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Welcome!!
What you will learn can change your life.
This website has as its primary objective the development of an understanding of various points of views and mindsets in the global community, with an end to developing writing skills, enhancing creative problem-solving abilities, improving an understanding of cultural diversity and conflict resolution, and enhancing one's awareness of how values, ethical positions, perspectives manifest themselves and how they evolve over time.
Road Trip of the Mind contains an analysis of how images, archetypal narratives, and various types of "authority" exert a deterministic influence on readers and audiences, and contribute to the "managing" of meaning. These processes can occur in overt ways, as in propaganda, or in more subtle ones, as is the case in films and advertisements.
At the end of the course, the student will have had several opportunities to examine perspectives that may be very different than his or her own "framework," and will have analyzed the process by which conclusions were reached and knowledge generated.
A pivotal component of Road Trip of the Mind involves providing students with the tools necessary to engage in critical analysis, and to see precisely how the mind makes meaning from cultural cues. This occurs in the beginning of each chapter, in the form of an introductory essay. Further, there is an ongoing analysis of how one constructs hierarchies of values, which may or may not correspond to the most "logical" positions that seem to be the most practical, or the ones that are held by others in the same community.
This collection of readings consists of short essays and images of culture which reflect how people understand themselves and others - as individuals and communities - within the U.S. and throughout the world, representing a spectrum of perspectives and points of view.
Each section contains a introductory essay which provides the necessary critical apparatus used to approach the readings, and group activities such as discussion groups, as well as the individual writing occasions, which include life journals, media responses, autobiographical reflections, community assessments.
The introductory essay is followed by readings, guiding questions for onsite or online discussions, life-based informal writing activities, suggestions for essays and writing assignments, media activities (film, Internet, music), suggestions for continuing research (online) and suggestions for writing brief summaries for reference, and developing annotated bibliographic research.
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