Group D: Teaching Check-in Questions
Group D: Meghan Scala, Brittany Reid, Aalfee Rahman
What does you want to teach?
We want to communicate the way that many initial judgement that people pass on each other based on appearance and how these judgement are socially constructed and do not necessarily reflect the reality of who an individual may be.
Why do you want to share (teach) this aspect of the course with a community outside our class (i.e. why does it matter)?
These socially indoctrinated judgments are a barrier to being able to understand who a person really is.
What is the central objective (i.e. the main thing you want to get across in your teaching)?
The central objective is to bring our audience to an awareness of everyday judgments they make about people and how those instinctive thoughts should possibly be challenged and reevaluated.
Does this lesson emerge from our course discussions, readings, assignments? How so?
The idea of individuals being evaluated and judged based only on their appearance appears in almost all of the texts that we have read this semester.
What course materials will you use to help you teach this lesson? What kind of additional materials might you need to supplement those core materials?
We will be using quotes pulled from the material we have read this semester, particularly The Outsiders,American Born Chinese, and the accounts of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases. We will also supplement them by giving our audience a questionnaire.
How do you plan to incorporate the graphic illustration (from at least one group member)? How do you plan to incorporate some part of the research, analysis, and/or theorization each of you have produced in your writing assignments? Note: If you are in Group E, you can think about how you might write your papers with your group ideas in mind. (Group D, you should already have an idea of what you’re writing and presenting on even if you haven’t actually done it yet.)
In order to present our lesson and facilitate discussion we intend to assemble a PowerPoint, which will feature our graphic illustration. Alongside the quotes we take from the book we will also draw analysis and arguments from our papers in order to add to the talking points of our planned discussion.
So I think you have good stuff in your teaching part, but you have a lot, and it’s a little vague. So on the one hand you want to talk about people making initial judgements based on appearances. This is to say you want to talk about surface readings. But what do you specifically want your audience to focus on in this idea of surface readings? (Maybe you want to show how authors connect surface readings of a text to surface readings of people??) You also have the idea that our surface readings are based on preconceived cultural interpretations of certain features. Again what do you want to do with that idea? (Do you want to show the way in which authors in this course play on the way outside discourses (from advertisements, movies, enduring stereotypes, other cultures, school books, etc.) inform the structures of our thought and limit our ability to interpret/read the people in front of us?)
Two things. Since this course is a literature course, the chances are you will need to articulate whatever it is you teach in terms of literature. We want to teach these students that these three novels put together ask us to think about X or Y? Then you show it, and then maybe you ask the participants to actually do the thinking that the novel asks for.
Second thing: I think unless what you want to teach is specifically something about the Outsiders, you will probably want to use more than one text from the class.