you’ll write a paper on your family’s educational attainment. You will first collect data in order to construct as complete a genealogy as possible of your family’s educational history. This involves interviewing family members about their education and the education of their parents, grandparents, and so on. You should also use any written documents available to you. Families differ enormously in the kinds and depth of knowledge they have about the past, and so the information you collect will be different than information collected by other students. The amount of data available is far less important than the analysis of whatever information is available to you.
After constructing your family’s educational history, you will analyze some aspect or pattern in that history. You might choose to focus your paper on the effects of social class or socioeconomic status, religion, language, race, gender, sexual orientation, or whichever other factors you find significant. While you will focus on your educational genealogy, your analysis should be grounded in the context of our class readings and discussions. In general, this paper is an invitation to you to continue applying the ideas and concepts we’ve discussed in class (surrounding issues like class, race, gender, language, etc.) to your own lives. How do these ideas illuminate your own life and the situation in which you currently find yourself?
You might, for example, choose to look at the way that the wealth (or lack of wealth) in your family has shaped the lives of and enabled and constrained the decisions of you, your parents and grandparents, and so on. Has your own class standing been determined by the social class of your family? Why have you been able (or unable) to have positive and productive educational experiences? This particular project might help you to see the way that social class – which we talked about in more abstract terms in class – functions concretely in individual lives to shape, enable, and constrain experiences.
This project has three primary purposes. First, the project aims to help you understand the ways in which the educational and societal issues we have discussed apply directly to you and your family. Second, reflecting on your background should help you to critically interrogate the “default” views you bring to education and to society more broadly: what do these views mean for how you understand and navigate the world? Third, learning about the huge variety of cultural and educational experiences we bring to the classroom can help you to better communicate and connect with students and families of diverse backgrounds.
