Selecting an Effective Theme
Your PWR course will be organized
around the writing assignments students will be doing—assignments that are in many ways
more important than the topic or theme of the course—and
you will need to define the topic carefully before you can
use it effectively as a context for the students’ writing
and research. In general, successful PWR themes:
- guide and inspire your students to respond effectively to
the basic sequence of assignments for the course;
- are accessible to first and second-year students who, without
prior knowledge of the theme or of its historical and intellectual
contexts, must get to the heart of the theme in just a few
short weeks and begin to write with increasing complexity and
understanding;
- are compelling and intellectually engaging to first and second-year
Stanford students without sounding esoteric or overly-specialized;
- are intellectually engaging to you in ways that enable you
to implement the appropriate sequence of assignments. You can
best help your students craft their own arguments if you select
a theme of genuine interest to you.
Note: An ongoing discussion in 2005-06 will be how PWR 2 section
descriptions differ from those for PWR 1. We will need to continue
learning about how best to teach sophomores, who will be thinking
more seriously about declaring their majors and may have more
clearly-defined research interests by their second year.
