Week 1 Discussion — What Does a Record Leave Out? — Traditional alternative (no AI)
Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.
Hook
Every form you have filled in was designed by someone else, and every family story is told from somewhere. This week you learned the field's four questions, the reading walk, and positionality, and those tools raise a question with no single right answer: what does a record leave out, and who notices?
Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.
Option A: Choose one rule, form, or record from your own life (a school dress code, a job application, a building's name, a team's roster rule), not a current election, candidate, officeholder, or live policy fight. Walk it with the four questions, name one thing it leaves out, and argue: did your own position help you notice that gap, or could it have hidden something a reader with a different background would see?
Option B: The course archive identifies every narrator by role and decade only, never by name. Is that the right trade-off between a narrator's safety and a reader's wish to know exactly who is speaking? Take a position, give at least one reason drawn from this week's ideas (the four questions, the intake rules, or positionality), and state the strongest case for the other side as fairly as its best defender would.
There is no single right answer here. Archives and oral historians handle names in more than one way, and the same record can look complete from one position and full of gaps from another. Pick the option you care about, and make your case.
Expectations
Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.
Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):
- Say which option you chose.
- For Option A, name your rule, form, or record, walk it with the four questions, name one thing it leaves out, and say how your position helped or hid that gap; for Option B, state your position on the role-and-decade rule, give at least one reason, and state the strongest case for the other side.
- Use at least two of this week's terms (the four questions, the reading walk, positionality, intake rules) correctly.
- End with one plain sentence that states your reading.
- Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.
- Write from your own reasoning, in your own words; keep living politicians and current campaigns out of your examples, and share only what you are comfortable sharing about your own family or community.
Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):
- Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
- A substantive reply does more than agree: name something the classmate's record leaves out that your own position helps you notice, state a stronger version of the side the poster argued against, or ask which of the four questions the poster has not yet answered. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.
What a strong post looks like:
I chose Option A and read my old school's dress code. The principal's office wrote it, it served teachers who wanted fewer distractions, and it affected students whose clothing or hair broke a rule they had no say in; I found no record of how students answered. It leaves out who decided which styles counted as distracting. Growing up with that code helped me notice the gap, but a teacher might notice how hard the rule was to enforce. In one plain sentence: the code sorted students by appearance without saying who drew the lines.
Notice how it asks all four questions, names what the record leaves out, uses positionality to see both a gap and a limit, and ends in one plain sentence. That is the bar.
Participation rubric
This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.
| Criterion | Full credit | Partial credit | No credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quality of the initial post (4 pts) | A clear position with at least one reason tied to this week's ideas, the other side or another reader's view stated at its strongest, and one plain sentence that states the reading | A position is present, but the reason is vague or the other side is weakened into a strawman | Missing, off-topic, or no reasoning about the question |
| Use of course concepts (3 pts) | Uses the four questions or the reading walk accurately and treats positionality as something every reader has and names | Uses a term loosely, or stops the reading at what the record says | No course terms, or used incorrectly |
| Engagement with peers (3 pts) | Two or more substantive replies that extend or challenge a classmate's reasoning | One substantive reply, or replies that only agree | No replies, or "I agree" with nothing added |
Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.
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