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Select a suitable topic

Page history last edited by Jared 12 years, 5 months ago

A quick look at Chapter 10 of Good Reasons tells you that evaluation arguments are very common:

from evaluations of groups, institutions, events, people, and objects

to evaluations of grand ideas like sending people into space,

to evaluations of more particular social policies or plans to 'downsize Detroit' or change the legal drinking age, or designate a new historic site

to smaller 'doodle polls' about the town's best pizza, to 'likes' on Facebook.

As a class you will need "4 Detroit hot topics" to evaluate:

You can think of your own,

use the readings as inspiration for a potential topic

(you will be able to use the article as one component of your research [see upcoming step]),

select an idea from:

50 ideas to fix Michigan

(give your team no more than 10 minutes to select a topic and have it approved by me)

(I will also share this selection with the rest of the class, as it will impact their selection, because...)

Judge's note on topic selection:

I will be evaluating the whole class for their selection of 4 topics that are:

significant to Detroiters today... a.k.a. suitably controversial, or suitably "hot topics"
suitably narrowed (i.e. you're not evaluating a vague proposition that is hard to research, not evaluating an overwhelming problem that you can't manage, or evaluating a nebulous problem without a strategy for narrowing your topic)
different from each other... What do I mean by "different"? The class selects an array of 4 topics that are not only evaluating different 'items', but present slightly different sets of challenges as a project. The main difference might be the challenge of scope: As a class, you might select one or two very specific subjects to evaluate (like many of the 50 ideas to 'fix' Michigan above), and one or two 'broader issues' like evaluating 'midtown's recovery' or "Detroit's toxic legacies" or "Detroit's portrayal in mainstream media". With a a broader a problem/solution/item (but not as broad as, say, "Detroit" as a whole set of problems, or 'sustainability' as a single solution), you will have to narrow your focus through one or two very well selected examples that you evaluate. You will almost certainly be able to compare the problem/solution/item you're evaluating to similar problems that have both local and national or even global dimensions. Examples of the latter might be the proposed appointment of an "Emergency Financial Manager" in Detroit, or the Occupy Wall street- Detroit branch.