Students explore the nature and structure of expository texts that focusing on cause and effect and apply what they learned using graphic organizers and writing paragraphs to outline cause-and-effect relationships.
Focus: What can we believe when we read an autobiography? How do writers recall, select, shape, and present their lives to construct life stories? Readings that ground these questions include selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent (pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs), "A Sketch of the Past" by Virginia Woolf, Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin, "The Achievement of Desire" by Richard Rodriguez, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin. Discussion, papers, and brief oral presentations will focus on the content of the life stories as well as the forms and techniques authors use to shape autobiography. We will identify masks and stances used to achieve various goals, sources and interrelationships of technical and thematic concerns, and "fictions" of autobiographical writing. Assignments will allow students to consider texts in terms of their implicit theories of autobiography, of theories we read, and of students' experiences; assignments also allow some autobiographical writing.
The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.
Fact Fragment Frenzy provides elementary students with an online model for finding facts in nonfiction text, then invites students to find facts in five sample passages.
These lesson plans and materials are designed for high school students, especially 9th and 10th graders. The goals of these lessons are for students to review and learn more about figurative language devices, to compare and contrast poetry from different authors, and understand point of view in order to see that authors have different perspectives in their works. This lesson plan unit covers six different poems from local Emma Bell Miles and famous Henry Thoreau. Each poem has a video, presentation, and handout to accompany it. The lesson plan has been divided into two 50 minute class periods. The first class period is designed to introduce the students to the poems and authors using the various materials. The second class period is designed to cover point of view according to Miles and Thoreau and ask the students to compare and contrast the authors’ perspectives and experiences.
The Fractured Fairy Tale tool encourages students to create their own fractured fairy tales.
Scientist and author Edward O. Wilson, draws on studies from a broad spectrum of disciplines to show how various fields of inquiry, and especially the humanities and sciences, intersect with each other. According to Wilson, "the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities." (58 minutes)
Some argue that genre fiction is only a marketing category, but other critics say that different genres meet specific expectations of readers. This course examines these different agreements of what the reader wants and what the writer provides under the aegis of different genres. We will look at how genres are divided into subgenres, and how they are combined into cross-genre work, always keeping in mind the Reader-Writer Contact that is at the heart of genre writing. We shall also think about the ways in which crossing genres has led to the establishment of new genres (steampunk, preternatural romance) and strongly established subgenres (historical mystery, urban fantasy).
Fantasy is currently one of the most popular genres across every platform in fiction. From film to gaming to literature, fantasy tops the charts. Why? Why do people who believe in democracy and live with the magic technology appear to long for wizards and dragons and the matters of kingship? In this class, we will explore this question, and from that base read articles, novels, write exercises and stories in this genre.
Works in this series were created as part of an open pedagogy assignment for Professor Wolf's ART 4190r: Global Currents in Contemporary Art in Spring 2021 at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Each work in this series includes a video presentation and associated paper with a biographical sketch and analysis of themes in the work of contemporary global artists.
This course is designed to improve the student's ability to communicate technical information. It covers the basics of working with sources, including summarizing and paraphrasing, synthesizing source materials, citing, quoting, and avoiding plagiarism. It also covers how to write an abstract and a literature review. In addition, we will cover communication concepts, tools, and strategies that can help you understand how engineering texts work, and how you can make your texts work more effectively.
This course is limited to MIT graduate engineering students based on results of the Graduate Writing Exam.
Guinea Bissau Conflict. Program examines the guerilla warfare underway in the African country of Guinea Bissau as part of the campaign for independence being waged in that country. Program is divided into two segments: the first consisting of an on-location British film about Guinea Bissau guerilla troop B-30 as it proceeds to an attack site, the second of an interview with Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) representative Gil Fernandes, who discusses his work, background, and the state of the war. Film contains commentary by PAIGC founder Amilcar Cabral. Produced by John Slade. Directed by Russell Tillman.
This course focuses on one particular aspect of the history of computing: the use of the computer as a scientific instrument. The electronic digital computer was invented to do science, and its applications range from physics to mathematics to biology to the humanities. What has been the impact of computing on the practice of science? Is the computer different from other scientific instruments? Is computer simulation a valid form of scientific experiment? Can computer models be viewed as surrogate theories? How does the computer change the way scientists approach the notions of proof, expertise, and discovery? No comprehensive history of scientific computing has yet been written. This seminar examines scientific articles, participants’ memoirs, and works by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to provide multiple perspectives on the use of computers in diverse fields of physical, biological, and social sciences and the humanities. We explore how the computer transformed scientific practice, and how the culture of computing was influenced, in turn, by scientific applications.
This resource provides references, writing aids and guides for students writing essays in a literature-based composition course. These materials were culled from several different sites; the individual pages link back to the original resource and indicate the Creative Commons license under which the page is adapted and/or reused. Except where otherwise noted, this resource is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.
HuMetricsHSS supports the creation of values-based frameworks to guide all kinds of scholarly process, and to promote the nurturing of a values-enacted approach to academia writ large. During the 2016 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI), the authors sketched a preliminary set of core values for enriching scholarship, highlighting five: Equity, Openness, Collegiality, Quality, Community. They created a framework which is intended to help transform how scholarship is created, assessed, and valued in the humanities.
At the workshops and in the toolkit, they emphasize that values are locally negotiated and frameworks locally built. That’s the explicit point of the workshop, to make space for open conversation about values and their meaning, to come to agreement on what matters for a given group, and then to work on constructing a framework that could be used to guide evaluation in the academy — whether that’s through the tenure and promotion process, the setting of annual goals, the hiring of new faculty, or decision-making about what kinds of digitization projects to take on, what kinds of collections to develop, or what kinds of projects to publish at an academic press.
The OER Textbook used for HUM 122 Medieval to Modern History Humanities Course.Examines written texts, visual arts, and musical compositions to analyze and reflect the evolution and confluence of cultures in Europe, Asia, and the Americas from 800 C.E. to 1750 C.E.
This resource includes a photo, video and written story illustrating my Humanities Moment. It depicts an experience I had in Ecuador with a volcano called Chimborazo and a piece of music that had never meant anything to me before. This resource gives a personal account of how the Humanities has impacted me and how it can change how we see the world around us.
Earl Ubell is a pioneer among science and health writers in America. After a long, distinguished career at The New York Herald Tribune from 1943 to 1966, he went on to work at both CBS and NBC News. Prominent in the emerging scientific writing community in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was a recipient of the Lasker Medical Journalism Award 1957. Milton Stanley Livingston was a leading physicist in the field of magnetic resonance accelerators. Working first with professor Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, Livingston was instrumental in the development of the Berkeley cyclotron. Moving to Cornell in 1938, Livingston was part of the core group who established nuclear physics as a field of study. Choosing to stay with the Cornell cyclotron rather than follow colleagues onto the Manhattan Project, Livingston was involved in the production of radioisotopes for medical purposes. At the time of this interview, Livingston was director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a joint project of Harvard University and MIT.In this program segment Louis Lyons quizzes Earl Ubell about the lack of public knowledge and the perception of the nuclear bomb, while pressing Professor Livingston to explain exactly what nuclear fallout is, and the danger it presents.
At age twenty-seven, physicist Philip Morrison joined the Manhattan Project, the code name given to the U.S. government's covert effort at Los Alamos to develop the first nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project was also the most expensive single program ever financed by public funds. In this video segment, Morrison describes the charismatic leadership of his mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the urgency of their mission to manufacture a weapon 'which if we didn't make first would lead to the loss of the war." In the interview Morrison conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Dawn,' he describes the remote, inaccessible setting of the laboratory that operated in extreme secrecy. It was this physical isolation, he maintains, that allowed scientists extraordinary freedom to exchange ideas with fellow physicists. Morrison also reflects on his wartime fears. Germany had many of the greatest minds in physics and engineering, which created tremendous anxiety among Allied scientists that it would win the atomic race and the war, and Morrison recalls the elaborate schemes he devised to determine that country's atomic progress. At the time that he was helping assemble the world's first atomic bomb, Morrison believed that nuclear weapons 'could be made part of the construction of the peace.' A month after the war, he toured Hiroshima, and for several years thereafter he testified, became a public spokesman, and lobbied for international nuclear cooperation. After leaving Los Alamos, Morrison returned to academia. For the rest of his life he was a forceful voice against nuclear weapons.
The "Into the Book" web site is designed to help elementary students practice eight reading comprehension strategies through playful interactive activities. The site focuses on eight research-based strategies: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. "Behind the Lesson," the teacher area of the site, provides information, lesson plans and other resources for teachers.