For our first essay, we’ll be reflecting on the effects our schooling and formal/informal educational experiences have had on us. The biggest part of the assignment is helping readers understand how and why our experiences helped us grow and/or limited our views of ourselves or the world around us. Sometimes we may even write about how one experience limited us but then also helped us grow!
There are several writing goals, like a developed thesis and using texts in a certain way, but we’ll have workshops and activities to help us meet those goals. Keep that in mind when you look at that long list! In our first week alone, we took steps toward those goals.
Also keep in mind the texts we’ve read: the reflections, research, and arguments on how formal schooling and formal and informal education has intended and unintended effects on individuals. Education enables some students to develop creative and analytic skills while also expanding a personal sense of self; in other instances, schooling has limiting effects, on skills, opportunities, and self-perception. As we’ve read, we’ve connected our experiences with theirs or with the analysis of the writer. We now turn more closely to our own experiences.
Prompt
In a structured reflection, develop answers to the following purposefully broad question:
How have your experiences in educational settings expanded and/or limited your view of yourself and the world around you?
Quick Notes before Moving On
“Can I talk about one year of my education?” Yes, if it holds that level of significance in your life.
“Just my four years of high school?” Absolutely!
“All of K-12?” Sure, but you’ll need to pick and choose selectively.
“The differences in my public school and my private school?” Yes, please!
“Education outside the US?” Of course! Those are your experiences.
“It’s been a long time, and I’ve tried to forget.” Me, too. But it’s still there, and it’s still affecting me.
“Experiences outside the classroom?” If it’s somewhere you learned, it’s an educational setting. As a kid, I learned more hiding in a closet reading than in a classroom.
Writing Goals
Use specific examples from your educational experiences to develop your ideas so that someone unfamiliar with your life can understand them—name names and describe assignments, activities, and actions.
Analyze and explain how and why these experiences affected you. The ethnographic part of this assignment is less about proving yourself right than about providing your readers with reasons and evidence linked to the larger claims about the effects you focus on.
Incorporate at least three specific pieces of textual evidence from assigned texts—please notice that this goal does not entail working with three different sources or using each piece of textual evidence equally. Some things are more important than other things.
Analyze, do not simply summarize, the readings and your experiences–dig into how and why things work, how things happened and why they matter, how a text works and why it is important or even unimportant.
Synthesize personal life experiences and textual support so textual evidence and evidence from your experiences are blended, even if that blending is to highlight difference.
Develop a specific thesis that unifies and maps your essay and acknowledges complexity. This will likely be a final step, not an early one.
Create an organizational strategy that emphasizes your ideas and guides a reader, most likely based around chronology or simplest to most complex idea.
Create a title that comes from the ideas you develop. This will also likely be a final step, not an early one.
Practice using MLA page layout (Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, 1” margins, headings and page numbers) and parenthetical citations to show readers where outside information comes from. Include a works cited page that can guide readers to your sources.
Write at least 1300 words; you’re talking about your life–you can get there!
Also I need at least 3 of these articles referenced in the essay, with a works cited page.