Fall SemesterDue to copyright laws, I cannot post materials and assignments on a public website for this course. However, you will find a description of each unit.
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Unit One: What's Next? Thinking about life after high schoolAs the opening unit for the Expository Reading and Writing Course, this module attempts to establish some basic attitudes toward college and adult language practices. Students will be asked to use reading, writing, and research to identify their post high school goals, evaluate their readiness for such plans, and then effectively represent themselves to the community they wish to join. Furthermore, research in the module allows students to gain information about application processes, career opportunities, and college life.
Assessments: College or Career Portfolio |
Unit Two: Identity through language and cultureIn this module, students interrogate gender norms and the ways social pressures enforce those norms. They begin by reflecting on their own experiences of gender-based social pressures, deepening their understandings of the relationships between language, gender, culture, and identity. They then read a transcript and view a short talk by Judith Butler, which should help to prepare them to think more carefully about the concepts in the module. In addition to asking students to reflect on a range of topics including gender, identity, race, and culture, the module readings ask students to consider how norms of behavior are enforced through language and social interaction and to analyze the ways they may have been silenced or witnessed others being silenced. The final writing assignment invites them to transform their own silences into language and social action.
Assessments: Narrative Story Speech |
Unit three: RHETORIC OF THE OP-ED: ETHOS, PATHOS, LOGOS“The Value of Life” provides students with extended practice analyzing and synthesizing a diverse set of texts on a shared question: How should human life be valued? This module dives into various viewpoints from famous authors and societal figures throughout history and has students analyze their use of rhetoric as they present their own arguments.
Assessments: Rhetorical Analaysis |
Unit Four: Into the WildThis nonfiction, full-length work, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, was published in 1996. Students engage with this biography/story, based on Krakauer’s investigation of Christopher McCandless, a young, idealistic college graduate, allows them to think deeply about human motivation and, perhaps, to begin to understand the complexity of maturity. In addition, because McCandless was an avid reader of works by the American Transcendentalists and Russian novelists, students may become interested in reading some of those works on their own, if only to gain some insight into McCandless’s use of those writers’ ideas to form his philosophy on life, twisting their idealism in ways that, ironically, might have led to his death. This nonfiction work is a mystery tale, with genuine pathos that appeals to young adult readers.
Assessments: Reading Blog Socratic Seminar(FINAL) |
Photo used under Creative Commons from Bex.Walton