AP Seminar: Sept. 6-9

This week we will jump right into the AP Seminar QUEST framework:  Question, Understand, Explore, Synthesize, and Transform.  Over the summer, students began considering the theme of money.  How does money impact our choices? What defines wealth in our society? Other societies? The questions are just beginning and students did a great job of analyzing the texts I provided them and adding their own texts to our conversation.  We will continue working with this theme for the next four weeks.

We will start this week talking about perspectives and the danger of considering only one perspective when thinking like a researcher.  We will use a very famous TedTalk  “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to begin this discussion and then gradually add all of the texts from our summer work to the table as the week progresses.  By the end of the week, I hope students can see the importance of looking at a text through multiple lenses. How might the same text be read differently by different people?  This first week will focus on how to read a text. Next week we will move from reading the texts and considering perspectives to analyzing the arguments made in the texts and critiquing their validity. Finally, in the third and fourth weeks of school, students will begin forming and researching their own arguments related to this theme.

I encourage you to engage your students in discussions about what we’re studying in class.  This semester we will be grappling with some very sophisticated arguments; the more chances they have to discuss them with adults and think about those arguments in different ways, the better!

Please let me know if you have any questions about the course!