AS91475: Writing Portfolio

Credits: 6 Word Range: 650-1000 words per piece

Due Dates: Piece #1 draft: T1 W6 Piece #2 draft: T2 W7 Piece #3 draft: T3 W5 Final Hand-In: T3 W10 (Fri, 19 Sept)

FOR YOUR FINAL HAND-IN, YOU WILL SUBMIT WHAT YOU THINK ARE YOUR TWO BEST PIECES.

Prompt #1

Why is your chosen critical theory relevant or important today?

This task serves as a prelude to the 'Critical Texts' project. Why is feminist / psychoanalytic / Marxist / post-colonial theory worth knowing about?

Prompt #2

Across the universe

Explore how philosophers from at least two different cultures have considered the same concept or problem.

Prompt #3

Write a piece of fiction which explores philosophical ideas AND/OR

Write a story from the perspective of an animal, or non-human person

Prompt #4

Respond to the ideas from a class discussion or in a text (or texts) you’ve read this term.

Choose a publication and write in a style appropriate for submission for that publication.

Prompt #5:

Opinion piece from the future! What are the petty concerns of the future?

Here is an example:

'Please stop printing unicorns'

This is a chance to do creative writing disguised as a serious opinion piece! Be imaginative and outlandish, but disguise your creativity with a veneer of seriousness...

Privatizing the U.S. Army was a mistake

Guide to writing a (normal) op-ed

Prompt #6:

How does a particular thought experiment help us to understand a philosophical problem or concept? Even better: come up with your own thought experiment.

Here is an example in the wild:

The Drowning Child

These prompts could also work well for developing an oral text (AS91476) transcript.

Instructions

During each term, we will endeavour to provide freewriting and discussion time to help you develop your thinking around an array of philosophical ideas.

Choose the idea you're most keen to explore in a 650-1000 word writing piece, and use a prompt above to help you consider general structure. (We're picturing you using a prompt above for each term, but the order is up to you.)

We can give you specific feedback on an early piece of writing, but that means you can't hand that piece in (see the NZQA rules below).

In the age of A.I., we have to feel confident that the work is your own. Please don't be offended if we ask you to prove that you have written a piece of writing entirely by yourself.

Some notes about the extent to which your teachers can help you: these come from NZQA's 'conditions of assessment' clarifications.

Writing should not be treated as one or two short assessment events. Instead, programme design should ensure that a student’s writing is developed over the year, and then their best is submitted for summative assessment.
‘hands on’: where the teacher indicates in detail the areas students should work on. The understanding shared by student and teacher is that this strategy is intended to directly target particular skills. This work would not be suitable for summative assessment.
‘hands off’: where, as the programme progresses, the student has developed skills sufficiently so that the teacher has less input and therefore the writing can be presented for assessment because it is the student’s own work.