PROJECT 2: ENGAGING IN A CONVERSATION

You’re not alone in your thoughts about education. Professionals, scholars, and citizens have been discussing what an education is, what it can be, and what it should be across the globe and across time. With so many others contributing to what’s been said and written, we think of their exchanges as part of an ongoing conversation. Through this assignment, we invite you to participate in a conversation around education. In these sorts of conversations, you wouldn’t just parrot what one of the participants has said; instead, you’d add something more to the discussion.

Up to this point, you’ve practiced collecting materials in one or more forms (e.g., memories, information, data, artifacts, photographs, recorded audio interviews) to create a class archive. That archive then provided you and your classmates with a site you could study, looking for patterns, gaps, and, among other things, persistent practices in everyone’s experiences of education. With the collected materials, you developed some selection strategies to curate a group of artifacts (Humans of Education) based on what you saw that mattered.

The collected materials will continue to serve as a source for ideas and examples, but it’s worth noticing how the archive begins to take on a life of its own as the many different perspectives and experiences represented in the archive also comment upon each other and form some complex networks of challenges to us to make some sense of what we’re seeing in the materials. What seems important?  What perplexes you? What matters to you and to others?

We turn now to learn what matters to some professional writers, scholars, activists, and content makers. Through these shared texts, we may engage with concepts, narratives, and arguments about education that we’ve not encountered before. By engaging actively with these texts, we can test our own thinking about the purposes and effects of education, and we can ask new questions that may help us answer a larger question of why it matters. These new questions will be rooted in the particulars of experiences while also connecting us to what others are thinking and writing about the purposes and effects of education.

As we work on these texts, you’ll be reading with an eye toward how you might make use of an idea or line of thinking provided by one or more of the text. By “make use of” we mean that the authors say something that helps you see your experiences and those documented in the archive in a different light.

· What have others said that might help you explain some repeated pattern of experience that you see in the archive?

· What have others said that make you see something new in the archive that you hadn’t thought of before?

· What have others said that doesn’t sit right because you’ve had experiences or seen evidence of others experiences that suggests some limitations in how the author’s ideas might be applied?

· What examples do these authors provide that you might explain differently?

These are the kinds of questions that suggest reading is more than just gathering the facts of what someone has said in their work; instead, you are an active participant who has something to add to the conversation.

This can be considered a “frame and case” project. In this genre, you will make use of an assigned or selected text as a frame to examine a particular text. The “case” to be considered would be an educational narrative or example from the HoED project.

You will do more than “apply” a frame to a case; in your work to foster scholarly engagement with both texts, you’ll extend the scholarly frames to new grounds; to recognize gaps, omissions, or dissonances between the frame and the case; and to use your HoED narratives to pose new questions in the context of the scholarly reading.

The assignment will be evaluated in terms of three priorities. The essay should provide:

· Use of the selected critical text (Biesta, hooks, Love, Rodriguez, or Freire) that illustrates close, careful reading and engagement with its project.

· A reading of the HoED stories that has specificity, detail, and purpose.

· A contribution of terms, ideas, and examples that help us advance our course conversation.

· Becoming a Strong Reader (Making Your Mark)

· Coming to Terms

· Excerpts from hooks, Love, and Biesta

· Joseph Harris, From Rewriting

· What is an archive?

· Determine a text’s set of ideas and questions in order to make use of that text (Engaging)

· Use an author’s project as a frame to examine an artifact or event (Engaging)