ID
201H Fall 2003
The
Idea Notebook
Among
the aims of LS 1: Human Dilemmas is the development skills in critical thinking
and intellectual inquiry. If we respond rigorously to the ideas we meet in
LS 1 readings, presentations, and discussions, we will begin to recognize
the complexities, ambiguities, and nuances surrounding the dilemmas we are
investigating. Developing these cognitive skills in ID 201H will provide you
with a stronger foundation for all of your studies at Skidmore.
As part of a grant
from the Carnegie Foundation's Center for the Advancement of the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning, Professor Catherine Berheide (Sociology) and I have
designed the ID 201H Idea Notebook as a tool for intellectual engagement. The
Idea Notebook is a place for you to respond to LS 1 materials and then to reflect
on the thinking--your thought patterns and thought processes--embodied in your
responses. Although I have labeled this activity "The Idea Notebook,"
it is not a notebook in the typical sense of a place where you take notes
to record the literal details or facts of what you have read or heard. Such
note-taking is valuable for studying and remembering content. If you have taken
such notes in the past, you will undoubtedly want to continue this practice
in ID 201H. This type of note-taking is not the task of your Idea Notebook;instead
you be taking note of the ideas that occur to you during this course--when reading,
listening, etc. Then you will go a step further and reflect on the nature of
your ideas.
The Idea Notebook,
therefore, emphasizes your ideas and the thinking embodied in them. To distinguish
between the two types of writing you will be doing in your Idea Notebook, you
will write your entries on a two-column page.
- In the first
column, you will write ideas you have in response to LS 1 readings, discussions,
or presentations. The entries should demonstrate that you are deeply engaged
in the materials, seriously and thoughtfuly responding to them. They should
be your response or reaction to the text (for example, questions, connections,
or contemporary applications). Your entries in this column should not merely
repeat information from a "text"; they should go beyond immediate
acceptance.
- The second
column in your Idea Notebook is for metacoginition (thinking about
thinking). Several days after you have written your first-column entry,
go back, reread the entry, and then write an analysis of how you were thinking
about the "text" in your original entry. For instance, were you
questioning the assumptions of the author/speaker? were you applying an idea
to personal circumstances? were you challenging his/her conclusions? were
you considering an alternative viewpoint?
Your first-column
entries should be at least half a column page in length. Your second-column
entries will most likely be shorter.
Sample #1: Entry
in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Martin Luther King says that if a law squares with divine law, then
it is just. But what happens if you don't believe in God? Lots of
people in the US today don't believe in God. And there is supposed
to be a separation of church and state in the US. How do atheists
and agnostics decide which laws are just? Would it be possible to
build a just society on purely secular grounds
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In this entry I seem to begin by questioning, if not challenging,
one of the major assumptions of King's ideas on justice.
I'm applying my question about his argument to this country today.
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Sample #2: Entry
in response to Herskovits's "Cultural Relativism."
Over the summer I saw two movies that presented different cultures:
The Whale Rider (about New Zealand's Maori tribe) and The
Fast Runner (Inuit culture). Although at times I found myself
waiting for the National Geographic narrator's voice-over in The
Fast Runner, I liked both films. But I'm not sure I liked the
behavior of the characters in the movies. Am I being ethnocentric
then? Cultural relativism clearly gives us a way to view these portraits
of different cultures, but it's hard not to judge what happens in
them, especially when our own cultural values conflict with the ideals
of the culture shown.
In the context of movies, it's easy to see how following cultural
relativism can be a real asset, but when we enter real world situations,
the moral neutrality of cultural relativism gets in the way. When
is it OK to judge another culture? Last winter, the US went to war
with Iraq to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass
destruction and to bring democracy to another country of the world.
I think killing people is wrong, that building weapons of mass destruction
is wrong, and that democracy is right. Does that mean we have the
right to tell Iraq it has be be a democracy? How would Herskovits
have responded to this war and the policy of importing democracy and
western values? . . .
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Making connections to other contexts and readings
Application to contemporary issue.
Arguing with the author. . .
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You should write
in your Idea Notebook at least twice a week. You should write at least one "column
one" entry per week followed by a "column two" metacognitive
analysis written two or three days later. You should write your Idea Notebook
on your computer using the Microsoft Word Template I will email to you as an
attachment.
I will collect
your idea notebooks several time throughout the semester and respond to them
with written comments. Twice during the semester you will write a cumulative
review of your Idea Notebook discussing patterns or habits of thinking that
you observe and charting what you can do to increase your critical thinking.
I will grade your notebooks check minus, check,
or check plus.