Bill McKenna
Short 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 SHORT WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Below is a short 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 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. For instance, conflicts between men and women n the United States can be approached in this way. Starting with the insightful analysis of these conflicts in D. Tannon’s book You Just Don’t Understand, the class will use philosophical concepts and theory to further develop the analysis and to devise possible methods of “resolution.”
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, which is not mentioned above, is a different kind of objective that relates to a more general goal that I see all philosophy courses having: that of giving people ideas that can allow them to see things differently, to render the obvious and taken for granted puzzling and thus motivate curiosity and further thought and inquiry. I call this the “heuristic” use of ideas. This relates to the “2nd page” of the assignment and the “new ideas” talked about - something that the difficulties of devising the method the students are to devise should elicit. The fifth objective relates to the “critical thinking” liberal education goal for the course
SHORT WRITING ASSIGNMENT This assignment involves the application of some of the philosophical concepts of the course to think about religious differences, in particular the concepts of belief and truth. You will do part of it in collaboration with another student. Objectives of the assignment
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 in direct pursuit of a goal of philosophy itself, which is to make the obvious puzzling, and the fifth is related to the Miami Plan principle of critical thinking. The problem One of the fundamental differences between Christians and Jews is their different beliefs about the divinity of Jesus. Imagine a man and a woman arguing about this. The Christian confidently asserts that Jesus was God, and the Jew just as confidently denies this, and says instead that Jesus was merely another one of the prophets. They engage in a heated argument about this. Imagine that you and your fellow student arrive on the scene with a desire to help them resolve this conflict using some philosophical tools. How will you do this? The tools In the course we have seen that a way of understanding belief is to understand it as holding something to be true. This will be your first tool. Applying this to the situation we can understand the Christian to be holding that the statement “Jesus was God” is true, and the Jew as holding that “Jesus was god” is false. The second tool is the correspondence concept of truth, as telling what “truth” means. The project The task for discussion: Using the philosophical understanding of belief, and correspondence theory of truth as telling what truth means, work with your partner to devise a way of resolving the dispute. Do not actually resolve it, but do your best to design a method that you could suggest to the man and woman that could help them resolve the dispute. Do not be concerned about practical obstacles; imagine that they could have unlimited amounts of money, time, access to resources, etc.. You could even imagine that you had a “time-machine” to give them to use that could transport them back in time. The method is to be a method of inquiry that the two should undertake that is designed to result in knowledge of whose belief is true, the Christian’s or the Jew’s, a method that follows from the correspondence concept of truth. The method should consist of a series of concrete steps that they would take. The writing task: After you have completed your discussion, each of you will turn in separate 2 page papers. On the first page, describe the method you two have devised. Set it out as steps: first do this, then that, etc. The second page is to be used for each of you to set out your individual thoughts. On this page you will identify and write about a new issue for you concerning religious belief or conflicts between religious beliefs that became apparent to you during the attempt to devise the method of inquiry (see handout on “Philosophical Seeing and Heuristic use of Ideas”). This issue may be one that you and your partner discussed, or one that occurred to you in your private reflections over the assignment. First state the issue in the form of questions in one or two sentences. Then, explain the issue by writing sentences that elaborate the problem. To do this, first explain in what way the task of devising the method of inquiry motivated your thinking of the issue. Then explain what puzzles you. To elaborate the problem you can do such things as explain the meaning of terms used in your questions, give examples, offer reasons in logical support of statements made, explaining what the problem is not, and other strategies listed on the handout “Developing your Thoughts.” Evaluation: Your paper will be evaluated on the basis of the evidence it provides of:
Evaluation Rubric:
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