Essential Questions (EQs)

Several questions will frame your work throughout the course. You will be prompted to consider these questions while you study a variety of texts. You do not need to respond to them at this moment, but they are explained below for your future reference.

  1. To what degree can an individual's choices and actions influence the direction of his or her life?
The choices that a character in a text makes often create consequences for that person, and for other characters as well. This question addresses various aspects of not only making a choice, but assesses that choice in terms of how it affects future life. How would a character's life be changed had a different choice been made?

Another aspect of this question relates to how much control a person actually has in life. Things may happen to a character, but how the character responds to these events will be the focal point of the question.


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© Ted Spiegel/National Geographic Creative

  1. Why is it important to be responsible to others on a personal, local, global, and/or digital level?
This question deals with the responsibility that we often think others should take. There are responsibilities that we have to our local situation with our family, our friends, our work colleagues, and possibly our community volunteer aspects.

What do we gain by being responsible, and what are the impacts of being irresponsible? What happens when we only think of ourselves? Our study of this question will examine, through various texts, what happens when we take responsibilities seriously and when we don't. What is the balance or the tipping point in thinking responsibly about others and ourselves?

Consider the aspect of examining what it is about human nature that makes us think about ourselves to the exclusion of others or, conversely, when we sacrifice everything for others and the balance is skewed in that way. Is there a need within us to think of ourselves as superior?

Is it okay to shirk our responsibility to others? Survival and fear are important components. Often we feel freer to blast someone digitally rather than face to face. There seems to reside within each one of us the desire to be mean with impunity.

 

3. What does it mean to be successful, and what role does failure play?
The need to succeed is a strong one for us in our society today. There are many aspects of success for us to consider. It could be as simple as having enough money to do the things that we want to do. We also know that money in itself doesn't make us happy. If success comes too easily, we lose the ability to fight for what we want. Failure is an essential building block to success and creates the means to demonstrate courage, perseverance, and determination.

Morality, ethics, and courage are other aspects of success. When we find that something isn't working, we need to ask ourselves what we need to do to change the outcome. Is failure a necessary component of success? How can a person's response to failure inform future success? We need to examine this question in the context of what the driving force to success is and whether our goal is to become better human beings or to gain "success" at the cost of friendship, family, and integrity. One other intriguing aspect of the question: If we are a success only in one aspect of our lives, are we then successful people?



© Jodi Cobb/National Geographic Creative


© Azad Pirayandeh/National Geographic Creative


4. How does an individual's perspective of, and response to, a crisis define him or her?
For a crisis to be defining, it is not so much if but rather when it occurs in life. There is an inevitability to crises appearing in life and how we respond to them, whether positively or negatively, which has the greatest impact on our character. As we examine this question, we will deal with the future impact of these decisions on characters. Lives are not cast in stone. When we feel trapped, or are lied to, that can impact the rest of our life depending on how we respond to the crisis.

Another aspect of the question is whether a person can really change because of a crisis. Can a person change, or is it true that "once a liar always a liar, once a cheat always a cheat"? Conversely, can it be that once a good girl/boy always a good girl/boy? It will be exciting to take a look at some of the motivations of characters in their desire to change. If we want to change the outcomes in our lives, we need to change the way we do things. How does our response to one crisis impact our response to future crises?