.
Thug thesis.
Some Problems with the Bully
Thesis
1. It limits what students can write about.
1. It reinforces simplistic ideas about the
nature of knowledge.
1. It suggests that deductive reasoning is
the best method of solving complicated
problems.
1. Begins with questions not answers.
2. Discovery is seeded with uncertainty, willingly
tolerated over time.
3. Emphasizes induction over deduction.
Conditions of Inquiry?
Open
(to find out)
How do I know
what I think
until I see what I
say?
I know what I
think, now how
can I say it?
Question
Purpose
Invention
“Essay”
Direct
(to prove or
explain)
Arrangement
Thesis-proof,
Fiveparagraph
theme
Teaching the Question
Is Elvis dead?
What does the enduring
belief among some that
Elvis is still alive say about
the nature of celebrity in
our culture?
What is a researchable question?
•
•
•
•
Raises more questions.
The right size.
Writer is curious.
Implies method of
answering.
• Audience has stake in
answer.
• Something has been
already said.
Myth of the Boring Topic
• No such thing as boring topic, only bad
questions
• Suspend judgment and tolerate ambiguity
• Extend the process of open inquiry
• Questions are like knives
• The more you look the more you see
Know little
Questions of fact or definition: What is known?
What is it?
What good is it? (Value)
What is the best explanation? (Hypothesis)
What is the relationship? (Analogy and
Comparison)
What should be done? (Policy)
What does it mean (Interpretation)
What do the facts suggest is true?
(Proposition)
Know a lot
Cognitive Load
Resistance
Question-asking
Reading
Motivation
Low
Knowledge
Moderate Knowledge
High
Knowledge
Dialogic Reasoning
Fastwrite Exercise
 Imagine a room you spent a lot
of time in as a child. Put
yourself back there.
 Drawing on all of your senses,
fastwrite for seven minutes,
beginning with that room.
What do you see, what do you
hear, what do you smell, what
do you feel? Write in present
tense.
 Skip a line. Compose a fat
paragraph, beginning with this
line: What I understand now
about this time in my life that I
didn’t understand then was…
Dialectical Thinking
So What ?
True friends are hard to
find.
Mountain
At a point in your life when
everything familiar changes,
even your sense of identity,
then old friends can become
uneasy reminder of who you
were, not who you want to be.
Sea
He didn’t look me in the
eyes when he said that,
and I knew something had
changed that October
night.
Strategy for Inquiry
Creative Thinking
Sea
Fastwriting
Showing
Specifics
Collecting
Observations of
What happened
Then
Generating
Exploring
Seeing
Playing
Critical Thinking
Mountain
Composing
Telling
Generalities
Focusing
Ideas about
What happens
Now
Criticizing
Reflecting
Interpreting
Judging
Portion of men whose
attractiveness is judged by
U.S. women to be “worse
than average” : 4/5
Portion of women about
whom U.S. men say this : 2/5
“Conversing” with Sources
• Especially in the United States, where cell phone use still
remains low compared to other countries, we are rapidly
approaching a tipping point with this technology. How has it
changed our behavior, and how might it continue to do so?
What new rules ought we to impose on its use? Most
importantly, how has the wireless telephone encouraged us to
connect individually but disconnect socially, ceding, in the
process, much that was civil and civilized about the use of
public space?
Christine Rosen, "Our Cell Phones, Ourselves," The New Atlantis, Number 6, Summer 2004, pp. 26-45.
Continuing the “Conversation”
• Why do these cell phone
conversations bother us
more than listening to
two strangers chatter in
person about their
evening plans or listening
to a parent scold a
recalcitrant child? Those
conversations are
quantitatively greater,
since we hear both sides
of the discussion—so why
are they nevertheless
experienced as
qualitatively different?
More Conversation
• Cocooned within our “Personal Area Networks”
and wirelessly transported to other spaces, we
are becoming increasingly immune to the
boundaries and realities of physical space. As one
reporter for the Los Angeles Times said, in
exasperation, “Go ahead, floss in the elevator.
You’re busy; you can’t be expected to wait until
you can find a bathroom.… [T]he world out
there? It’s just a backdrop, as movable and
transient as a fake skyline on a studio lot.”
Mini-Inquiry Project
Experts see patterns that novices fail to notice.
1. Organize data into logical categories
2. Choose one category and eliminate the rest of the
cards for now.
3. Identify patterns in some of the remaining data:
• Narrative
• Analogy
• Problem/solution
• Effect/cause or cause/effect
• Correlation
• Contradiction
4. Draft an inquiry question from the data in the form
of a relationship question: What might be the
relationship between _____ and _____? Or offer a
theory that might explain the data.