Essay Instructions: I want this paper to focus on community development. Here are the instructions from my school:
The research paper is a thesis-governed essay of at least 10 but not more than 15 double-spaced pages, not including the title page or references section. Students choose the focus of their papers based on their personal and academic interests. Papers will be approved when:
1.An explicit thesis statement unifies the paper’s argument.
2.Key claims are supported by appropriate evidence, observation, experience, examples, etc.
3.Ideas are developed logically within and across paragraphs.
4.The argument allows for multiple perspectives and interpretations based on a common set of facts.
5.Source material is appropriate, integrated into the text, and properly documented.
6.Word choice and sentence structure support the argument.
7.The tone is formal and respects a diverse readership.
8.Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are typically correct.
9.Formatting is consistent with recommended guidelines.
Here's what I started writing:
Perhaps one of the single most important indications of a
healthy culture is in how the majority relate to, interact
with, and raise children; therefore an analysis of how a
culture approaches children plays a keystone role in the
diagnosis and healing of an unhealthy culture.
Raising children is a complex multi faceted experience;
bringing about many issues such as discipline,
communication, and respect. There are many issues arising
in the parent/child relationship out of societal
expectations and demands, many power dynamics are simply a
result of this. Autonomy and identity are yet another
complex piece of the social demands placed on children in
the US culture.
Here is my idea for the body:
PART 1 INTRO.
Analysis, what is it like to be a child in US culture, what role do they play, how are children perceived, and treated?
Par. 1- Rising/ ways that children are raised.
Par. 2-Interactions/ ways children are interacted with, power dynamics-how they are treated.
Par. 3-how related to/ ways children are perceived and related to/issues of boundaries and autonomy.
PART 2 BULK OF PAPER?
What An Analysis of role of children reveals about unhealthy relations w/in US culture.
Examples: range from individual, family, community, (even activist communities perpetuate the same problems as mainstream US culture) and nation/world relations-economics.
(What are the signals, signs, and symptoms of an unhealthy culture?)
PART 3 HEALING AND AFFECTING CHANGE.
What change could look like and how change could be affected.
Start with children/ relating to oneself/ inner child; how this would extrapolate to other levels of relation- mental, emotional, and physical health and well being.
Above (address all previously mentioned examples of healthy/ unhealthy communities.)
Here are some possible quotes:
“In retrospect, it is amusing to me that when I wished my children to have contact with wildness, I sent them “out,” to climb high upon ridges and to absorb the grand vistas. Yet when they wished to gain a sense of wilderness, of animal comfort, they chose not the large, but the small. In doing so, they may have been selecting a primordial connection with the earth and its verdant cover.”
-Gary Paul Nabhan, The Geography of Childhood, pages 7-8
“Healthy cultures make space for people whose perception and actions fall far from the average. It’s not that someone diagnosed as schizophrenic is automatically more sane than those of us who can cope –chances are high that they have been severely injured by civilization, damaged from having to live with intense sensitivity in such a belligerent and unbalanced world. They may not lead us home, but we can accept their gifts. A healthy culture would use diversity for its strength. Ours does not.”
-Laurel Luddite, Fire and Ice, page 58
“We’re just not built to handle this much grief in our little human bodies. We need to open up to the mountains and to each other, to make something bigger by our interconnection, big enough to feel this.”
-Skunkly Monkly, Fire and Ice, page 50
“We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them.”
-Hermann Hesse
