Group C Check-Ins
Teaching Check-in
-We are teaching the idea that we change ourselves physically to gain acceptance from others, and in turn, ourselves.
-We are teaching this because it is important to accept ourselves.
-The central objective is that we change ourselves to gain acceptance.
-This emerges from our course because the characters in American Born Chinese change themselves physically and monsters’ construction is about adding and subtracting parts that make them inhuman.
-We will incorporate the graphic illustrations/history assignment by using Kerry’s illustration and Julie’s material on the history of perms.
Audience Check-in
-Our audience is college students in Manhattan
-We chose this audience because it is diverse
-This audience is in Manhattan
-We will reach this audience through personal interactions
Lesson Plan Check-in
-The main thing we want to communicate is that we change ourselves whether we are conscious of it or not.
-We will teach this lesson face-to-face
-This will be a Q&A with students as well as reading materials we will distribute
So I have a lot of questions. In general you will need to flush out these ideas and your rationales a lot more in the final write up. So Manhattan as a location is way too broad. If I told you to grab my coat and said it was in Manhattan, you’d look at me like I lost my mind. Plus Manhattan doesn’t seem to be integral to how you see the identity of your audience, so be specific. Which college students? Are you going to gather a group or are you going to just look for people one at a time as they pass on the street? Specifics?
What do you mean by personal interactions? Do you mean you will say hey on the street or that you will take a spin class with them?
Face to face is helpful, but where will you teach it face to face (in a park, in a classroom, the Met, a coffee shop, on the roof top of an apt building, in an artsy club??)
I’m interested in your main thing you want to get across. I think the idea of wanting to people to think about the way adjustment of self in relation to others works on the conscious and unconscious register is interesting, but it is still broad. I’m also wondering what kind of ethos you have behind this point (is it bad to change ourselves in relation to others, or is that integral to what it means to be in relation with others??)
So for central objective: “-The central objective is that we change ourselves to gain acceptance.” Central objective is kind of what you want your students to do or get. So is what you want your students to do is learn and become aware of the fact that we change ourselves to be accepted? Is this teachable? Do you want them to learn it as a stable fact (that’s what it sounds right now)? Do you want them to be aware of how people often do it so they can resist it so they can be more thoughtful? Is what you want them to do to interrogate the reasons why we change our appearance?
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.