Essay Prompt #1

Consider the transition of North America between the Pleistocene and about 1000 years ago.  Select a culture area or sub-region and discuss how the continental ecological patterns, including post-glacial changes, helped shape and/or limit cultural adaptations.  Write your reflections in an essay of about 500 words (2 pages, typed, double spaced).  Submit the essay by email to tprewitt@uwf.edu.  You may include the essay as the body of the email, or as a Word attachment saved in Rich Text Format; you may also give me the work on disk in class.  I will return your graded essay in printed, in class, form with comments.

Essay Prompt #2

Select an excerpt from either Wisdom Sits in Places or The Ten Grandmothers.  Write an essay of about 500 words that discusses how the selection informs you of some aspect of Native American culture you had never before encountered or considered.  The response should not simply recount the incident or account in the original work, but should offer some analysis of why this new information is important to understanding of Native American history or culture.

Essay Prompt #3

Write a "scaled" multiple choice question relating to North American Indian cultures.  Scaled questions have more than one "correct" answer; I prefer four options with three answers that offer different levels of correct precision, and a fourth "incorrect" answer.  Such questions are usually prefaced with a "premise statement" that focuses the content of the question and makes it possible to discriminate between the answers as "better" or "worse" responses.  The example I gave in class, with the answers presented in descending order of "correctness" is:

North American Indian cultures often reflect regional patterns of adaptation to environment that obscure differences of tradition or language. Which of the following choices offers the best example of this effect:

a. Plains equestrian bison hunters

b. Great Basin hunters and gatherers

c. Mississippi Valley horticulture

d. Gulf Coast shell trade

My scaled multiple choice questions are usually offered with space for a written justification.  The question is valued at 10 points, and the multiple choice answers receive 3, 2, 1, and 0 points, respectively.  The balance of 7 points can then be gained through the justification of the answer.  I sometimes also give bonus points for extraordinary justifications.

Writing this kind of question is actually quite difficult. This assignment turns, therefore, offers another way for me to evaluate how clear you are on some of the subtle comparative arguments presented in the books or in my lectures.  You may find, therefore, that it take you longer to write a good question than it would have to prepare an answer for it.