Learning Outcomes
The purpose of this assignment is to help you practice the following skills that are essential to your success in this course / in school / in this field / in professional life beyond school:
Write a letter to the editor on a very specific issue pertaining to civic engagement in our contemporary world.
Demonstrate respectful disagreement or persuasion.
Assignment Tasks
Imagine you are writing a ‘letter to the editor’ or an editorial on a very specific issue pertaining to civic engagement in our contemporary world.
Write a letter that consists of a minimum of 300 words.
Demonstrate in your letter how some incident, writing, or challenge from U.S. History (that we have studied this semester) may provide some guidance in addressing this contemporary issue
Your letter should demonstrate expertise and a high level of research. You may include endnotes and references if you so choose.
Advocate in your editorial a specific course of action that may help to address the challenge you wish to address. The specific course of action you advocate should be informed by the lessons of the past.
Your editorial may certainly engage in critique, but it should model civility, respect for alternative views, and, above all, it should address theory, science, and/or policy, and not engage in ad hominem attack or obloquy.
