24 May

Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Assessment

Les Lynn Argument and Literacy, Argumentative Writing, Assessment, The Debatifier

By Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

[Adapted from a talk presented at a session on “Standardization and Democratization in College Writing Programs” at the NCTE Conference on College Composition and Communication, April 7, 2016, in Houston Texas.]

After a rocky start, higher education has come to embrace outcomes assessment.  When Gerald was President of MLA in 2008 he caught a lot of flak for a pro-assessment column in the MLA Newsletter entitled “Assessment Changes Everything.”  Now, eight years later, the outrage has largely dissipated.  As Chris Gallagher suggests in a 2012 College English article, “OA now seems like educational common sense.  Define goals for student learning, evaluate how well students are achieving those goals, and use the results to improve the academic experience.  Who could argue with that?”  Gallagher does go on to argue with Outcomes Assessment, citing some dangers that he sees in it.  But he accepts the need for outcomes assessment in principle, as do most of us.

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04 Aug

Dismantling Racially-Motivated Arguments for Exclusion

Les Lynn Argument and Literacy, Argumentative Writing, Resources, The Debatifier
I was recently asked to present at the Chicago Public Schools Social Science and Civic Engagement annual conference in mid-August.  Its theme and title: Face & Embrace — Waking Up to Racial Equality in Education.  I immediately recognized that this conference would offer up an opportunity to discuss and disseminate to the social science and civics teachers attending a different angle on academic argument than they may be expecting.  Instead of staking out positions on an open, balanced, debatable question and building arguments to support and develop that position, we would have a chance to look at how skills with argument analysis and evaluation can empower students to take apart and neutralize arguments that are counter to their interests and more broadly hostile to our democratic polity — in short, to dismantle racially-motivated or simply racist arguments.  This post will explore the resources that I will present on at the Face & Embrace conference.

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24 Jul

Oedipal Arguments

Les Lynn Argument and Literacy, Resources, The Debatifier

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is arguably where Western literature begins.  First performed in 439 BCE, and cited repeatedly in Aristotle’s Poetics for its exemplary features of poetic drama, the play functions in our literary tradition as a kind of ghostly template — certainly over the stage, but over all that can be called tragic narrative too — faintly echoing behind globalized civilization’s literary arts.  In light of this status, we’d want to be sure we can argumentalize a unit on Oedipus Rex, right? 

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13 Jul

Exercising Response and Refutation in Interpreting ‘Interpretater of Maladies’

Les Lynn Argument and Literacy, Argumentative Writing, Resources, The Debatifier

The Bengali-born American writer Jhumpa Lahiri burst on the literary scene with her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, when Lahiri was in her early 30s.  The collection, which gathers stories published in The New Yorker and less prominent literary magazines, has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Hemingway/PEN Award.  Lahiri launched a literary career with this masterful collection in which she has both been very widely read and very highly lauded.  Among other honors, she was named by President Obama in 2010 to the Committee on Arts and Letters, a position she resigned in 2017 to protest President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric

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06 Jul

AWE-some Reasoning Through Interpretive Arguments on ‘Caramelo’

Les Lynn Argument and Literacy, Resources, The Debatifier

Sandra Cisneros is a staple in high school and middle school reading lists, but not for Caramelo.  The House on Mango Street (1984), Cisneros’ short and powerful story collection, is well known and well loved for good reasons.  One of them is its austere, rather journalistic and plain-spoken prose style.  Caramelo  is its very under-read and under-assigned opposite in many ways.  This 2002 epic novel tells the multi-generational story of the Mexican-American Reyes family, through the eyes of its adolescent, sensitive, wry protagonist, Ceyla Reyes.  Despite its 500+ page length, it is very well worth looking into as an engaging achievement of Latino literature, workable in many high school English reading lists.

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