"Our initial large group conversation about dignity was kind of flat. Then I asked my students to write for twenty minutes about what they thought dignity was, and how it was important in their lives. Later that night I read this wonderful stuff they had written--full of varied and rich ideas about dignity and its importance--and I thought, "What a shame that I'm the only person who's really getting the benefit of this." So, I had the idea of using [my students' writing as] documentation and reflecting their collective thinking back to the class.
I selected passages from each paper that either represented a viewpoint or brought up an idea that I found particularly provocative, and I arranged them under questions that came up for me as I was reading them. For example, "Does dignity come from within or without?" Then I gave these collected and anonymous quotations back to my students."