Assignments

Improving Learning Environments

1. Write a “Freedom School Curriculum” for a class of contemporary students—any age, any venue, any focus… The important thing is to be true to and to adequately represent your sense of the deep underlying goals and purposes of a Freedom School.

2. Beginning with the learning environment that you have somehow mapped or sketched or in another way depicted, represent an improved learning environment along several dimensions suggested by the readings, the classroom discussions, and your own developing awarenesses. This representation can capture something moving through time or focused on a specific moment, something that embodies a whole or focuses on a particular corner that somehow illuminates the whole. Your representation should draw on a wide range of media and can be expressed in a variety of forms—film, photography, painting, dramatic arts, drawing, dance, pantomime, poetry, music, sculpture, weaving, for example—and you should strive for originality and intellectual depth in its execution.

Qualitative Research Questions

What are the purposes of research? What is the nature of knowledge? What is bias? What is the substantive focus of each? What is data? What is data analysis? What is the role of theory? What theory of human development does each embody? What ethical issues arise? What (if anything) distinguishes this work from fiction or journalism? Is research neutral? Is it beneficent? Always? Who does research serve? Who does it help? Can research be linked to advocacy? Should it be?