Pop Up Claims - Developing Ideas Worth Writing About

This post features Bayan's experiment with an activity cribbed from Dave Stuart, Jr.’s Let’s Make Teaching Better called “pop up debates”. Stuart’s process calls for single arguable point, but we focused instead on coming up with claims and verbally reporting those opinions with the rest of the class. We wanted to build confidence to come up with and publicly share opinions worth knowing.

This semester, we are studying Kevin Nadal’s book Filipino American Psychology. Together, we read the first two chapters. Chapter One provides a super brief sketch of Filipinas and Filipinos in the United States, demographics, how we got to the US, and the psychological impact of our history and place in US society. The second chapter focuses on Filipino values. As very few Bayan students had any formal coursework on Filipina/o American issues, we needed shared pool of knowledge these chapters offered.

After working through those chapters, we briefly examined the themes of the other chapters. Topics ranged from Racial and Ethnic Identity Development to Gender/Sexuality/Sexual Orientation, from the Model Minority Myth to Colonial Mentality. Subsequently everyone selected two to read beyond the ones we had studied together. We read these new chapters with the aim of teaching what we discovered with each other.