IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE END OF THE SEMESTER

*********TOMORROW'S CLASS IS CANCELED********** (Wednesday APRIL 30)

Unfortunately, I have to cancel tomorrow's class, so our class meetings are now officially over.  We do not have class on Monday, May 5.  Before you work on your final essay, you should read and analyze Freire's "The Banking Concept of Education".  Here, again, is the link to that essay:

http://learning.writing101.net/wp-content/readings/freire_the_banking_concept_of_education.pdf

For your final essay, you will be writing an educational autobiography, which will be in letter form.  You will begin with "Dear Professor Carr" (or Dr. Carr, or Karen) and go on to write an in-depth examination of your educational history.  This should not be a simple chronology but, rather, an extensive look at the ways you were taught to think about learning, education, and the process of making meaning from/for your lives.  

You must refer to the articles that we have read for this section, which are found in the "Schooling" section of the textbook.  You must also work extensively with Freire's essay, by discussing the extent to which the "banking concept" was the pedagogical method employed by your teachers.  

The essay is due, via email, by Monday, May 12 at noon.

kcarr@ric.edu

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

Reading for Monday, April  14

Paolo Freire -- "The Banking Concept of Education"

http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-2.html

there is no new reading for tomorrow, april 7.  we will be using your interviews in class, so make sure to have them with you.

for monday, april 7

interview and essay

the last step of the process before the essay is to conduct an interview with your parent(s), or the people who you live with who bought/rented your house/apartment.

interview questions . . .these are preliminary questions. feel free to add you own. the aim here is to go beyond simple answers and to work to engage the person in a conversation:

when, exactly, did you move here?

what made you choose this neighborhood?

what made you choose this particular house/apartment?

what do you like about the neighborhood?

what do you dislike about the neighborhood?

would you say that the house itself or the neighborhood is your primary reason for being there?

essay due on monday april 14

once you have conducted your interview, take everything you've done for this project -- from your early interviews with classmates about neighborhood, to your walking tour, to your search for public art -- and create an essay in which you work out an analysis of place and space, and the role it plays in shaping identity. this essay needs to examine space and place in considerable depth.

assignment for monday, march 31

street art

find some public art/street art and spend some time looking at it, and the surrounding neighborhood.  write a short essay about the art, as well as the neighborhood. what is the art communicating?  how does the art seem to fit into the surrounding neighborhood?  is it working with or against the identity of the neighborhood?   explain.  discuss the street art in the context of the banksy film and or the article about chicano murals.  

*****     *****

assignment for april 2

mapping your neighborhood and another

for this assignment, you will need to walk and map your own neighborhood, and another, unfamiliar neighborhood.  as you walk, you should be taking notes for both a map and an eventual longer piece which will explore your own relationship to place/space.

-begin by walking the perimeter of what you define as your neighborhood.  walk to the limits in every direction, and notice what, exactly, demarcates the edges of your neighborhood.  is it a physical change, an emotional one, both?

-walk at least 2 blocks (or their equivalent) past what you think of as the edge of your neighborhood.  notice your responses.  how/why do things feel different in this area?  

-identify any particular ideas you have about any aspect of your neighborhood as you walk along.  for instance, the house with the tall grass, that everyone from the neighborhood stays away from, or the house with the barking dogs, or the house that always leaves their trash cans out.  try to identify ways that you think about the people who represent a departure from the neighborhood norms, and from this thinking, develop an idea of what the norm is for your neighborhood.  once you have figured out your neighborhood norms, incorporate them into a key for your map, and make sure your map addresses the specifics if which houses/streets are seen as fitting the norm.

-- try to infer things about the history of the neighborhood from your walk through it.  

-as you walk both neighborhoods, make note of things like race, gender, age, social class, religion.  how do these demographics affect the way you see both neighborhoods, and their  boundaries?

--notice the art in both neighborhoods.  if there is none, mark its absence somehow on your map.  if there is art, make sure you include it on your map.

--notice the presence of absence of things like trees, fences, grocery stores, bodegas, liquor stores, and any other features of the neighborhood that distinguish it as a neighborhood.

Upcoming Assignments

For Monday, March 24:  Lopez:  "Caring for the Woods" (p.277)

Davis:  "Fortress Los Angeles:  the Militarization of Urban Space (p.287)

For Wednesday, March 26:  Cockcraft and Barnet-Sanchez: Signs from the Heart:  California Chicano Murals (p.303); Visual Essay, Banksy -- "The Most Honest Artform Available" (p.310)

For Monday, March 31:  walking tour of your neighborhood and another.  Maps

For Wednesday, April 2:  Interviews

For Monday April 7:  place essays due

Assignment for Wednesday March 19

Read the article entitled "Black Men and  Public Space", by Brent Staples http://themes2014.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/7/1/19711205/unjust_judgments.pdf

and Tina Ansa's, "the Center of the Universe" in Chapter 6 of  Reading Culture 

Write a short comparison (1-2 pages) of the different ways that each conceptualizes space in terms of its relationship to African-American identity. 

Today's class is cancelled (March 5)

I am still sick, so I am cancelling today's class.  The essay assignment is described below.  It is due the Monday after break -- March 17.  Also, this assignment must be handed in as a paper document.  It must be done on a computer -- NOT HANDWRITTEN -- and printed out before class.  

ESSAY

For this assignment, I would like you to expand the brief writing I had you do on your faces into a full-scale essay which deals with your face/body, broken down into parts.  You may pick any of the parts I already had you write about -- eyes, mouth, hair, hands, nose, skin -- but you can also add other body parts if you would like.  You must deal with at least 5 different parts, and look at each from the vantage point of personal, cultural/historical and media-influenced.  When we talk about media-influenced, it can be anything from specific ads that tell you how these parts of your body should look, and what you have to do to achieve that look, to more subtle ideas about race, ethnicity and cultural expectations for beauty.  The goal here is to really think about how the media -- broadly defined -- influences the way we shape our ideas of self.

I would really like you to explore creative ways to think about and write these essays, beyond your own comfort zones.  Try to loosen yourself from the kind of writing that yells "ASSIGNMENT", and see where you might land.  

For Monday, March 3: Gloria Steinem, "Sex, Lies and Advertising" which can be found here:  http://www.udel.edu/comm245/readings/advertising.pdf  Also for Monday:  a one page response in which you link Steinem's essay with the documentary Miss Representation.   This can be handwritten, and I will be collecting it.  

For Wednesday, March 5:  Leppert, pp.202-205;  Visual Essays, pages 206--210;  214-217 

for monday february 24

read john berger's "ways of seeing" and bring in one advertisement and one art image that exemplify his argument.  

Assignment for Monday, February 17

Read "In the Shadow of the Image" on page 178, and do the exercise on page 179, which asks you to make an inventory of the various products, brands, images that you use/identify with.

Wednesday SNOW **** Assignment for Monday, February 10

Hi Everyone,

Hope you're enjoying the snow day.  Because we missed class today, we are going directly into the rough drafts for Monday.  So the assignment for Monday is still to write the first draft of your "cyber-autobiography."  You need to make sure that you have a minimum of three quotes from any of the four essays we read for this project.  You may have more than that, and I really encourage you to do so, in order that you can begin to develop the skill of "conversing" with another person's ideas via your and their writing. You can use any number of the essays -- all your quotes can come from one, or you can quote from several, or all of them. You need to use MLA format for citations.

Remember too that at this point, your drafts can be handwritten or typed.  You must bring a physical copy to class, as we will be using them for workshops/peer critiques.

The assignment for today will not be required, though I still recommend it, especially if you want to practice identifying claims.

The best Website for MLA citation rules is here:  https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

Essay #1

For this essay,  you will be constructing a cyborg autobiography -- an essay  in which you will think about how your own life has been shaped thus far by contemporary technologies, and by the idea, expressed in the article  by Sherry Turkle that "we are all cyborgs now" (36).

For Wednesday,  February 5, you will need to write four paragraphs that explore the idea of yourself as cyborg by identifying and interacting with one specific claim from each of the four essays in the chapter that deal with the ways we are being "rewired" (Lam, Turkle, Hayles, Gopnik).  You should begin each paragraph by identifying the specific claim, and then discussing your own views of the idea you have identified.  For this exercise, it is not necessary for the four paragraphs to work together as an essay.  In Wednesday's class, you will work to identify the ideas you are going to develop in more depth for your final essay.

For Monday, February 10, and Wednesday, February 12,  you must bring a rough draft of your cyborg autobiography as we will be doing peer critiques and workshops all week.

The final version of this essay is due on Sunday,  February 16 by 5pm via email to:  kcarr@ric.edu

SYLLABUS -- Introduction and first two weeks

writing 100

spring 2014

dr karen carr

in writing 100, you will begin to develop analytical and writing skills that will enable you to begin to make meaning of the world around you, and of the world of ideas that college introduces you to. writing is as much a perspective as it is an act, as it asks you to begin to think critically about culture, as both a participant an an observer.  good writing is about much more than grammar and syntax, though these are important parts of the equation.  good writing is about a practice of engagement that honors the complexity of seeing, listening, reasoning, and demands intellectual, imaginative attention.

in this section, we will approach writing as a means of attaining layers of understanding about the things we think we already know -- which is to say, the ideas, expectations, performances and gestures that constitute contemporary culture.

you will be doing a lot of writing, from informal class assignments, to drafts,  to peer critiques to formal, finished essays.  each piece of the process is equally important, as it is all a part of the ongoing practice of learning to think and see as a writer.  to that end, attendance in this class is crucial.  you are allowed two absences, and any more than this will lower your grade.  please be aware that i do not discriminate between excused and unexcused absences, as each has the same effect:  you are missing work that cannot be made up.  

*i do not allow any devices of any kind to be on in my classroom.  

*you must arrive on time;  leaving early will count as an absence.  

*please refrain from taking unnecessary “breaks” during class.  

*all work must be submitted on time, to me, at kcarr@ric.edu

when you are submitting essays, please make sure that they sent as attachments in any of the following formats:  word, pdf, rtf

textbook:  reading culture: contexts for critical reading and writing,   8th edition, by diana george and john trimbur

schedule:

monday, january 27:  intro to class

wednesday, january 29:  introduction (pp.3-10); chapter 1, pp.1-23

monday, feb 3:  chapter 1, pp. 24-48

wednesday, feb 5:  draft of essay #1 due