Everyone will be expected to complete the following REQUIREMENTS:
- Reading assignments. We can only have interesting and exciting discussions if you do ALL of the reading in advance.
- (20%)—Class attendance and participation.
- (20%)—Three days (72 hours) prior to each class, each of you will be required to submit (on Pitzer's Sakai website), at least two questions you thought of while doing the readings (including the reading assigned by the discussion leader(s) and the readings assigned by the professor). Among the purposes of these questions is to help the students who will be leading the discussion 3 days later to prepare for that task. The quality of these questions will be evaluated by the discussion leader(s) for their ability to spark discussion as well as for the extent to which they offer evidence that ALL of the readings were actually completed.
- (30%)—At least one turn as a discussion leader. Being a discussion leader will include finding—and assigning—one or two articles on your assigned topic (15 pages maximum, total). This article must be approved by me, and can be review chapters from edited books or empirical articles from research journals. Either way, plan to have an electronic copy of your paper(s) (in PDF file-format) to me by 2:45 pm one week before your presentation. In addition, be prepared to tell your classmates on that day what they will need to know as they read the material you're assigning. Your grade on this section will be jointly determined as a function of the quality of both your presentation and your chosen article(s). As a discussion leader, you will be responsible for leading the class through ALL of the articles to be discussed on your assigned day; but rest assured, you can count on your professor to be there to provide background information and help on the articles *I* have chosen for that day.
- (30%)—A final paper that further considers one of the topics covered during the semester. THIS PAPER WILL BE DUE ON THE FINAL DAY OF CLASS (Wednesday, December 11th). In addition, I will ask everyone to prepare a research poster to be presented on the final day of class; this poster will provide you with an opportunity to share with the rest of the class information that you discovered while doing research for your final paper. Your final grade on this requirement will reflect the quality of *both* your final paper and your poster.
PLEASE NOTE: I will consider any collection of 4 or more consecutive, unquoted words taken from another source to be plagiarism. Any paper containing any plagiarized content will receive an automatic grade of F.