For Tuesday: The Invisible Poor

For Tuesday, please read "At the Edge of Poverty" and "Work Doesn't Work" from David K. Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, and then, by the start of class, please email me your responses to the following questions.

• What does Shipler mean when he says that the working poor are "invisible"? What causes this "invisibility"? What are its consequences? 
• The "Wealth Inequality in America" video that we watched last week relied on numbers to make its argument, and it presented that argumented in highly visual form. Iceland's argument relies on stories, presented in written form. Compare and contrast the two approaches: What insights into the issue do story-based arguments have that statistics-based arguments do not, and vice versa? What advantages do written modes of presentation have over visual ones, and vice versa?

Your responses need not be very long -- maybe a page altogether.

Shipler's book is available online via Penrose. After you click the link, you'll need to sign in with your DU ID and password.

Wealth Inequality in America

The original video:

And a response:
 

For Thursday: Writ writer and WRIT writers

For Thursday, please watch Writ Writer, a documentary about "jailhouse lawyer" Fred Cruz, and, by the start of class, email to me a paragraph or two that responds to the following:

How does the practice of writing and research depicted in this film compare to your own experience thus far? What about Cruz's writing and research practices would you like to adopt/adapt for yourself?

The video is available on DUCourseMedia. Click on the Social Justice gallery and then on the film.

Though this is an "informal" assignment, you should aim to write as clearly and as gracefully as you can, to use specific quotes and/or concrete descriptions of scenes from the film, and to write down the times at which those scenes or pieces of dialogue occur.

Our syllabus!

WRIT 1133 Syllabus - Spring 2013 by DUSocialJustice