Reading Our Histories, Understanding Our Cultures: A Sequenced Approach to Thinking, Reading, and Writing, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Just what I needed!
Review: This book is perfect for my freshman course in composition and communication. My 24 students all take a parallel course, Introduction to Theology, with a single instructor who is using textbooks by Paul Tillich, Hans Kueng, and Viktor Frankl. Our team must show the interrelationship of one field of learning with another and make cross-disciplinary thinking a pleasurable experience. READING OUR HISTORIES takes the student from analysis of a portion of her own life to analysis of personally relevant issues throughout history and across cultures. One of the strongest points of this book is the stimulating collection of six to twelve stories and essays provided for each analysis of nine different topics. Topics such as fashion, family portraits, beauties and beasts, Elvis: Man or Myth, and The City: Dreams or Nightmares provide plenty of variety to hold the students' interests while they are practicing actual cultural and historical analysis. Assignment sequences are detailed enough to save the instructor the trouble of inventing his own, yet leave room for expression of a wide range of individual perspectives. Students who need to practice writing research papers can use a combination of the readings in the book and the audiovisual and written texts suggested for further research at the end of each chapter. They can focus on the message they want to communicate and practice citing sources that are easy for them to find.