Using the Race/Ethnicity Studies List: Discussion Questions, Spring 2005

If you've been to the course listserv page, you know what a listserv is, how to join your section's listserv, why we have class listservs, and what to do if you run into problems using the listserv. This page takes on three important questions about the discussion questions you are required to post to your section's listserv: what, what for, and how to. I've included "do"s and "don't"s to help you understand my expectations for your discussion questions. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.

What

A set of discussion questions is one or more emails you send to the course listserv over the course of a week in which you ask 3 substantive questions that you think would spark interesting class discussions for our upcoming class meetings. Your email(s) should be posted to the course listserv by 10 pm Sunday for Monday's class, 10 pm Tuesday for Wednesday's class, or by 10 pm Thursday for Friday's class. No more than one set of discussion questions per week (3 questions, that is) will count toward your overall total, although you may submit as many additional questions each week as you want for extra credit.

Your grade for this segment of the course will be determined by the number of on-time, passing discussion questions you post to the course listserv: 10 or more sets of discussion questions=A; 9=B+; 8=B; 7=C+; 6=C, 5=D; 4 or less=E. The quality of your discussion questions will be factored into your preparation/participation grade tenth and any sets you post beyond the tenth will count as extra credit and raise your preparation/participation grade (for more on this component of your final grade, see the main page, Section VI).

Any response that doesn't meet the above requirements or the expectations laid out below (see "How To") will be counted as an extra-credit "follow-up response" (the extra credit will be factored into your preparation/participation grade; the better the quality of the follow-up response, the more extra credit it will be worth). So there are several circumstances in which something you intended as a set of discussion questions may end up being counted as a follow-up response: if you submit your questions late, if they look back on a previous class's readings and discussion without also looking ahead to the next class's readings and discussion, if you fail to ask three discussion questions in a week, your listserv submission will be counted as a follow-up response.

For the first few weeks of the semester, as people are familiarizing themselves with these requirements, I will notify people when I am counting their submissions as follow-up responses rather than a set of discussion questions, but by mid-semester, I will expect everyone to understand what is expected of them and will stop notifying them when a listserv submission is counted as a follow-up response. It is your responsibility, in short, to know the difference between a set of discussion questions and a follow-up response and to keep track on your own of how many of each you have submitted to the course listserv. If you have any questions, contact me; I will assume you understand what is required and expected of you unless you ask for clarification.

What For

At the most fundamental level, I prefer having you write weekly discussion questions to giving you reading quizzes or having a final exam. I can tell a lot about how carefully and thoughtfully you've done the readings from the questions you ask of them--and I'd rather watch how the kinds of questions you ask change over time than use the one-time assessment measure of a final exam. Rather than the teacher always supplying the questions and your job being to figure out the answers, having you ask interpretive/discussion questions can enable you all to influence or even set the agenda for a given class discussion. Rather than taking up valuable class time with pop quizzes or making you think this is the kind of course where it's ok not to do any work except for cramming for the exams, I want the job of regularly raising questions to help you get in the habit of being an active, critical reader. Even the activity of reading and thinking about others' questions in itself is valuable--you can get a clear sense of what others are interested in and challenged by, you can see the range of different kinds of questions that can be asked of the readings, and it's very likely that others' questions will lead you to understand the readings differently. In fact, your getting in the habit of asking incisive questions of the course materials is probably the key intellectual foundation of the course--questioning is the fundamental building block of all intellectual activity, and developing an inquiring mind is a product of consistent, steady practice. The questions you and others ask can not only form the basis of our class discussion, but they can spark ideas for the essays and projects in the course, as well. The discussion questions provide opportunities for inquiry-based learning, class time gives you practice in generating and discussing possible answers to important questions, and reflective essays give you practice in choosing a challenging question and not only giving an answer to it, but doing it in such a way that it's persuasive to your audience, as well.

Two more pragmatic reasons it's worth your while to put a significant amount of time and thought into these discussion questions: avoiding boredom and getting better grades. If you ask questions that you're genuinely interested in and that you want others to be interested in, as well, you're increasing the chances that we'll have a vigorous class discussion. And when I calculate your final grade, I will be sure to raise the base grade of those who have made extraordinary contributions to class discussion and to the listserv.

How To

Questioning

Think of all the questions you have as you finish reading the first sentence of a story or essay. Now, as you read on and are first trying to make sense of the text, you're probably still going to have a thousand and one questions. The process of moving from first impressions to first analyses should radically reduce the number of questions, hopefully by several orders of magnitude. But there will still be many more questions than we could hope to address on a listserv or in a day or week or even semester--particularly when the questions are not just about the plot or characters or main arguments, but are also about the way the text is structured, the author's intentions, the ideas or issues being broached in the story or essay, its relation to other works we've read, and so on. So you have to prioritize when considering what questions to ask on the listserv. Keep in mind that the point of asking these questions is for you to influence the shape of our upcoming class discussions. Ask questions that you believe will lead to active, interesting, and productive discussion in the next class meeting--a discussion that not only helps us understand the texts better and their relations to each other and to others we've already read, but that also gives people the opportunity to share their own interpretations, analyses, and reactions, to agree and/or disagree over significant issues, and to bring their own perspectives, values, and experiences to bear on their responses to the readings and the students in the course.

Here are some informal suggestions/guidelines for generating discussion questions.

"Do"s:

• Read other people's questions before submitting your own--think of yourself as participating in an on-line, asynchronous conversation, rather than simply turning in your questions in a different format than usual. By the same token, I expect you to have read and thought about your classmates' questions before coming to class.
• Raise questions about upcoming readings that you believe would spark a class discussion you'd want to take part in next class. If you're dissatisfied with past class discussions, do something about it. Put your concerns on the agenda. That's what the listserv is for.
• Ask questions that matter to you--that you really want us to try to answer. Give people a context for understanding the importance of the question to you. It's often a good idea to explain why you're asking the question you're asking, or to begin with an observation about or interpretation of a particular passage or pattern that sparked the question for you.
• Ask questions that are genuinely debate-able, for which there are a number of possible answers. A big part of the work of class discussion consists of us trying to move from identifying possible answers to the questions you've identified as central to figuring out what are more or less plausible answers to them. When you ask a question, you might suggest possible answers you've considered, or discuss ways of coming up with an answer to the question (i.e., what we'd need to figure out to be in a position to answer the question).
• Think carefully about the kinds of questions you could ask--such as questions that help us understand the text better, that ask us to analyze how it works, that ask us to give our reactions to it, that ask us to evaluate it, that ask us to compare it to another text, that ask us to relate it to an issue we've been discussing in previous classes--and choose the kinds of questions you think are most appropriate for/relevant to a particular text or group of texts. Experiment with different kinds of questions.
• Rank your questions in order of importance to you. When I'm trying to figure out how to synthesize all the various questions that people are asking in order to put together an agenda for class discussion, I'll be looking most closely at the first question you ask--that should be the one that you absolutely positively NEED to discuss in class. By ranking your questions, you're also signalling your priorities to your classmates, and as you read their responses you should be comparing their priorities to your own.

"Don't"s:

• Don't just ask questions for the sake of asking questions; don't just ask the first questions that come to mind. Be selective and prioritize.
• Try to avoid questions that need be answered only with a "yes" or "no," without any further explanation or thought.
• Try to ask as few "factual" questions as possible--questions, that is, in which you want someone else to clear up some confusion about what happened in the text. First try to figure out these kinds of questions for yourself (never underestimate the power of a dictionary, thesaurus, and a willingness to reread!). If after an honest effort to do so you are still confused, you may ask a "factual" question. Odds are you've then hit on something the author intentionally has made ambiguous or a weakness in the author's argument. But if that's so, then you'll most likely be better off asking why the author made this precise moment in the text so ambiguous and what people think the effect of this ambiguity is or whether others think this is a weakness in the essay. That's a much more inviting approach than in effect asking someone else to explain the plot or argument to you. If you really need to ask questions of this kind, better to include them at the end of a list of several discussion questions, rather than have them counted as one of your first three.
• Don't just repeat someone else's questions; if someone else has already asked a question you find interesting and would have asked on your own, say a bit about why you find the question interesting or why we should address it in class, and consider asking a follow-up question.
• Don't put what's really an observation or interpretation in the form of a question--if you have a point you really want to make, much better to say it straight out and ask a follow-up question that relates to it in some way.

In closing, if you find it difficult to come up with discussion questions, it's probably a sign that you're not reading carefully enough or giving yourself enough processing/brainstorming time. Adjust your work schedule accordingly. If you don't, you'll find it very difficult to complete the other, more formal and ambitious writing assignments.

Or to put the point more positively: the more work you put right now into generating discussion questions, the better off you'll be when it comes time to write your essays and projects.

INDS/HIST 220: Introduction to Ethnicity/Race, Spring 2005
Created: 1/25/05 6:00 pm
Last modified: 2/18/05 8:47 am