Your initial task will be to engage in reflection about the ways in which your personal history and experiences have created and shaped some of your most important values. You may choose to focus on a single experience or analyze a collection of experiences. From there, you will construct a critical narrative that informs your audience about a value that is important to you and demonstratesan intricate understanding of how your personal history or experiences contributed to its creation and evolution.

Example Research Issue: If you value loyalty, you could define what it means to be loyal in you own words and ask why you define loyalty in that way. Answering this question may involve reflecting on specific experiences, relationships, personal belongings, or something you read that led you to define “loyalty” the way you do. Likewise, you could also investigate your feelings about loyalty, working to identify and describe, in detail, experiences that led you to view loyalty in specific ways.

Learning Goals: The purpose of this assignment is to engage in critical thinking and writing about how external experiences mediate, to a certain extent, how you see the world. The goal is to dig deep in your analysis of your personal value to gain a greater understanding of both the value and your relationship to it. Most importantly, you will learn to avoid surface-level observations and commit yourself to an in-depth process of reflection and investigation that considers the relevance of your personal experiences, relationships, belongings, and activities. Such a commitment will help you construct an informative narrativethat provides your reader with a glimpse of how your past has contributed to the formation of your values and how your values have contributed to who you are. Such an understanding of yourself will be necessary as we progress through this semester and turn our attention to the ways external and material factors influence what communities value.

Requirements: A successful essay will:

• Identify a personal value of importance to you
• Reflect on that value, using specific details to demonstrate how your personal history contributed to the creation and/or evolution of this value
• Be organized as a personal narrative anchored to a generative claim or line of inquiry
• Cite all sources in MLA style
• Be two full pages (not included any Works Cited pages) in length and carefully edited