SUNY Fredonia
Division of Arts and Humanities
AMST/ENGL 296: American Identities
Spring 2009
Section 1: TTh 8-9:20 am, Fenton 159
Office: Fenton 265; M 10-4, TTh 4-5, W 1-3, and by appointment; 673-3856
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu (during working hours); brucesimon18@yahoo.com (evenings and weekends)
Web Site: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
Course ANGEL Site: https://fredonia.sln.suny.edu/frames.aspx
The Oral Learning Analysis, Spring 2009
This page takes on three important questions about the Oral Learning Analysis: what, what for, and how to (here's where you can find the assignment sheet). My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.
What
Like the Identification Project, the Oral Learning Analysis is designed to encourage self-awareness, self-reflection, and a critical engagement with the course material. Here, the goal is to demonstrate and reflect upon your learning in the course, by focusing on the writers, texts, and ideas that have influenced you the most or prompted the most productive internal dialogues, identifying key turning points, and generally mapping your intellectual journey. By focusing on your own learning process in this project, you're freed up to carry the results of your reflections in it into your revision of the original Identity Paper and bring only the most relevant readings and concepts into your Identification Project. Whereas the Identification Project is aimed at a public audience that knows nothing of you or the course, in the Oral Learning Analysis, we are each other's audience and our goal is to reflect together upon the learning that took place in the course this semester. As you listen to each other's presentations, take note of patterns you recognize; your final discussion board posts should comment upon them.
What For
The Oral Learning Analysis is the second oral project in the course, fulfilling the CCC's Public Speaking requirement in the process. Whereas the Discussion-Leading Project aimed at developing your skills in summarizing research findings and leading discussions on their implications on the topics of your choice and at a length you were relatively free to determine, the Oral Learning Analysis poses the same challenge to everyone: how best to structure your reflections; how best to interest your classmates in your own intellectual journey this semester; how best to convey its content, contours, and context in a very limited span of time. The challenge, then, is how to balance specificity and concision, how to mix together responses to the key writers and writings in the course for you with your own reflections on your thought and learning process, and how to convey your own individual take on materials we examined together.
How To
Here's the assignment sheet for the Oral Learning Analysis.
Due: in our regular classroom, between 8:30 and 10:30 am on Thursday, May 14, 2009.
Assignment: Demonstrate and reflect upon your learning in the course by taking us on a tour of your intellectual journey, focusing on the writers, texts, and ideas that influenced you the most and the key turning points in your thinking about American identities this semester.
Format: Although you may use handouts or Powerpoint to supplement what you're saying, the focus should be on you, your words, and your thoughts, so youtube clips or other material that take up time that could otherwise be your own are not recommended.
Grading Criteria: Your grade for this segment of the course will be based on a combination of factors: the structure, pacing, and delivery of your talk, the quality and specificity of your reflections on your learning process and what influenced it this semester, and your overall ability to concisely convey the content, contours, and context of your intellectual journey in the course for an audience of your peers.
AMST/ENGL 296: American Identities, Spring 2009
Created: 5/11/09 12:42 pm
Last modified: 5/11/09 12:42 pm
Webmaster: Bruce Simon, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia
Check out the Spring 2006 version of this course!