There are five types of assignments you will be completing over the semester, some of which you will share with me or the class, some of which are for your own personal resource. My focus in all these assignments is to get you practice at the method of discourse analysis and to reflect on your reading and learning as you go.
For the readings for each class period, I ask you to make notes of the main points of the piece, what you found interesting and/or confusing, and a quote that you would like to discuss in class. These notes are not collected or reviewed by me - they are for your benefit in preparing for class and for writing your response posts. It is time well spent, and a good way to practice active reading.
Your response posts, which you will write every other week, provide an opportunity to pull together the readings and class discussions for the week into a larger reflection on the themes of the course. The first response posts will have a prompt from me to help you get started, though they may become more self-guided as we progress through the semester.
These posts should be 250-500 words long and should be written in formal academic English (i.e., full sentences, minimal grammatical and spelling errors, citations for quoted sources). These are public on our class blog, so be aware that what you write is readable by your classmates. In all things, strive for civility and politeness. We all think things that other find strange, so you should not mock the people discussed in the readings or your classmates at any time. You can disagree with the ideas and discuss why, but keep the ideas and the people separate. (No ad hominems. Ever.)
If you have privacy concerns about your writing being public, please talk to me. We can set you up with a pseudonym or make an arrangement to have particular posts remain in draft mode.
One of the primary learning outcomes for this course is to teach you one of the foundational methods of the humanities: discourse analysis. To that end, you will be writing five essays where you will practices different aspects of discourse analysis. These essays will be connected to the content of the course and the prompts will provide instructions on the particular skills you are to practice in the essay.
These essays should be 1000-1500 words in length and, as with the posts, be written in formal academic English.
During the last week of the semester, we will change it up a little and instead of a reflection post, you will do a presentation where you take a position and apply the lessons of the course to analyze a piece of popular writing related to the topic chosen by the class.
These presentations will be done in groups - group size to be determined. The presentation should be 10 minutes long (short is hard, fair warning), and should include some sort of visual element (such as slides.) All group members should split the talking time roughly equally.
I am focused in this course on teaching you a particular method (discourse analysis) and having you apply that method to a particular topic (the relationship between “religion” and “science”). To that end, I will be giving you a lot of feedback on your writing and will be asking you twice during the semester to reflect on what you are learning, where you could use additional explanation or support, and how these ideas might connect to other areas of study.
Your self-evaluations will be central to the assignment of your final grade in the course. I reserve the right to modify any grade suggestions you might make, but if you are engaged and participating in the course, I am very likely to agree with your self-assessment of your learning.
The self-evaluations will be guided and will be done through Qualtrics.