TASK: To participate in this unit’s discussion, please choose 2 of the prompts below, and craft a 1-2 paragraph response to each prompt. Remember that your instructor is interested in your ideas, interpretation, and analysis, so take your time to craft a thoughtful response! There are many possible “good answers” to each of these prompts. Choose the prompts that most interest you. Please tell your classmates which prompts you are responding to!
Plato’s “The Allegory Of The Cave” has proven to be one of the most important texts of Western culture. Plato’s allegory can be dense and intimidating, but at its heart, “The Allegory Of The Cave” is a straightforward parable about the power of knowledge. Let’s think about Plato’s work as a story about learning. Who or what is doing the learning in Plato’s allegory? What is being learned? What happens as a consequence of this learning? And what does Plato’s allegory suggest about the nature of learning, education, and knowledge? How do you know?
David Sedaris is usually described as a humorist, meaning that his purpose as a writer is to make his readers laugh. Did you find Sedaris’s essay funny? If so, what specific moments in the essay were most funny? What made them funny to you, exactly? Besides humor, Sedaris seems to describe something important about the nature of learning — what is that? To Sedaris, what is learning best compared to?
Jenee Desmond-Harris writes about the effect of the death of Tupac Shakur on her own growth and identity. What stood out to you most as you read this essay? What elements of Desmond-Harris’s experience did you recognize from your own experience? What did Desmond-Harris’s essay teach you about how we grow and develop identities in adolescence?
Most of the readings this unit could be classified as learning narratives. Let’s imagine that the learning narrative is an authentic genre, or type, of writing, using these three pieces as examples. First, discuss what is similar about each of the pieces, and what is different. Then, describe your experience of reading these pieces together. What connections did you discover? Finally, based on these three pieces, what would you say are the important aspects of the genre of the learning narrative?
Choose one of the learning narratives you read this week, and compare that writer’s learning experience with your own experiences as a learner. Do the writer’s ideas about the nature of learning hold true to your experience? Why or why not?
Last Completed Projects
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