Ms. Diane Vanner Steinberg

Unit III assignment sheet – unit on civil disobedience

Unit III will have two "big" grades and two "little" ones. Let’s get the little stuff out of the way first. I’d like you to analyze King’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (20 points). An analysis asks you to detail the arguments King uses to defend his decision to break the law. Also, I’d like you to contrast King’s letter with either Van Dusen’s "Civil Disobedience: Destroyer of Democracy" or Plato’s excerpt from The Crito (20 points). In a contrast, the writer focuses on differences and overlooks or seriously under-emphasizes any similarities.

This unit has one persuasive speech (100 points—80 of which are for your group’s presentation itself and 20 of which are for your responses to one another’s presentations). This speech will be on the topic of civil disobedience, and will be a group presentation. Your group’s first task will be to find some contemporary or historical example of an act of civil disobedience (other than Martin Luther King’s). Some of you may want to go back to Thoreau, who "invented" civil disobedience, or to Gandhi, who is the 20th century’s most famous practitioner of civil disobedience. Although it hadn’t been "invented" yet, civil disobedience could be a label applied to Antigone’s decision to bury her brother.

The first part of your group’s task will be more informative than persuasive; you’ll be telling us about the incident of civil disobedience you’ve found to report on. In the second (and probably slightly longer and more important for your grade) part of the presentation, you’ll be persuasive rather than informative. Here, you’ll tell us whether or not you believe that civil disobedience was an appropriate response in this case, in other words, whether or not you approve of or agree with your chosen deployment of civil disobedience. For this part of the presentation, think about whether this use of civil disobedience was (or was not) justified by the sufferings of the person who engaged in it, was (or was not) justified by the actions of the authority figures it was directed against, was (or was not) successful in bringing about change, was (or was not) successful in remaining nonviolent, and any other questions or conditions you find relevant to your claim that this civil disobedience was or was not appropriate—the unifying claim of your speech.

Making your claim up-front or delaying it until the end is your choice. Remember which is harder to pull off successfully. You’ll be dividing the task of presenting material among the four or five group members, with 1-2 members presenting the incident, and 2-4 members arguing that, in this instance, civil disobedience was (or was not) an appropriate response. You may want to assign one group member the task of introducing each of the rest of you and providing transitions among your different speeches (as if he or she were a Master of Ceremonies).

For this last persuasive speech, I’d like you not to use any notes at all, but because some of you will panic, you will be allowed any information you can fit on a single index card as a sort of comfort blanket. I am not planning to measure the index cards. The better speakers among you are not relying on many notes, and the weaker speakers seem wedded to many notes. Remember how often you talk to people without using notes at all! Your syllabus calls for 3-5 minutes of air time, which translates into 12-25 minutes for your group.

In figuring a grade for the presentation, I expect to give a "group grade" in which the entire presentation is judged as a single entity.  I do reserve the right, however, to increase or decrease an individual member's grade from the group grade, if that seems an appropriate response to a seriously unbalanced sharing of the work among group members.  Your audience will have a different response format for these presentations, and will be asked to grade you as well.

When we talked about people’s second speeches, many of you praised speakers who had used supporting materials—pictures, examples, whatever. Since your group’s speech would benefit from supporting materials, use them. To date, few have used the whiteboard, but that can really help a speech, especially if you want your audience to keep a name, date, or place in mind.

Your fifth and final argumentative essay will also be on civil disobedience. It will be an in-class writing assignment, and will take place during the scheduled final exam time for our section—which I do not yet know. The exam will be scheduled for two hours, and I will design the essay to take only one hour, but you may take the entire two hour time slot if you wish. As we did with the earlier in-class essay on euthanasia, we will be reading essays on the topic of civil disobedience and using them to generate possible exam questions. This essay will also be open book and open notebook.  This argumentative essay will be worth 150 points. Of course, the possible questions will all involve your making some sort of claim about civil disobedience (either in general or about some specific instance), and arguing that claim persuasively.