| Mind Maps | Mind maps that you create before Tuesday of each week will be the basis for essays that are due Tuesdays of weeks 3, 7, and 9. Basic information regarding mind mapping will be discussed in class, but additional information can be found by Googling “mind map” or consulting The Mind Map Book (Tony Buzan). You might find these links helpful: The center concept or image of each week’s mind map must be a question that arises out of that week’s reading. From this central question, use the map to follow your lines and circles of thought. By "thought" we mean more than simple intellection or understanding; we want you to find a question that will launch an embodied sensual inquiry that will make meaning. It will perhaps also motivate action or change you, as well as your understanding of things. To help you focus this work, choose and read into the "Sensory Bibliography" on pages 397-406 of Empire of the Senses. As you learned in Kingsley's Reality, thought is sensual. Use your mind maps to explore this. Respect Buzan's "mind map laws":
Our expectation is that the meaning and requirements of all of these components will evolve through our engagement with this work.
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Response Essays |
The response essay invites you to reflect on the previous weeks’ mind maps in order to craft an essay that increases the awareness of 1) your self as the writer, and 2) your audience as the reader. The essay should be an ethnography of the thinking that led you to construct your recent mind maps. It should lead the reader through the lines and circles of thought that took you from the first map in the series covered by the essay to the last. The mind maps were premised on the fact that the question at the center of the map, together with the thoughts that spun off from the central question, enhanced your awareness. The task of this paper is to increase the awareness of your reader through an exploration of your question(s) and of your thinking with regard to the questions. This work asks you to describe a "meeting" between your self and your thinking. We are asking for thick description of your thinking that is similar to descriptions of culture that go under the name "ethnography." This is what we are calling an "ethnography of thinking." (The classic article on ethnographic thick description is Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” http://webhome.idirect.com/~boweevil/BaliCockGeertz.html) Your target audience should be a more or less anonymous reader, including your peers in this class, your teacher, your friends, your parents, and onward from there. You should write these reflections with an eye toward possible scholarly readers. That is, these reflections may form, eventually, part of a self-evaluation that will be read by scholarly, academic professionals, or others who will make decisions about future schooling, careers, etc. You should imagine increasing their awareness through the craft of your writing. You must test the effectiveness of your essay before submitting it (1) by having colleagues in the program read and respond to the essay in writing and (2) by having someone from the Writing Center (or a more qualified person) read it and provide written feedback. You must submit to the faculty all your drafts along with TWO reader’s suggestions for revisions and feedback (along with their signatures or names) with your final version. The Writing Center encourages students to reflect on their feedback and understand writing as a collective endeavor. Write a short, two- or three-sentence summary of the feedback you got from your readers. This summary should be the cover page for the stapled packet you submit to your faculty member. NOTE WELL: Your reader should be able to know, easily and without ambiguity, the questions at the centers of the maps covered by each essay. (Readers will not have the original mind-maps as they read your essay.) Here's an example of a response essay: Negelev's essay |