Bill McKenna
Long Writing Assignment for Students
2005 Workshop on Improving Student Writing
Center for Writing Excellence
Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching
INTRODUCTION FOR FACULTY TO THIS LONG WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Below is a major writing assignment for a course that I will be teaching for the first time in the fall, 2005 semester. The course title is “Cultural Differences: Worlds Apart?” and it is a seminar for first-year students offered as part of Miami’s new First Year Seminar program which began in the 2004-05 academic year. The courses offered in this program have a maximum of 20 students all of whom must be in their first year at Miami. The idea of this seminar program is to introduce students to challenging academic work at the beginning of their time at Miami. As originally envisioned, these courses were to be writing intensive and to have content that was related to the research of the instructor so that the course would engage the students in that work.
“Cultural Differences: Worlds Apart?” is a course that comes out of my current research and in a way I will be enlisting the students to help me advance this research by engaging them in a semester long conversation about the subject matter and also by helping me find writings on cultural differences.
The course concerns the epistemic dimension of life, that is, the way that processes of knowing at work in individual people may be involved in the formation and maintenance of basic beliefs that people hold and of the realities to which these beliefs relate. In particular it will concern the role that these epistemic processes play in forming the differences in beliefs and perceptions that are correlated with the generic differences that there are between people, differences such as those that stem from religious, gender, racial, political, national, and ethnic identities. One goal of the course is for students to learn and understand some philosophical concepts and theories that relate to the epistemic dimension of life, concepts and theories concerning such things as belief, truth, objectivity, and reality. A second goal is for them to learn how to use these concepts and theories in order to understand and think about these generic differences.
A third, more practical goal of the course is for students to learn how to apply the philosophical analysis of the epistemic dimension of life to devise ways that people could use to understand and cope with the conflicts that arise among them due to their generic differences. The assignment below is expressed in terms of this practical goal, but involves the other two as well. The first three objectives below flow directly out of the three goals. The fourth objective relates to the “critical thinking” liberal education goal for the course.
The assignment consists of a sequence of steps that include research to gather information, class presentation and discussion to elicit peer input, submission of paper to the instructor for review and comment, revision and submission of final version of paper.
LONG WRITING ASSIGNMENT FOR STUDENTS This assignment involves the application of the philosophical concepts and theories of the course to understand and resolve a cultural conflict. Among the concepts and theories to be used are:
Objectives of the assignment are
The first three objectives are in direct pursuit of the major goal of the course, which is to learn ways of using philosophical concepts and theories to understand and cope with the issues that arise for people because of their differences, differences that stem from their religious, gender, racial, political, national, ethnic and other identities. The fourth objective is related to the Miami Plan principle of critical thinking. The project At the beginning of the semester you identified a cultural conflict that was of interest to you. Your project is to discuss ways of resolving the conflict using the philosophical concepts and theories of the course. Your work will be done in several steps that will culminate in a paper that you will turn in near the end of the semester. The steps 1. Research the conflict in order to learn the details of it. 2. Present the results of your research to the class and lead a discussion of ways you are thinking of analyzing the conflict using the concepts and theories of the course. 3. Write the paper in accordance with the specifications below and submit it to the instructor in or before the 12th week of the semester for his review and comments. 4. Revise the paper in accordance with the instructor’s comments and submit a final draft of the paper in the 14th week of the semester. Paper specifications
Evaluation Your paper will be evaluated on the basis of the evidence it provides of:
Evaluation rubric
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