By now you should have received by email a link to join the Google Group email list, so I can email you all as a single group. You should also have soon thereafter received a link to the course Google Drive folder. If so, your first bit of homework is already complete!
As discussed in class, please set up your personal course blog ASAP, and send me a link to it in a comment below this post.
I also need you to quickly upload your summer essays to Google Drive under "Submitted Student Work." Be sure to create a personal subfolder using your full name. Please be reminded that I only accept work as a Google Doc file (no Word, PDFs, or Pages!). So copy and paste if necessary. This is in order to make giving you detailed feedback much more easily and to avoid having to repeatedly search for and save files on my hard drive.
On Wednesday, we will be holding our first Socratic Seminar.
As I mentioned in class, we will be holding roughly 20-30 minute Socratic Seminars on most Wednesdays this year. These seminars are a forum for you to discuss texts, course concepts, and their relationships to key historical and current events in the United States. Socratic Seminars are not generally intended to be argumentative--we will have lots of debates, don't worry!--but instead are meant to be supportive and collaborative. Ideally, they will help you discuss key ideas and relate them to your lives (or future lives), and thereby help you understand American political life in more depth and in a more meaningful way. Effective participation does not necessarily entail persuading others as to the veracity of your perspective; instead, it will involve active listening, supporting and building on the ideas of others, drawing connections between ideas, and posing effective questions to keep the discussion lively. As I will be (mostly) taking a back seat, it is incumbent on you to put a lot of thought and effort into your preparations.
Specifically, our first Socratic Seminar will center on the the four global forces shaping the 21st Century, as explained by Lawrence in The World in 2050. The TED Talk on Manufactured Landscapes we viewed in class today illustrates many of them well and you will be expected to integrate the two sources in the discussion.
You are responsible for reading, annotating, taking notes on, and ultimately discussing, the first four chapters of The World in 2050. As you have already done so for two chapters and written your summer paper on them, I am confident you will be well-prepared. You should already have a set of notes and questions for Manufactured Landscapes. Remember to bring all of your materials to class!
When creating questions, be sure to consult the document, Socratic Seminar Questions, which can be found in Google Drive under "Writing, Questioning, and Documentation." You must prepare at least two of each type of question, and be sure to give your own questions serious thought before we hold the seminar.
I strongly recommend you also consult the following documents found in the same folder to help you prepare:
- a) Bloom's Critical Thinking Question Stems, which will help you formulate higher-order questions,
- b) Questions to Support Discussion, which will help you keep the conversation going if it seems to be hitting a lull, and
- c) the Socratic Seminar Rubric.
Prepare well!