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MAS 801Module Outline

MAS 801 Critical Thinking and Writing Skills in Social Sciences

MA(Social Studies)

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Core subject

Lecturers / : / Asst/P Mark C. Baildon (Rm 3-03-149B, email , Phone: 6790-3581)
A/P Elisabeth N. Bui (Rm 3-03-139, email: ,
Phone: 6790-3423)
A/P Wang Zhenping (Rm 3-03-140, email: , Phone: 6790-3403)
Number of AUs / : / 3
Duration / : / 39 hours

Description

This module will introduce students to the thinking and academic writing skills they need in history, geography and the social sciences and the ways these can be applied in social studies teaching. The ways in which arguments are constructed and presented will be studiedthrough workshops and seminars.Students are required to play an active role in this module. The basic principles in critical thinking and writing are illustrated through practical examples prepared by students, which will become the basis for continuous assessment for the subject.

Objective

The module aims to provide students with a solid grounding in the basic elements of critical thinking and writing in the relevant disciplines. At the end of the module, students will be familiar with many of the main approaches to each discipline, and be able to review articles, books, and other forms of “text” and media, and complete literature reviews in history and geography according to the correct conventions.

Organization of module

Students will meet with lecturer once a week for three hours for lecture, presentation and group discussion.

Schedule of module

Duration of the course: 14Weeks (starting on 27 July)
Time and Venue for Lectures: 6:00-9:00 PMat Teachers Network

Sessions

Week no. / Topic
1. / Introductions to critical thinking and writing; Understanding critical and disciplinary discourses and theoretical frameworks: critical and disciplined inquiry and literacy practices
Week 1 PowerPoint
Week 1 Assignment
2. / Disciplinary discourses in schools: Classrooms as communities of practice for critical thinking and writing in social sciences
3. / Critical thinking and writing in social studies/history
4. / Critical thinking and writing about space and place
5. / Critical assessment of biography as a form of historical study (I): Mao Zedong in the Long March
6. /
Critical assessment of biography as a form of historical study (II): Mao Zedong in the Cultural Revolution
7. / Using documentary as a source of historical study
8 / Literature review as a means for critical scholarship
9. / Critical thinking in Geography: New Orleans (NO) after hurricane Katrina: Should NO be rebuilt?
10. /
Investigating the historical context of NO and defining the geographical /spatial context of the problem
11. / Beyond NO: Is there a broader context to the NO/hurricane Katrina story?
12. / Investigating the social context of the NO/hurricane Katrina story
13. / Review of the module

Assessment

Students will be assessed on the basis of assignment (60%), presentation and discussion (30%), and participation (10%).
Assignment1.You will submit three short essays, each of 1,000 words at the end of week 4 (17 August), week 8 (14 September), and week 12 (12 October).
Essay #1: Critical Response Essay
2. Please consult your lecturers for essay topics.
FORMAT OF ASSIGNMENT
a)The length of the essay should be approximately 1,000 words.
b)It should be typewritten (double-spaced) on A4-size paper.
c) Quotations must be acknowledged in the footnotes.
Books that have been used as reference must be listed (in alphabetical order of the authors’ last names) in the bibliography.
d)The title Page: The Title Page should include thefollowing-
#Title of Essay
#Name of Student and Year of Intake
#Program
#Name of Tutor
#Date of Submission
#Name of Address of National Institute of Education
#A Statement that reads as follows: "This assignment is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MA(SS) course.”
e) A bibliography
3. Plagiarism
Plagiarism is an academic offence. It is cheating of the most serious kind. It will be treated firmly. Even if only a small proportion of your assignment submitted exhibits plagiarism, this can justify a zero mark. If you are not sure what constitutes plagiarism, please read pages 12-13 of History Handbook 2001-2002, HSSE, or discuss this matter with your lecturer.
The following are the three main kinds pf plagiarism:
  • Plagiarism of ideas. All ideas and arguments taken from other works of any kind must be footnoted in the form explained on page nine. You may not pass off any work from another person, book, the internet, or any other source whatsoever, as your own.
  • Plagiarism of references. In this case you read work x, which cites work y. But you cite work y as if this was your source, though you have not read it. This is fraud, in that you are making a false claim to having read y. The correct action is to footnote it as ‘work y, as cited in x’. See page nine above for an example.
  • Plagiarism of words. If you take the exact form of words from another work, you must always put those words in quotation marks. Even if you acknowledge the source in a footnote, it is not acceptable to use the precise form of words of the original without quoting them. Nor is it acceptable to use the original sentences, while changing the occasional word. You may paraphrase short sections of another work, but “paraphrase” means genuinely putting such sections into your own words. As a rule of thumb, if you repeat more than four or five words from another work together, then they must not only be footnoted, but must in all circumstances go in quotation marks as well. If you are in any doubt at all, it is your responsibility to ask your lecturer.

Recommended Readings

Week1-week4
Alston, K. (1995). Begging the question: Is critical thinking biased? Educational Theory, 45(2), 225-233.
Black, J. (1997). Maps and politics. Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press.
Booth, A. (2003). Teaching history at university: Enhancing learning and understanding. New York: Routledge.
Burbules, N.C. & Berk, R. (1999). Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences, and limits. In T.S. Popkewitz & Lynn Fendler (Eds.) (1999). Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics, pp. 45-65.
Calder, L. (2006). Uncoverage: Toward a signature pedagogy for the history survey. The Journal of American History, March 2006, 1358-1370.
Evans, R. W. & Saxe, D. W. (Eds.), Handbook on teaching social issues: NCSS bulletin 93.Washington, D.C.: National Council for Social Studies.
Fay, B. (1987). Critical social science. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press.
Gaddis, J. L. (2002). TheLandscape of history: How historians map the past. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Harley, J. B. (1988). Maps, knowledge, and power. In D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels (Eds.), The iconography of landscapes: Essays on the symbolic representation, design, and use of past environments. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press.
Himmelfarb, G. (1989). Some reflections on the new history. American Historical Review 94(3), 661-670.
Holt, T. (1990). Thinking historically: Narrative, imagination, and understanding. College Board.
Jenkins, K. (1991). Re-thinking history. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, K. (2003). Refiguring history: New thoughts on an old discipline. NY: Routledge.
Kaiser, W., & Wood, D. (2001). Seeing through maps: The power of image to shape our world view. Amherst, MA: ODT.
Levstik, L. (1985). Literary geography and mapping. Social Education, 49 (1), 38—43.
Levstik, L., & Barton, K. (2001). Doing history: Investigating with children in elementary and middle schools. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Massey, D., & Jess, P. (Eds.) (1995). A place in the world? Places, cultures, and globalization. NY: OxfordUniversity Press.
Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Monmonier, M. (1991). How to lie with maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Monmonier, M. (1995). Drawing the line: Tales of maps and cartocontroversy. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Nisbett, R.E. (2003). The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently…and why. NY: The Free Press.
Rosenau, P.M. (1992). Postmodernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.
Segall, A. (1999). Critical history: Implications for history/social studies education. Theory & Research in Social Education. 27(3), 358-374.
Segall, A. (2003). Maps as stories about the world. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 16(1), 21-25.
Segall, A., Heilman, E.E., & Cherryholmes, C.H. (Eds.) (2006). Social studies - The next generation: Re-searching in the postmodern. NY: Peter Lang.
Seixas, P. (1993). The community of inquiry as a basis for knowledge and learning: The case of history. American Educational Research Journal. 30(2), 305-324.
Soja, E.W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. NY: Verso.
Stearns, P.N., Seixas, P., & Wineburg, S. (Eds.) (2000). Knowing, teaching, and learning history. New York: New YorkUniversity Press.
Walters, K.S. (Ed.) (1994). Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia, PA: TempleUniversity Press.

Books on the Craft of Scholarship

Five books that might be useful for students interested in the craft of writing and scholarship are the following:
Booth, W.C., et. al. (1995). The craft of research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
This book provides a fairly systematic account of how to carry out research by starting with the problem of how to conceptualize a study and formulate a question and how to deal with basic steps in the research process: dealing with data, using sources, constructing valid claims based on evidence, formulating arguments, representing data, organizing research reports, and making strong arguments.
Becker, H. S. (1998). Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Becker focuses on intellectual “tricks of the trade’ that researchers use to make sense of their data – asking good questions, following productive angles for analysis, using logical strategies, and avoiding common mental traps. He discusses the use of imagery (metaphors, images of how things work), sampling (data used for persuasion, validity, representation), concepts (uses of theory, approaches to conceptualizing what you see), and logic (considering the full range of possibilities, looking for what’s missing). Tricks include treating the exception as the rule and exploring assumptions behind your observations.
Lasch, C. (2002). Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lasch is an American social historian and critic who wrote this book hoping to train students in the “historiographical arts.” He sees writing as an art of argument and plain speaking, the ability to bring someone around to your point of view. He wrote this as a guide for university students.
Williams, J. M. (1990). Style: Toward clarity and grace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams provides strategies on how to write in a clear, concise, effective, and graceful manner. As Williams explains in his introduction, “I want to do more than just urge writers to ‘Omit Needless Words’ or ‘Be Clear.’ Telling me to ‘be clear’ is like telling me to ‘hit the ball squarely.’ I know that. What I don’t know is how to do it. To explain how to write clearly, I have to go beyond platitudes.” This is what he tries to do. He offers basic principles of good writing, along with examples of the application of these principles.
Weston, A. (1992). A rulebook for arguments (2nd ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Weston offers a concise and understandable outline of basic rules for constructing arguments. His rules are easy to follow and his examples show what good and bad arguments look like in practice. He focuses on creating effective short arguments and how to extend this to writing arguments that extend over a full-length paper or book.

Web Resources

Writer’s Toolbox for Building Arguments: This is the companion Web site designed to accompany Writing Arguments, Brief, and Concise Edition, 2nd Edition, by John D. Ramage, John C. Bean, and June Johnson. Created for students and instructors, this site both highlights key concepts and resources of Writing Arguments and offers new material that builds on and extends these resources. Especially useful is the “Writer's Toolbox for Building Arguments,” which provides reading and writing strategies that can help you with many different writing projects.
The University of North Carolina’s Writing Center Resources for Writing: This site provides handouts and tools for writing that include writing arguments, thinking about your audience, writing introductions and conclusions, using evidence and counterarguments, reading critically, and writing papers in specific fields such as history, political science, sociology, and philosophy. It also includes a section on “Writing in History.”

A Brief History of Critical Thinking: Provided by The Critical Thinking Community, this site gives a good overview of critical thinking and its history. The site also includes “35 Dimensions of Critical Thought.”


The National History Project Analysis Guides: An excellent site that provides historical thinking and analysis guides, background on history’s habits of mind, and heuristics for doing historical analysis and interpretation.
History Matters: A project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning that provides guides and interactive activities for analyzing a range of primary sources (photos, oral histories, maps, films, letters, diaries, numbers, ads, etc.). “Scholars in Action” segments show how scholars puzzle out the meaning of different kinds of primary sources, allowing students to try to make sense of documents and then providing audio clips (or text) in which leading scholars interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis.
US National Archives and Records Administration’s Digital Classroom: NARA provides a set of document analysis worksheets for several different primary sources (written documents, photos, cartoons, posters, maps, artifacts, sound recording, and motion pictures).

The Library of Congress’ “The Learning Page”: The Library of Congress provides guides, activities, and lessons to help students learn about primary sources and how to analyze and interpret primary sources. It provides questions to guide students’ analyses of primary sources, a time and place rule, and a bias rule to support student thinking about primary sources.

Thinking Critically about Discipline-Based World Wide Web Resources: This UCLA College Library site offers several points to consider regarding Web sites for subject disciplines.
Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources: This site offers several questions for evaluating the content, source, and design of Web sites.

Critical Viewing and Critical Thinking Skills: The Center for Media Literacy provides many useful resources for visual literacy, teaching media literacy, and deconstructing media representations.
Tolerance.Org Site Check: Site Check walks the reader of a Web site through a series of questions to help evaluate the appropriateness of a specific Web site for classroom use or for research purposes. At the end of the tutorial, students can print their assessment of the site for future reference. The questions can also be downloaded as a pdf. file.

5 Criteria for Evaluating Web SitesCritically Analyzing Information Sources: Guides provided by CornellUniversity’s libraries.

Tools for Reading the World: NoodleTools offers tools, guides, and activities for 21st century literacies, such as visual literacy, historical literacy, cultural literacy, information literacy, scientific literacy, and mathematical literacy.
JohnsHopkinsUniversity’s site on Evaluating Information Found on the Internet: This site discusses the criteria by which scholars in most fields evaluate print information, and shows how the same criteria can be used to assess information found on the Internet.

Digital Literacy: Rethinking Education & Training in a Digital World: A site provided by PortlandStateUniversity with information about media studies, media literacy, constructivist learning theories, and curriculum development.

Resources for Studying Propaganda: This site from the Institute for Propaganda Analysis provides information about common propaganda techniques, questions that can help students identify these techniques, and examples that students can analyze.

UC Berkeley Library’s Finding Information on the Internet: The UC Berkeley Library provides “A Tutorial: Evaluating Web Pages - Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask.”
Historical Inquiry: This site is part of a project for “scaffolding wise practices in the history classroom. It provides background information, strategies, tutorials, and resources for historical inquiry and understanding the past.

Critical Media Literacy in Times of War: As the site explains, “this site focuses on U.S. foreign policy, military invasion and war, because controversies like WAR test the freedom of expression in a democracy.” It provides modules to help compare domestic and international reporting, analyze sources, word choice, and point of view, and examine how different media offer different reporting.

Critical Literacy: Produced by the Department of Education in Tasmania, this site examines elements of Critical literacy as the analysis and critique of the relationships among texts, language, power, social groups and social practices.
Week5-week9
Anderson, C. Arnold. “The Utility of the Proposed Trial and Punishment of Enemy
Leaders,” American Political Science Review, 37:6 (December 1943)
Barmouin, Barbara ad Yu Changge. Zhou Enlai: A political life. Hong Kong: The
ChineseUniversity Press, 2006.
Breslin, Shaun. Mao. New York: Longman, 1998.
Brook, Timothy (ed.). Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor, Michigan:
University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New
York:Basic Books, 1997.
Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon. Mao, the Unknown Story. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Cohen, Paul. China unbound: Evolving perspectives on the Chinese past. New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
------. Discovering history in China: American historical writing on the recent
Chinese past. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1984.
Chou, Erich. Mao Tse-tung, the Man and the Myth. London: Cassell LTD, 1982.
Dirlik, Arif. Revolution and history: Origins of Marxist historiography in China, 1919-
1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Fogel, Joshua A. The Nanjing Massacre in History & Historiogaphy. Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 2000.
Jian Bozan et al., A Concise History of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1964.
Li, Fei Fei, Sabella, Robert and Liu, David (editors). Nanking 1937, Memory &
Healing.New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002
Feigon, Lee. Mao, a Reinterpretation. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Morrison, Donald. “Taking Aim at Mao,” Time, June 13, 2005, pp. 48-49.
Ng, On-cho and Wang, Q. Edward. Mirroring the Past. The writing and use of history
in imperial China. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
Pritchard, R. John and Zaide, Sonia Magbanua (comps.). International Military
Tribunalfor the Far East: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (22 vols.). New York: 1981–1987.
Schaberg, David. A patterned past: Form and thought in early Chinese historiography.
Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversityAsia Centre, 2001.
Schmidt-Glintzer, H. et al (eds.). Historical truth, historical criticism, and ideology:
Chinese historiography and political culture from a new comparative
perspective. Leidon: E.J. Brill, 2005.
Short, Philip. Mao, a Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
Tam, Yue-him, “To burry the unhappy past: The problem of textbook revision in
Japan.”The East Asian Library Journal, VII:I (1994), pp. 7-42.
Tanaka Masaaki. What Really Happened in Nanking- The Refutation of a Common
Myth.Tokyo: Shekkai Shuppan Inc., 2000.
Wong R. Bin. China transformed: historical change and the limits of European
experience. Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1997.
Yamamoto Masahiro. Nanking – Anatomy of an Atrocity. Westport, Connecticut:
PraegerPublishers, 2000.
Yang Daqing. The Nanjing Atrocity: The Making of a Twentieth-Century Rashmon. MA
thesis, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1989.
Yoshida Takashi. The making of “the Rape of Nanking”: The history and memory of
the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, China, and the United States. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Net Resources
Aldric Hama , A re-evaluation of the "genocide" in Nanking: victor's justice Dec 2004,
Askew, David, The Nanjing Incident, Recent Research & Trends electronic journal of
contemporary Japanese studies
China News Digest Nanjing Massacre Historical Archive (A Collection of Articles and Photographs related to
the Nanjing Massacre)
Jiangyong Liu, On Correct Understanding of the Historical Issues between China and Japan.
Museum of the Nanjing Massacre
The Distortion and the Revision of History in Post-war Japanese Textbooks, 1945-1998, Tomochika Okamoto,
The Nanking Atrocities (An Online Documentary)
Virtual Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre (Mirrored from the Chinese University of Hong Kong site: Contains an excellent list of links to other Nanjing Massacre-related sites.)
Yang Daqing, Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing.

(quotations of Mao)
(history of PRC)
VCD
In HSSE collection
BBC People’s century (20th). Disk two: 1997 fast forward (from 15 minutes to 21:18 minutes: reforms in China in the 1980s)
In NIE library:
No rest for the weary: The Cultural Revolution and its origin.
Unfortunate generation: The Cultural Revolution and beyond
Week 11- week13
Bird, J. H. The changing worlds of geography: a critical guide to concepts and methods. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.
Chandrasegaran, A. and K. Schaetzel. Think your way to effective writing (3rd ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall: Singapore,2004.
Reference book: Sharma, M.B. and Elbow, G.S. 2000. Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in Geography. Greenwood Press.

Background info:




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