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."


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


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.

 

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? . . .


Making connections to other contexts and readings















Application to contemporary issue.




Arguing with the author. . .

 

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.