ABSTRACT

How do you give a student a writing assignment that he or she cannot fulfill by downloading something off the Web? How do you give a writing assignment that teaches something you want to teach, especially the transferable skills that are such an essential part of any good university education, yet requires a student to reach beyond his or her perceptions of the world in a meaningful way? These questions, which are probably the same question just phrased differently, are some of the central pedagogical ones in higher education today, and probably in middle and secondary schools as well. I don’t claim to have succeeded in answering them, but I know for a fact that I’ve come close with paper assignments in various courses, assignments that are a direct extension of the Cedar Point experience. In other words, I saw something happening in the field course, and knew I had to make that same something happen back on city campus. Every student had to generate a product that was both unique and at the same time useless from a practical point of view-for example-a piece of art disguised as science. The goal, of course, was to teach the art, rather than the technology, of science, to inspire originality instead of always worrying about the execution.