Utopian Manifesto

詹姆斯·本顿，英语与写作

这学期，我让我的学生们组成小金沙赌场，编写一份乌托邦宣言，他们在宣言中列举了一系列价值观，然后创建了一套规则和体系来支持这些价值观。  They had to first consider utopian thinking, then consider the manifesto as a genre.  This involved researching utopian experiments from the past, reading manifestos like our declaration of independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Port Huron Statement, and the Black Panther Party statement, “What We Believe and What We Want.”  Students quickly had to make the distinction between hollow platitudes like “freedom” and the concrete mechanisms needed to support their core values.  They ended up realizing before long that designing a society is not so simple, and they were forced to research issues like immigration, defense, education, health care, and justice. They certainly know more than what they did ten weeks ago.  

They also confronted the need to express themselves in writing with clarity and precision and gained an appreciation for paragraphing, transitions (the relationships between ideas in the orderly sequence of ideas), and a little bit about document design conventions.  All in all, my WR 121 students definitely learned a lot, whether they realize it or not.  So did I.