Working with a New Reading
by Michael Cripps

The bulletin board forum is a potentially wonderful technology precisely because it makes sharing easy, and retains a public record. It is a great place to get students to begin work with a new reading. I like to link all my reading assignments to a requirement that students post to the bulletin board forum, and respond to other students' posts.

1. Early in the semester I will seed the bulletin board discussion on a new reading by posting questions about issues in a reading. I require students to respond to some set of these questions, and to post their own questions about a new reading. This kind of assignment works best when students are required to quote the passages that give them trouble. Lastly, I require students to respond to at least 1 or 2 of those questions. Each student only posts about 4 times, and the result is a written record of early insights and issues.
2. As the semester progresses, I hand off primary responsibility for initial posts to 3 or 4 students (making sure to distribute the requirement). Other students are required to respond to some or all of those questions, and to post questions or problems they are having with the reading. Over the course of the semester, students can return to the forum posts for help with the readings.

When a Paper Is Due on the Same Day as a New Reading
by Michael Goeller

Often in 101 I find myself assigning a new reading on the day that the final draft of the previous assignment is due. This does not make for such a good session, of course, since most students will not have done very much of the reading. So now I have students meet that day in the computer lab and get them to do some basic work with the new reading in front of a computer, posting their ideas to the class forum. In the course of an hour they will generate lots of great material that I can use in discussion the following class meeting. And if I wanted, I could have them return to the assignment at home, once they had a chance to really go through the reading, so that I can increase their time on task.

Here is an assignment I used in introducing Abu-Lughod's essay on the day they were turning in papers on James Scott. I think it worked very well.

Applying Scott's Terms to Abu-Lughod's Essay

I know that since all of you were writing Essay #3 for today, you probably did not have much time to read Lila Abu-Lughod's "Honor and Shame" in our book. I hope, though, that you at least read far enough to get a sense of how her essay might be talked about using terms and ideas from Scott.

Today what I want you to do is the following:

Choose an incident from Abu-Lughod's essay that you think would make a good connection with James Scott's essay and discuss it in the forum using at least two quotations. Tell us about the incident you have chosen, and then begin discussing it using terms and ideas from Scott. Discuss at least two quotations at some length using ideas from Scott to help explain these passages. Try to use quotations from Scott as well. And see if you can write two paragraphs in the forum.

I would like you to use your own, original example from the essay, but if you feel you have not read the essay well enough to choose a good incident, consider one of the following:

A) Kamla wrote an essay titled "An Essay on the Young Bedouin Woman of Egypt and the Changes in Her Life over 40 Years" in which, according to Abu-Lughod, "You can trace, in the stilted words of her essay and the candid comments (in parentheses) she made as she read it aloud to me, the outlines of the new world she hoped to gain by marrying the likes of Engineer Ibrahim Saleem." How might Scott interpret the passages of Kamla reading her essay aloud to the author? How would he discuss specific passages and parenthetical remarks?

B) Reread the story about Kamla's cousin Salih drinking liquor. How might Scott interpret this story? What specific passages help us to read the way power and resistance get played out in this incident?

 

Using Images on the Forum to Stimulate Discussion
by Carmen Vendelin

I first thought to post images to the forum for my 201: Photography and Visual Culture class. I knew I would not have much time to devote to teaching the students how to write about images in class and I thought the forum could be used in that capacity. I began by posting images for formal analysis and for students to attempt connecting images to issues in the texts. The students posted images relating to their topics, posing questions and asking for feedback. (The students especially like posting controversial images and starting debates.) My next goal is to get students to use images in their replies, so they think about the visual image as part of their answer.

From this experience, I branched out into the 101 forum. I, like many instructors, was concerned that my students were reading uncritically. Our first reading was Lila Abu-Lughod's "Honor and Shame." In the essay, Abu-Lughod records the comments of Bedouin tribal members. The Bedouin oral tradition includes over-exaggerated insults and name-calling. Many students took their words at face value. I made the following post, hoping that some students would question the Bedouin perspective.

What do women wear in Egypt?

In "Honor and Shame," some members of a Bedouin community describe the dress of urban Egyptian women as immodest. Kamla asserts that some Egyptian girls in the cities go out to clubs and wear "short dresses" (Abu-Lughod 42). Kamla's father is concerned that young Bedouin men will want to marry Egyptian women because they look "so pretty" in these "short dresses" (Abu-Lughod 43). "A group of Bedouin elders" even meets to "discuss what to do about these women who 'walk around naked'" (Abu-Lughod 43). How literal are these statements? Do you think the Bedouin might be exaggerating? How short do you think the "short dresses" are? How long could they be and still be considered indecent by the Bedouin? Has anyone been to Egypt who could describe the way most women dressed when you were there?

Student replies acknowledged that the Bedouin probably exaggerated. I then thought showing them some photos might help accelerate the process. Then they would have more to inform them than their reading skills and logical deduction. I posted images not only of Egyptian women but also of Bedouin. Posters were most interested in the Bedouin images. How, for example, they did or did not conform to student expectations; how they might be able to preserve the tradition of tattooing (a cultural detail that I do not think the students caught from the one brief mention in the text).

How to do it:
Images can be uploaded from a computer hard drive by clicking the "browse" button next to the "attach image" box, and will appear in the post itself. (Acceptable file types and maximum size are listed.) Image links may also be added by clicking the "IMG" button above the text entry box. With this method, the post contains a link, rather than an image, that must be clicked to open another page with the image.