In this course, you have four major assignments. More information about each of these assignments will be provided throughout the semester. If you have questions about my expectations for any of these assignments, or would like to ask about how you are doing on them, don’t hesitate to ask!
A semester-long small group project
At the beginning of the semester you will be placed in a small group with three to four students. Working collaboratively, your group must first select a “legendary American” from a list that I will give you. (It is possible for you to propose a figure who is not on the list, but you must obtain approval from me.) Your group should settle on a figure by September 14.
Over the course of the semester, you and your fellow group members will then work individually and independently to learn as much as you can about this figure and the legends surrounding him or her, reporting your findings back to the group on a “group blog” (more on that below). You will need to do research and reading on your figure, both on the Internet and in traditional sources at the library or in the library’s online databases. You should also think throughout the semester about how what you are learning relates to the assigned readings that we are doing in class.
Finally, at the end of the semester, you will work collectively as a group to select some materials about your figure to share with the entire class for discussion (examples of relevant materials might include scholarly articles, historical documents, artifacts about the historical figure from popular culture, film clips, etc. Use our schedule of readings as a model for the kinds of things you might select for discussion). You must provide these materials (which should amount to no more than about 50-80 pages of text) to the entire class by November 16 so that everyone in the seminar can look them over, and you should also provide a few questions for discussion about your materials. Then, on November 23 and November 30, we will devote about an hour of class time to discussing the materials prepared by your small group. In these discussions, you and your fellow group members are responsible for serving as facilitators of discussion and “resident experts” on the “legendary American” that you have been learning about over the course of the semester.
After these end-of-semester discussions, each student will publish a final post to the blog (around 1,000 to 1,200 words in length) that makes and defends an argument about your figure or the historical debates surrounding him/her. More guidelines for these final posts will be provided later, but they are due by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, December 14.
Two blog posts per week
You and the other members of your small group will be given a group blog on the Rice network. Every week (from the end of class Wednesday to the beginning of class on the next Wednesday), each student should publish at least two posts to this blog.
One post must be a “reading-response post” based on readings assigned for our upcoming class. (Each week on the main course blog, I will post a list of questions about these readings, and you should select one of the reading questions and respond to it directly in your reading-response blog post. This post is due before you come to class each week.)
The other required weekly post should be some update about your small group project (described above). Examples of this type of post might include (in the early weeks of the semester) ideas you have about potential historical figures for your group to focus on and (in the later weeks) reports about some reading you have done, interesting things you have learned about your historical figure, connections or comparisons that you see between some figure we are discussing in class and your own figure, or potential materials that your group might want to circulate to the class for our end-of-semester discussions.
As a group, you may decide that each member will focus on finding sources and learning about a particular aspect of your figure’s life, or will focus on particular kinds of sources. However, each individual member is responsible for publishing a post per week about the project: think of it as a weekly “progress report” on what you’re learning, questions you’re asking, or things about your “legendary American” that puzzle or interest you. There is no firm word limit on these posts, but your target range for your two weekly blog posts should be, at a minimum, 400 words each. When deciding on a writing style, think about your posts as “miniature essays” or brief letters to the editor of a newspaper; that is, these posts don’t have to be as formal as a research paper, but should not be as informal as a posting to a Facebook wall. The main point(s) of your post should be clear.
A short “mock editorial”
This assignment will be due on November 22 by 4 p.m. Imagine that you are writing an editorial for a local newspaper or for the Rice Thresher on the topic of high school history education in the United States. In your editorial, you should address the following question: Should high school history courses focus on some famous historical figures more than on others? Why or why not? (In defending your answer, you are encouraged to draw on readings and specific examples of famous historical figures from the semester. The editorial should be about 3-4 double-spaced, typed pages in length).
Participate in the seminar every week
One of your most important assignments is more general than the other three. Namely, for this seminar to be successful, it is essential that you contribute to our intellectual community in the course. Community is the key word here: by joining this course, you are entering a collective intellectual enterprise with your fellow classmates as well as your professor. All of us will learn more if all of us take responsibility for nurturing that community.
One of the best ways you can do that is by contributing to in-class discussions during the seminar, both by making comments or asking questions about the readings, but also by listening attentively and responding to the comments of others. You can also comment on blog posts by your fellow group members or classmates on other group blogs; all writers benefit from knowing that someone else read a piece of writing and responded to it in some way, whether the response was agreement, disagreement, or a question that the writer’s post raised.
Consider it your responsibility to regularly monitor, at the very least, the main course blog and your small group’s blog. Sometimes you might contribute to our intellectual community by sharing with us something you learned or found outside the class that related to course themes; in addition to your required weekly blog posts, for example, you might post a link or a brief note to your blog about something you saw that reminded you of class. These are only three examples of the ways you can contribute to intellectual community in the course; your assignment is not to do all of these things on a weekly basis, but in every week you should give some evidence of participation in the seminar, perhaps by doing one of the above things.
Finally, it is vital to the success of the course that you keep up with the weekly readings and complete your other assignments on time; much of our discussion in class will revolve around the assignments and readings that you are doing during the week, so when you don’t read or don’t complete your assigned weekly posts to the blog on time or don’t submit materials by their due dates, you are harming the education of your fellow classmates as well as your own.
Grading Guidelines
Your grade for this course will assess your performance on the above assignments. Over the course of the semester you will receive five numeric grades (measured on the 4.0 grade point scale), which will then be weighted by the following percentages to calculate your overall course grade.
- Mid-Term Grade on Reading-Response Blog Posts published by October 6 (25%)
- End-of-Term Grade on Reading-Response Blog Posts published between October 6 and November 17 (25%)
- Participation in the Seminar (10%)
- “Mock Editorial” (10%)
- Individual Grade on Small Group Project (30%)
This last item–the group project grade–will be based equally on your weekly blog posts on your small group project, your presentation to the seminar, and your end-of-term reflection paper; I will give you a provisional grade on October 6 based on your performance on the small group project up to that point, but the only grade that will count towards your final grade is the one given at the end of the semester. Your grade will be based on your work alone, as documented through your weekly posts and reflection paper, and not on the work of your fellow group members.
More detailed rubrics about how these grades will be determined will be distributed in class, and I will provide informal feedback throughout the semester about how you are doing (for example, by posting occasional comments to your posts or by highlighting model work on the main course blog). If you have additional questions about how you are doing or would like some more extensive feedback prior to or after receiving grades on your assignments, you can always make an appointment with me to discuss your work.