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 12:00 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% Post Exercises : Students are responsible for completing different post exercises throughout the semester. Each student will be assigned a post group [A, B, C, D, etc.]. On the schedule of assignment (i.e. syllabus) page, you will see the group responsible for posting prior to that particular class in the far right column. 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 are in post group B, and you see post group D on the schedule to the far right of Thurs. 2/3, then you must publish your post by 4:30 am on 2/2 (aka super late Tuesday night).
Note: While I hope the assignments help you further develop an idea, you cannot double dip between the assignments. Though your post might build on one of your journal entries, your post is not a substitute for your journal or vice versa. 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.