Welcome to 112!

Hey everybody! Glad to have you in 112 this semester. It should be a lot of fun.

To start, let's make sure we're on the same page and talk about some of the purposes of 112. Here are a few quotes from Harvard's 2007 "Report of the Task Force on General Education" that I'm drawing from.

Their aim was to "enable undergraduates to put all the learning they are doing at Harvard, outside as well as inside the classroom, in the context of the people they will be and the lives they will lead after college." To do this, the report stated students need a liberal education,

...an education conducted in the spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility. This kind of learning...heightens students' awareness of the human and natural worlds they inhabit. It makes them more reflective about their beliefs and choices, more self-conscious and critical of their presuppositions and motivations, more creative in their problem solving, more perceptive of the world around them, and more able to inform themselves about the issues that arise in their lives, personally, professionally and socially.

In persuasive language, the report declared that a liberal education's purpose is

...to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to re-orient themselves. A liberal education aims to accomplish these things by questioning assumptions, by inducing self-reflection, by teaching students to think critically and analytically, by exposing them to the sense of alienation produced by encounters with radically different historical moments and cultural formations and with phenomena that exceed their, and even our own, capacity fully to understand...The historical, theoretical, and relational perspectives that a liberal education provides can be a source of enlightenment and empowerment that will serve students well for the rest of their lives.

So, let's talk about how stories can help us to that end...

Damon from Benjamin Thevenin on Vimeo.

Before Thursday, be sure to do the following:

• Read over the syllabus carefully. 
• Set up your own blog on which you'll post your creative projects this semester and then email me the link. For accessibility’s sake, please use Blogger to create your blog. And blogs urls should be “firstnamelastnameyearadmittedtotheprogram.blogspot.com”. Example: “jessebaird2014.blogspot.com”.
• Read Forbes' "The Power of Story in an Age of Consequence" & Viera's "Will The Hunger Games Spark a Revolution?"
• Lastly, read over the following description for the "Thinking & Writing" assignment and select a media text to write about. 

Thinking & Writing (20 pts.)
Each student will choose a media text (film, book, comic book, video game, TV episode, webisode, podcast, music video, album, etc.) and write a scholarly essay (of 750-1000 words) in which they make an argument (using the methods discussed and practiced in class) about that text. Students should consider not just textual characteristics (story, theme, aesthetics), but also contextual characteristics (authorship, genre, technology, industry, audience responses, personal experiences, cultural trends, etc.) in their essay.