Assignments

Overview:

  • Participation (40 %)
    • Attendance (10%)
    • Class Participation (15%)
    • Journal (15%)
  • Midterm (20 – 40 %)
  • Project (20 – 40 %)

Students have options for how much weight they would like the midterm and class project to count in the assessment of their final grade. Selections must be made no later than two hours after the midterm deadline. Students may choose from the following options:

  • Midterm 20 Project 40
  • Midterm 30 Project 30 (default option)
  • Midterm 40 Project 20

Participation:

  • My Expectations – Punctual attendance is a key part of participation. (Click here for details about the attendance policy). However, I expect you to do more than just show up to class. I expect you to not only come to class but to come on time with your copy of the readings, access to the course schedule, writing utensils, and any other materials and/or assistive technology necessary for you to be a ready and active member of the class. I expect you to not only complete the readings prior to our class session but also take time to annotate, reflect, look up background context, and formulate questions to contribute to our class inquiry. I not only expect you to complete your journal assignments in a thoughtful and timely way. I also expect you to respectfully and attentively read and respond to your peers’ work. At the end of the day, your participation influences not only your success but also your classmates’ success and the success of the class as a whole.

Midterm:

  • Description: Each student will have 48 hours to complete an open note / open text take-home examination. The midterm will consist of three parts:
    • The first will include a mix of multiple choice and true or false questions.
    • The second will consist of short answer identification questions.
    • The third section will consist of a short essay answer based on one of the prompts provided by the instructor.

Movement Journal:

  • Overview: As part of their overall participation grade, each student will keep a hybrid physical-electronic journal in which they will explore additional avenues of a particular course text, concept, and/or discussion by responding to one of the prompts on the journal prompts page.

  • Goals and Objectives: Over the course of the semester, students will keep a journal with the goal of deepening their creative, analytical, and personal engagement with the course material and developing ideas for the final project The movement journal is a low stakes assignment designed to give students a place to explore, ask questions, engage with different movement practices, identify topics of interest and patterns in their thinking; and to flesh out, research, revise, or otherwise work on some aspect of their final group project.

  • Description: At minimum, each movement journal will consist of at least eight journal entries and a final journal reflection. For most of these entries, students must respond to one of the prompts provided by the professor. While all journal entries should be uploaded to the student’s personal class blog site, students may elect to publish some entries as “private.” Posts published as “private” will not be viewable to other students, and they will not be reviewed by the professor. To encourage paced completion and allow more opportunity for class engagement, there will be benchmarks (on the course schedule) indicating when students should have completed 1/4 (two entries); 1/2 (four entries); and all (eight) of the required journal entries.

Final Project

  • Overview: For the final project, students will work in small groups to theorize, create, practice, and stage their own scaled movements.

  • Goals and Objectives: The purpose of this assignment is to encourage students to 1 ) Apply theories and historical models explored in course to creation and practice of an original movement piece. 2 ) Extend the course’s inquiry about the relation between embodied and political movements 3) Deepen engagement with the insights and history of black political and artistic movements discussed in the course; and 4) Examine the relationship between black history and black art and the political, social, and cultural practices and concerns of their lives and communities. For more details about these goals and specific objectives, click here.

  • Description: For the final project students will work in small groups to develop and stage an appropriately scaled original movement. Each group must decide whether they want to develop a movement that is primarily recognizable as a political movement movement (examples: a demonstration; protest; rally; direct action effort) or a movement that is primarily recognizable as an artistic movement. However, while the group must make this generic choice, whatever movement they organize should develop from and express a thoughtful consideration of both specific political and specific artistic (or aesthetic) commitments.

Submitting Assignments

Respect your work, your readers, and your sources.

  • Adhere to formatting and submission instructions indicated on respective assignment sheet/post.

  • Submit Work On Time
    • Unless otherwise noted (as is the case with blog posts), assignments are due at the beginning of class date they are listed by on the syllabus. 

  • Cite Sources
    • All quoted materials should be properly formatted, and all quotes, direct reference, and paraphrasing of work other than your own must be thoroughly and accurately cited according to MLA guidelines.  

  • Proofread and Edit
    • Leave time to adequately revise and edit your work. Make use of your resources (style guide, spellcheck, writing centers, friends, etc). When possible read your work out loud (preferably, to a friend) before you submit it. When you read your work out loud you are more likely to catch awkward phrasing and unclear sentences.  
    • Ultimately proofreading involves more than just running spellcheck, but I expect that at the very least, you can spellcheck your work and try to attend to the Word red and blue edit flags that Word automatically makes. Unless I’m provided with a viable alternative, I will assume that if you submit your work without heading the Word spellcheck suggestions, you do mean to respect your work or your readers (and depending on the error, your sources).