Assignments & Grading
25% Participation: Includes offering generative, genuine, & relative questions; contributing thoughtful and informed ideas to class discussions; sharing relevant historical and current texts on the class website; active listening; thoughtful and respectful responses to others’ comments; and of course the timely and thorough completion of course readings and exercises. You should be complete readings before 3:00 pm (the class start time) the day they appear on the syllabus.
Please note that the general expectation is that you will have your videos on during each class session. If you need to mute your video for some reason, you must make a formal request to me prior to the start of class. If you are participating with a muted video, you will need to find other ways to communicate your active listening and participation since we will not be contributing facial expressions or bodily gestures to the conversation.
The only exception to the “videos on” policy is that from time to time it’s possible that we may engage a sensitive text or topic that might trigger strong feelings. If you need to temporarily mute your video for the purposes of psychological/emotional self care and/or to gain your composure, you may do so. If you need to mute your video for more than a few moments, I ask that you follow up with me after class.
25% Journal: While you will not be responsible for posting every week, you will be responsible for journaling every week. Approximately half the weeks you will be provided with specific prompts that will encourage if not require a variety of different types of responses (analytical, evaluative, reflective, creative, visual, sonic, etc.). The other half of the time you will create and respond to prompts generated by you and your fellow classmates. You may use previous weeks prompts as models for your response, but you should make sure you adopt your prompt to the particular text(s) for that week.. For more information about the journal assignment, please consult the “Journal Assignment” page.
25% (Close Reading) Posts : Students will publish at least three posts (2 close reading textual analysis post and 1 creative post) during the semester. Each student will be assigned a post group [A, B, C, D, or E.]. On the far right column of the syllabus, you will see the class date for which your post group is responsible for providing well-constructed, thoughtful posts, that will help guide our in-class discussion. Because we need to read your post prior to the class period, you should plan to publish your post on the site, 36 hours before the start of class in which we will discuss it. For example: If you see your post group on the 2/11 day on the syllabus, your post should be posted by 3:00 AM on 2/10 (aka really late Tuesday night).
Your post can be a response to the prompt for that week, or you may choose to revise a previous journal entry that you believe is relevant to the current week’s readings and discussions. Remember: You will still be responsible for a journal entry for that week. Basically even though the assignments should help you build on an idea, you cannot double dip between the assignments. While your post might build on one of your journal entries, your post is not a substitute for your journal. So make sure that at least some initial version of your post exists in your journal before you elaborate and/or revise that version to share on the class blog.
Every week you are responsible for reading your classmates’ posts. Of course, the weeks that you post, you will have one less post to read. For more details, visit the Post Assignments page.
25% Project:
- The final project is a group project designed to give students an opportunity to deepen, as they demonstrate, their understanding of the stakes of close reading analysis in and beyond the space of academic literary studies and their ability to employ a variety or relevant close reading strategies. For more details, visit the Final Project assignment page.