EH 1101 is designed to help incoming students prepare for academic writing as a genre. It focuses on introducing students to the basics of rhetoric, with a focus on constructing consistent, arguable theses; finding and incorporating valid research methods, with a particular focus on primary research methods; and formatting the information in the most effective way for a given audience.
My EH 1101 course encourages students to consider what legacy our current culture will leave behind. This will be done through a literacy narrative that invites them to consider their position as readers and writers in the 21st century; an ethnography in which students attempt to observe a group of people objectively to gather what is important to that group; an exploratory paper about a cultural artifact; and a blog or site that targets a specific audience to convey the information from those papers as a cohesive analysis of modern culture.
My inspiration for this class comes from utopian theorist Ernst Bloch’s volume Heritage of Our Times, a record of various cultural analyses that range from the arrangement of cities to direct the poor to entertainment to analyses of the climbing Nazi party’s claims towards pure Germanic people to an inherent dehumanization within a dance contest. The record we receive from Bloch shows a clear, conscious understanding of many of the horrors other German people claimed not to know after the defeat of the Nazi party in World War II, and as such is a treasure of the value of cultural criticism. With this inspiration, I will bring some utopian themes and theories into the classroom that will help facilitate students’ speculations of what future generations might need to know about our times.
I have attached my syllabus, assignment sheets, and grading rubrics as a source to any students or colleagues who want to know how I introduce students to this field of academic, primary research writing.
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