I did not come up with the concept of The Unessay – I first saw the concept on Christopher Jones’ twitter back in April of 2017 and was wowed by the work his students were producing. Since then, I’ve had at least one class per term that have done unessays instead of final papers or exams, and I could not be more in love with the practice. Yet the unessay can seem daunting to some at the outset, and I…
There’s rarely a time in my classes where my students read something or hear something for its own sake. Instead, the reading or listening is a first step in some bigger activity that asks them to take the information they’ve learned and apply it a some new way, making decisions about the significance of events, people, and actions. One example of this kind of processing is to have students build a collective timeline. Yesterday, in Power and Inequity in America…