PROF. MICHELLE CHIHARA
Department of English Language & Literature http://michellechihara.com
Office Hours: Wednesday, 1:00PM-3:30PM Hoover 112
mchihara@whittier.edu and also, see the CONTACT page to sign up for a slot online.
INTD 100 / T-TH 11AM- 12:20PM / PL 201
TALKING ABOUT MY GENERATION: BOOMERS, HIPSTERS, GEN X-ERS, MILLENIALS, AND…?Do you think you know what a “hipster” looks or acts like? What about a “boomer”? How do generations get identified and profiled? Who comes up with these terms? Who studies generational differences? What kinds of statistics do scholars, journalists and corporations look at? Do such tags have an effect on the groups they ostensibly describe?
Obviously, negative associations won’t help anyone, but could there be some good that comes of a group identity? How might we go about evaluating an article about the generational group that most students in college today get associated with: “millennials”?
Ultimately, I would like the class, as a group, to imagine itself as a group invested with the power to identify and name your own generation. If today’s college students are no longer Millenials, how can we use the concept of generations to speculate about what might happen next? How can we give you, the next generation, an accurate and useful and even possibly inspiring sense of collective identity?
I would like to give credit to Ray Bourgeois Zimmerman, who was the course director when I I first taught writing at the college level at UC Irvine, and whose assignment structures I have borrowed from generously here. He is a wonderful teaching mentor.
