We’ve finished one week of the semester so far–congratulate yourself for that accomplishment! Here we go with Week 2!

Week 2: Annotation, Education Narratives

  • Dates: Monday, 9/9 & Wednesday, 9/11
  • Meeting Info: Each week, I will post an agenda that will outline the week’s work. It will include instructions for you and links to readings, discussion questions, and other work.  We will work on developing community both in our classroom and in our online written community.  

Objectives

  • To read, annotate, contribute to the course site; to begin Project #1: Education Narrative

To Do Before Week 2

For the start of Week 2, be sure to have completed the work assigned in the Week 1 Agenda, most importantly:

To-Do This Week

Monday, 9/9: Reading and Writing like a Writer; Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Texts:

Writing

In Class

  • What do we think about when we think of light and dark?
  • Dark:
  • Light:
  • What do we think of when we think about education? What does it mean to be educated, or to seek education?
  • Why read difficult texts?
  • Let’s read Plato’s text together:
    • One of the texts we’re working with this week is from Plato’s The Republic. It’s called the “Allegory of the Cave.” It’s a difficult text, but one that is broadly applicable to life, to learning, to society, etc. It’s hard, but something we can work through together. The videos can also help us through the text. What’s important here is that we find something that we can work with, not that we understand every part of the text. We’re coming into it in the middle of things, and we’re using it to help us think about our own educations so that we can write interesting, powerful things. This is not a philosophy class, and I don’t expect you to digest the text as though it were a philosophy course. But if this kind of writing, or these kinds of issues speak to you, please let it take you where you want it to.
    • CONTENT WARNING: the Plato text and related videos are about people who are imprisoned, maltreated, and tortured.
    • Reading and annotating this Google Doc of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
    • Reading aloud
    • sketching, focusing, reacting: What’s a moment in the text that had an impact on you, stayed with you, or was meaningful for you? Why?
  • Here are three short videos for Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”:
  • start with “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave” by Alex Gendler for a good overview of this section of the text and the philosophy behind it:

  • If you find additional videos that you think would be useful for our discussion of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” please share them in a comment below.
  • Metaphors:
    • What metaphors does Plato use to describe education and knowledge? Are these new, or have you already encountered them elsewhere? What do you think about these metaphors for education and knowledge? What other mentor texts include metaphors, and what do those metaphors do for the text? How does reading Alex Kapitan’s “Dark and Light: Practicing Balance—and Countering Racism—in Metaphors” shape your thoughts on the metaphors for education we have encountered in Plato’s text as well as others from this semester? What is a metaphor you might want to add to your education narrative?

Wednesday, 9/11: Genre, Education Narratives

Texts:

Writing:

  • Annotate the readings.
  • Double-entry journal Discussion on “Learning to Read”

In-Class

  • Let’s re-introduce ourselves and say something we learned, or a question we have, from the first week and a half of the semester.
  • How can we read as writers, as Bunn recommends? What difference does that make to our reading? to our writing?
  • Double-entry journaling for our readings:
    • which passages do you want to be in dialogue with?
    • which passages speak to you, relate to your experience, or resonate with you?
    • which passages contradict your experience in a way that is helpful to push against–maybe advice that didn’t work for you or had a different outcome.
  • Education Narratives
    • what are education narratives?
  • Reflection

Photo Credits: “Eye On the Milky Way” by Jeff Sullivan via Flickr under the license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.