If the rhetorical analysis, synthesis, and free-response questions were cooking-show challenges, they might go like this:
The free response, otherwise known and referred to as the ADQ (for the frequent command to Agree, Disagree, or Qualify) is an essay that typically asks students to agree, disagree, or qualify (partly agree) with a given statement or position and to use examples from their academic or personal experiences to substantiate their claims. This is where many students, particularly students without a strong background in history, literature, or academic subjects, find themselves most at a disadvantage, and it is also where the AP reveals itself (or reveals itself more than usual) to be a test of cultural literacy above all else. The student who can write meaningfully about Plato and Jean-Luc Godard will be at an advantage not enjoyed by students with a comparative paucity of literary or cultural influences. The purpose of this unit is to help "stock the pantry shelves," as it were, by presenting readings that will ultimately inform a student's understanding of a particularly rich AP free-response prompt, one asking about the ability of photography to represent our world. This unit will be in two parts: Plato's Cave and Photography, Either one could be done independently, but they are intended to work complementarily. Those of you who have done the synthesis project on college will see the similarity in the setups of these two units. |
Unit Questions: Philosophical Chairs Activity
|
Questions and Procedure
|
Opening Questions
Do you agree or disagree with the statements below?
Philosophical Chairs Rules
Students are to keep an open mind and listen to the speaker's statements without rushing to judgment. Students are to divide into Yes/No groups based on their answers to the questions.
|
Overview
|
A major focus of this unit is to "stock the shelves": that is, to provide students with a wide-ranging group of texts from multiple eras and disciplines that reflect in some way on the issue at hand.
In this case, all students will read the three articles listed under "Background Reading." Two of them concern the famous conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church over Galileo's belief in a heliocentric solar system; one will concern the efforts of the English noblewoman Mary Wortley Montagu's efforts to introduce a badly-needed smallpox vaccine to Europe. When we turn to the major readings, the focus will be on perception and reality, a central issue in the famous "Allegory of the Cave" by the Greek philosopher Plato, an allegorical story that has influenced generations of writers (and the filmmakers of The Matrix, of course) by asking questions about reality and received truths. Background Reading
Readings Annotations Students should make annotations on these texts or take Cornell notes on the visual media. At this point, the discussion questions with which the unit began can be asked again, this time in light of the readings, or the readings themselves can be synthesized into a larger issue or discussion. Possible Post-Reading Reflections
|
Overview
Most of us are more than familiar with the often-tiresome clichés about a picture's worth in words or the power of photography to -- well, make the world real or concretize the sense that an event really occurred. Call it the "Without Pix it Didn't Happen" phenomenon. However, how does photography document our world? Is photography always art? Does an image have the power to capture reality, or does it always distort reality? These questions will dominate our discussion and reading prior to responding to the ideas present in the Sontag essay. |
Opening Questions
|
Related Statements on Art: Agree or Disagree
|
These statements may be used to conduct philosophical chairs if the discussion turns to this issue.
|
Readings and Texts on Photography
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
|