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Showing posts from April, 2025

FYW Curriculum Idea 2: The FYW Comp Curriculum that Changed the World

 Motivating/orienting texts 1. Decoder Ring: "How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World"   2. Supercommunicators: "How to Talk to Anyone: The Art and Practice of Asking the Right Questions" Essential Advice for Good Writing 1. Be curious 2. Be brave 3. Recognize complexity 4. Seek understanding (with humility) 5. 

FYW Curriculum Idea 1: Federal Program Impacts

 A motivating question: How can we get writers to move beyond ideology to explore, understand, and make decisions based on evidence? EXIGENCIES/ASSUMPTIONS Immediately (Spring 2025), DOGE is massively cutting federal funding for a variety of agencies and programs that have existed for decades or more.  Broadly speaking, citizens (of all ages) are getting "further from the facts," in terms of forming attitudes about civic behavior. There is a deepening of inductive (top-down) thinking about the role of government, where sweeping political ideologies over-drive people's orientation to specific events. (The alternate I prefer in this CI is deductive exploration of information, a kind of "working up" from evidence, ideally to encourage subtle interrogation of top-down ideologies they may have already acquired.) GENERAL SKETCH A note: I think this CI is probably "unit scale" rather than "semester scale"--it would probably need to be combined with...

Letter from Birmingham Jail

 Just parking this here: The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?