Teaching Inclusively
A Workshop for NIU Teaching Assistants
Ways of
categorizing “difference”:
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Some opening questions:
1.
What categories of difference have caused you concern or difficulty
in your experiences with students?
2.
How are you different as a TA, and which of your own
“differences” do you think makes an impact on your students?
3.
Choose one or two of the above categories and comment on what
you’ve noticed about students’ reading, writing, speaking, listening, or other
learning skills, when they are in situations where they do not belong to the
“mainstream or “majority” of those categories.
Please write about one important concept that you have to
make sure your students understand, and write it in a way that you think all
of your students would easily comprehend.
Edward Corbett’s Elements of Reasoning identifies four
common types of argument: definition, cause/effect, evaluation, and
proposal. Effective argumentative
techniques include: Socratic dialogue, induction (which predicts), deduction
(which draws conclusions from facts and evidence), and analogy. Ethical arguments should avoid: hasty
generalizations, unrepresentative sampling, faulty comparisons, non sequitur,
equivocations, post hoc ergo prompter hoc, falsely honorific or pejorative
terms, and shifting criteria.
An assignment in argumentative analysis (the concept
of argumentation & techniques is a part of the assignment) :
Listen to conversations, watch TV, listen to a radio program,
or look through a newspaper to find one argument that you believe is effective
and honest. Then look for another that
you believe is ineffective, flawed, or maybe even unethical. (1) Write a summary of the two
arguments. (2) Explain which type each
argument seems to be (definition, cause/effect, evaluation, proposal). (3) Give specific reasons why you think one
argument is ethical, while the other is not.
(4) Suggest ways in which each argument is effective and/or might have
been presented more effectively.
Your draft
should be about 2½-3 typewritten pages (or 500-675 words). You will be reading your draft to a small group
of your classmates, who will comment on your draft’s strengths and weaknesses
and suggest revisions to help you satisfy the 4 criteria above.
Persuasion is
the ever thirsty leech that sucks blood of human foolishness. Somehow we evolved into prospective fools,
destroying our bodies with drugs and alcohol.
And we die like fools afraid of what we cannot sence. And those among us who are evel stand on
roof-tops of bazars and encourage us to remain half-wits
Look at me my
children. You can see me think. I must exist. I'm flesh and bone and
spirit. And when I die I will seize to
exist. Fear not hereafter. Live life now. For tomorrow you will die like fools.
And the man with
his hanging beard and flowing robes hands down the fire stick and says
Look children,
point the stick, release the soul and let loose the days of evil. Fear not death for today it is what we fight
and die for.
And I like a fool stood by and agreed with words I thought
good. Not realizing I was selling my
soul to a man who had already given his to the devil. And all the time the wolf was screaming laughter at my face, he
said,
Come with me
children. Let us today kill for
religion. Let the children run explosives
tied to their chests to detonate beneth the tank.
Or better still,
let them walk ahead to give the enemy marksman a chance to waist ammunition or
to blow up any mine that lies in our way.
And when the battle
was over, there were only the dead left.
The blood like a dirty ink written on a clean sheet of paper, wanting to
be removed. All that remained was the
memory and all that stayed was the nightmare to follow. And yet we did not learn, we waisted our
tears and swore to revenge the blood with even more the next day.
And what did I
fight for, I asked God. It could not
have been religion. For religion makes
us human, doesn't it?
No! cried the
devil. Let me answer you. After all it was I all along. You fought for land to human adversary. You fought for a new world under my world
order.
Yesterday I
asked a friend of mine that he suppose one day he got married and in a few
years had a child.
I asked him to imagine a child just torn from a womb, unprotected, fragile from a place as unknown to us as afterlife. If their I was to appear before you and ask for your child in exchange of anything and everything he desired would he agree.
He replied no,
and yet I said we do it everyday of our lives.
Placing value over human life.
Today it is worth the price of oil, tomorrow it could be anything. The beauty of human life is its
pricelessness and no amount of persuasion should change that.
(476 words)
Some Questions:
1.
How do you think the above assignment is helpful to and
inclusive of all students?
2.
What problems might students who are “different” have
reading and understanding the assignment?
3.
What do you speculate is different about the student who
wrote “Two Sides of a Coin”?
4.
How did the student succeed in meeting the instructions to
the assignment? Where did the student not succeed?
5.
What suggestions would you give, to help the student revise?
Wrap-up:
What did you learn from this
workshop that you can use in your work as a TA and in any future teaching roles
you play?