The most regular assignment in this course should take no more than a few minutes a week: By midnight the day before class,** every student will submit four open-ended discussion questions through this google form.
Two questions should directly engage the reading(s) you completed for homework that week. These questions should not be inquiries for more factual information. One quick way to decide if you have generated a discussion question is to ask yourself if you could find the answer to your question by searching the internet. If you could – if you are asking for facts – then it is not a discussion question.
Two questions should be directed at the special guest who will be joining us that week. In many weeks, the special guest is also the author (or co-author) of the reading assigned. This is a wonderful opportunity to ask scholars and researchers directly about how they think about research methods, challenges and triumphs they have had, and recommendations or advice the could share.
I ask you to share your questions because I am interested in what has made you think, what you think deserves more attention, or what is puzzling. More generally, I want to reinforce the idea that we should all be generating questions as we read, rather than looking for the "right" answers. Further, as we will discuss in class, it is actually quite difficult to come up with good questions and learning to do so is a skill. Please take this opportunity to be creative. Don't be afraid to ask big questions, but please keep that day's readings in mind. Always feel free to think across the readings and discussions.
The questions are due by midnight (the night before class) so that I can share your questions with our special guests and they might have a bit of time to think about possible answers.
All questions will be graded on a credit / no credit basis, which means as long as you turn in open-ended questions on time, you will receive full credit. When you are assigned multiple materials in the same session, you need to turn in four questions total, not four questions for each reading assigned.
Please submit your discussion questions via this google form. You are welcome to work ahead and submit questions early.
**Please note that the first set of questions, for the first class session, are due at noon January 4, the day of class. I don't like assigning work for the first day but this is unfortunately caused by 1) our university's absurdly short winter break, 2) the fact our class meets on the first day of the semester, and 3) the fact that this is a mini-course with a very limited number of sessions.