Introduction to Course Material:
I first heard the song that’s currently playing by Rage Against the Machine when I was about 14 years old. I was immediately taken by its genre bending sonics, defying categorization even after entering into the arena of mainstream music. Is it hip hop? Is it hard rock? Is it heavy metal? Is it punk rock? The song doesn’t even attempt to assume a permitted position or identity within the discursive regimes of power established and maintained by dominant media: radio, MTV, Billboard, etc. Instead, it queers the process of categorization itself to emerge as a new way of creating/playing music in a world overdetermined by labels fitted onto artists by corporate entities bent on commodifying their art. |
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It was the song’s sound that pulled me in, but its message that kept me listening. Throughout the song, the band’s lead vocalist Zack de la Rocha, in true Foucauldian fashion, presents a relationship between knowledge & power. For de la Rocha, it is the miseducation that traditional formal schooling provides that produces a misinformed and disempowered public: “The teacher stands in front of the class, but the lesson plan he can’t recall. The students’ eyes don’t perceive the lies bouncing off every fucking wall. His composure is well kept. I guess he fears playing the fool. The complacent students sit and listen to some of that bullshit that he learned in school.”
de la Rocha emphasizes the Eurocentric bourgeois outlook of public education in the west in various portions of the song, but what should stand out here to advocates of critical pedagogy is his critique of what Paulo Freire called the “Banking Model” of education, where the belief is that an instructor’s job is to transmit knowledge to students as if he/she/they were depositing money into a bank. In this fashion students remain passive receptors of information. Their opinions, thoughts, and beliefs are not valued, questioned, or examined. The student’s ideas are not even allowed much room for articulation in the classroom, and the instructor’s opinions, thoughts, and beliefs are made master over the site of knowledge that is constructed.
It is my hope that the activities and writing prompts I’ve posed on this page not only allow for the development of higher order thinking skills, according to Bloom, on the part of our students, but act more as provocations than prescriptions for critical thinking. With this in mind, I am always open to student revisions of writing prompts in my classrooms. On top of this, I always allow students to reject the writing prompts I’ve posed altogether in favor of writing their own, which are then confirmed through a dialogic process between myself and the student before the student begins his/her/their writing project. While I have written a lot of prompts, there is no way that they can all be used in one course. I merely want to provide options to both students and instructors. Depending on the class, I might place three of the prompts here on an assignment sheet, allowing a fourth spot for students to write in their own prompts if desired. What I’m after here is flexibility, which I feel is very important with regard to how we think about constructing our syllabi and assignments.
All of the writing prompts on this page are meant to produce thesis driven, argumentative essays. This in no way means that students aren’t welcome to blend rhetorical modes in the drafting of such essays, bringing in narrative and descriptive components to create meaning and to augment/support their essays’ theses. That said, these prompts have been written with departmental expectations for course curriculum in mind, and in my personal experience, writing programs, whether housed within English departments or not, still privilege argumentation over other modes of expression, critique, and knowledge production. Therefore, these prompts should work to satisfy curricular expectations while allowing students some room to dictate their relationship with the text(s) assigned. Some of the prompts are more geared towards performing close reading and developing interpretive frameworks, while others require a research component. The types of responses to prompts you expect should be clearly indicated on whatever assignment sheets you produce, including asking students to ground their answers to prompts with direct evidence from the novel, from other assigned course readings, and from outside research (where applicable).
All of the prompts are intended to center some aspect of the politics of the novel, as opposed to the types of readings that belong to the schools of literary formalism, new criticism, and basic reader-response. I am not dismissing these approaches to literary analysis out of hand, but I do want to acknowledge how these modes tend to silence the political, focusing more on issues of textuality than political content. Instead, the assignments on this page have more in common with Black feminist, queer, critical race, and Marxist traditions in their attempt to ask students to situate the novel within the realms of the social, the political, and the economic; and as pertains to the role students play in their own education, and as makers of history, in the words of de la Rocha, help them to “take the power back.”
de la Rocha emphasizes the Eurocentric bourgeois outlook of public education in the west in various portions of the song, but what should stand out here to advocates of critical pedagogy is his critique of what Paulo Freire called the “Banking Model” of education, where the belief is that an instructor’s job is to transmit knowledge to students as if he/she/they were depositing money into a bank. In this fashion students remain passive receptors of information. Their opinions, thoughts, and beliefs are not valued, questioned, or examined. The student’s ideas are not even allowed much room for articulation in the classroom, and the instructor’s opinions, thoughts, and beliefs are made master over the site of knowledge that is constructed.
It is my hope that the activities and writing prompts I’ve posed on this page not only allow for the development of higher order thinking skills, according to Bloom, on the part of our students, but act more as provocations than prescriptions for critical thinking. With this in mind, I am always open to student revisions of writing prompts in my classrooms. On top of this, I always allow students to reject the writing prompts I’ve posed altogether in favor of writing their own, which are then confirmed through a dialogic process between myself and the student before the student begins his/her/their writing project. While I have written a lot of prompts, there is no way that they can all be used in one course. I merely want to provide options to both students and instructors. Depending on the class, I might place three of the prompts here on an assignment sheet, allowing a fourth spot for students to write in their own prompts if desired. What I’m after here is flexibility, which I feel is very important with regard to how we think about constructing our syllabi and assignments.
All of the writing prompts on this page are meant to produce thesis driven, argumentative essays. This in no way means that students aren’t welcome to blend rhetorical modes in the drafting of such essays, bringing in narrative and descriptive components to create meaning and to augment/support their essays’ theses. That said, these prompts have been written with departmental expectations for course curriculum in mind, and in my personal experience, writing programs, whether housed within English departments or not, still privilege argumentation over other modes of expression, critique, and knowledge production. Therefore, these prompts should work to satisfy curricular expectations while allowing students some room to dictate their relationship with the text(s) assigned. Some of the prompts are more geared towards performing close reading and developing interpretive frameworks, while others require a research component. The types of responses to prompts you expect should be clearly indicated on whatever assignment sheets you produce, including asking students to ground their answers to prompts with direct evidence from the novel, from other assigned course readings, and from outside research (where applicable).
All of the prompts are intended to center some aspect of the politics of the novel, as opposed to the types of readings that belong to the schools of literary formalism, new criticism, and basic reader-response. I am not dismissing these approaches to literary analysis out of hand, but I do want to acknowledge how these modes tend to silence the political, focusing more on issues of textuality than political content. Instead, the assignments on this page have more in common with Black feminist, queer, critical race, and Marxist traditions in their attempt to ask students to situate the novel within the realms of the social, the political, and the economic; and as pertains to the role students play in their own education, and as makers of history, in the words of de la Rocha, help them to “take the power back.”
Essay Prompts: Divided by Emphasis
Close Reading/Interpretive Frameworks:
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Research Driven:
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Low-Stakes In-Class Activities:
Brief Explanation:
The low-stakes classroom activities proposed below don’t have anything to do with the scaffolding of how students might engage with the essay prompts above. Instead, they are again more concerned with bringing some of the novel’s politics to the surface. In this regard, they might be employed in classes leading up to the introduction of the novel in anticipation of the types of discussions/activities that might take place around the text itself. If you have any questions about, or suggestions for, scaffolding, please feel free to contact me via my bio page.
The low-stakes classroom activities proposed below don’t have anything to do with the scaffolding of how students might engage with the essay prompts above. Instead, they are again more concerned with bringing some of the novel’s politics to the surface. In this regard, they might be employed in classes leading up to the introduction of the novel in anticipation of the types of discussions/activities that might take place around the text itself. If you have any questions about, or suggestions for, scaffolding, please feel free to contact me via my bio page.
Note: When creating groups, ask students to elect members to perform the following roles: group manager (responsible for keeping group on task), note-taker (neatly puts together the analysis the group is going to present), presenter(s) (presents the group’s work to the rest of the class). If your groups are large, then more than one student can perform each role.
Activity 1:
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Activity 2: |
The video on the right is of the Prophets of Rage--a new super-group made up of former members of Rage Against the Machine, Chuck D from Public Enemy, and B=Real of Cyprus Hill--performing the song "Take the Power Back" on January 20th, 2017 at the Teregram Ballroom in downtown Los Angeles to protest Donald Trump's inauguration to the office of the presidency. By posting this video here, I do not mean to make an anti-Trump statement, as that is not the purpose of this page; instead, I hope to demonstrate the life of a song that so motivated me as a youth and appears still to be performing the political function of a rallying cry in the way that it is being used to mobilize the youth of today. |
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