Learning Outcome Three: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

When reading difficult pieces of literature, I will go through it trying to get the best understanding I can after my first read through. Once I’ve gotten a relative understanding for the piece, I go through and find any quotes or lines that I deem important, confusing, or even interesting. This will help me critically analyze the text and provide helpful information for supporting evidence on anything I may be looking to justify in my own writing.

Throughout the semester, two of the readings I was asked to read was “Making conversation” and “the Primacy of practice” By Anthony Kwame Appiah. From the reading, I’ve found places within the text that I had questions about and applied the learning outcome, using techniques of active reading to form an explanation and what my understanding of the quote was. Because of this, it’s helped me analyze important text and break down otherwise complicated pieces of literature. Below I’ve broken down an annotation exercise which contains my question, the definition, and the connections. All have corresponding color codings with the questions in yellow, defintions in blue, and connections in pink

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martins, 2010, pp. 66–82.

Annotation exercise: (yellow)

Question 1.) Why choose the word cosmopolitanism instead of multiculturalism?

Answer: “Not Multiculturalism, another shape shifter, which so often designates the disease it purports to cure… With some ambivalence, I have settled on ‘Cosmopolitanism.’ It’s meaning is equally disputed.” Page 68

Questions 2.) Why does Appiah believe dictators are apposed to cosmopolitanism.

Answer: “…murder was the first instrument of politics— launched regular incentives against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’; and while, for both, anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism, they were right to see cosmopolitanism as their enemy.” Page 70 

questions 3.) Does Appiah believe we can all be cosmopolitan?

Answer: “The obligations of those who wish to exercise their legitimate freedom to associate with their own kind… And the way of segregation and seclusion has always been anomalous in our perpetually voyaging species. Cosmopolitanism isn’t hard work; repudiating is.” 

Class Notes-  Reading Response Sources (blue)

Defining 1.)  “…regard all the peoples of the earth as so many branches of a single family, and the universe as a state, of which they, with innumerable other rational beings are whole…” (Appiah 69)

Defining 2.) “As we’ll see, there will be times when these two ideals-universal concern and respect for legitimate difference-clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution of but of the challenge.” (Appiah 70)

Defining 3.) “Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal: But you can’t have any respect for human diversity and expect everyone to become cosmopolitan.” (Appiah 72)

Roadblocks to Change (pink)

Answer 1.) People may reject my ideas because “conversations across boundaries can be fraught, all the more so as the world grow smaller and the stakes grow larger…What academics dub ‘cultural otherness’ should prompt neither piety nor consternation.” (Appiah 72) 

Answer 2.)  People might be opposed to the changes I suggested because, “Indeed, our political coexistence, as subjects or citizens, depends on being able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification.” (Appiah 73) 

Answer 3.) People might be opposed to my ideas for change because, “…a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. If you live in a society where children are spanked, you will probably spank your children.” (Appiah 75)