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.
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."
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Sample #2: Entry in response to Herskovits's "Cultural Relativism."
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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.