FYI
Central Text: Tannen’s “The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue”
Outside Source: Anyon’s, “From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”
Avenue of Investigation: Tannen claims that students are trained in this legacy of our “agonistic heritage” (224) as early as elementary school. In this paper, I will investigate how other authors discuss the long-term cultural effects of early, school training and how their work help us better understand Tannen’s text overall.
1. Your “context clue,” or more broadly, your avenue of investigation, is most likely a claim or evidence of a claim from your central text. State it here. Make this a strong topic sentence with transition from previous paragraph (though that can come later).
Though Tannen traces the roots of our “adversarial culture” back to the ancient Greeks, she also states that students today are inculcated into this predominant, academic culture beginning in elementary school.
[note how this works as a topic sentence—nothing I state after this can veer too far off the track of elementary school training]
2. If you haven’t already, give us a solid example/quote/paraphrase of your avenue of investigation in the central text.
For example, she cites the work of educational researcher James Wertsch, who had found that in early school settings are a “prime arena for such training” (223) in emphasizing formal and objective knowledge over relational and intuitive knowledge. These values in education, she states, grow “out of our notion of education as training for debate” (224).
3. Transition into outside source. What is the common ground between the two texts? Or, put another way, how does the outside text relate to the central text?
Tannen is not alone in discussing how early childhood training prime us for a culture we’ll encounter later in life.
4. Introduce outside author, title of essay/article and publication, and the main argument.
Specifically, education researcher...