They Say / I Say as you are able.
--300-600 words minimum
This reading is from: PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED by Paulo Freire. New York: Continuum Books, 1993.
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.