Thursday, January 21, 2010
Research Blog #1: Initial topic Ideas
The title of this course, College!, initially caught my attention just by the simple fact that hey, I am in college so this should be an interesting topic. However, once I started to read the course description I noticed that all my feelings about the different views and ideas people hold about college start to flare up. All my (mostly negative) feelings about the admissions process and cost and all my (mostly positive) feelings about being independent and creating an identity separate and unique from the one that had been created for me during my middle school and high school years. After the first class, I started to think about all the different views people have about college. Students view it as a chance to break free (proven by the enormous amounts of students who opt to live on campus rather than commute); parents view it in multiple ways 1. as a way to experience and explore before buckling down into real life mode, 2. as purely a means to a degree, or one of many others; athletes view it as a chance to physically develop themselves in order to make it to the next level of competition; and there are many many many more views offered by the professors, legislators, and so on about the purpose of college. With all of these different ideas about what college is meant to it seems appropriate to wonder which is the right view? Or if there even exists a right view? Another question that arises is in regards to the difference between smaller, larger, private, or public schools- where do students get the most effective learning experience or college experience? With all these differences in opinions and ideas the topic of college is an instant conversation starter and interest flarer.
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Thanks for posting. I like what you say about all of the different points of view about the meaning and value of college. But I think you raise so many issues and so many points of view, that you really have not even begun to stake out a specific focus for the course. What topic do you want to write about? Why? What you say about college as a place where people can create a new identity that is different from the one thrust upon them at home and in K-12 education is very interesting and could be the beginning of a topic. But you'll have to think that through some more. And are small schools or large schools more conducive to forming an independent sense of identity? What are the sources of that independent identity? Once parents and the K-12 peer group are out of the picture, what are the "sources of the self"? Charles Taylor in the Ethics of Authenticity talks about how identity is always formed in dialogue with others -- sometimes in immitation and sometimes in opposition or open rebellion from others (like kids who embrace a Goth or punk aesthetic just to demonstrate that their identities are unique from their parents). You might want to write on how college students try to form unique identities at school, and what influences there are for identity here. That is still a very broad topic, but at least it's a start.
ReplyDeleteOne approach to the identity topic is to examine the ways some particular official or unofficial "institution of identity" helps college students create a new sense of identity that might be different from the one they had before. The most obvious of these are fraternities and sororities, but there are many others. Do students join groups, like fraternities and sororities, in order to establish a sense of identity and belonging? What kind of identity do they establish that way? Other institutions include clubs (Lesbian/Gay Alliance, academic organizations like Phi Beta Kappa, etc.), specific professional or pre-professional organizations (school newspaper, business clubs, etc.), or political organizations (Tent City, Democrats, Republicans). It might be interesting to survey the field -- what institutions are available? But I think you'd have more success if you focused on one particular institution.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought -- to give you an idea of how you could turn the identity question into a more specific topic.