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The Course GEN 230 Creative Expression: Fiction and Poetry - Spring 2007 other pages welcome | syllabus | case | bistro | reports arts | user content | media | software tools Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement: Fiction | Poetry this page catalog description | student objectives special requirements | self-assessment

Syllabus

Semester Spring 2007
Number of Credits 3
Prerequisite GEN 110 and WRT 175

Instructor Douglas Anderson

Office 85 Humboldt
Hours Monday, Wednesday 12:30 - 1:30 PM, 3 - 4 PM (between and after these two courses), Tuesday, Thursday 3:45 - 4:15
email anytime at Doug@RicciStreet.net

Please note: Grading of student papers will reflect standard English usage. The MLA and APA bibliographic styles are generally used at Medaille.

Statement on Disabilities

Any student with a disability who believes he/she needs accommodation(s) in order to complete this course should contact the Office of Disability Services as soon as possible. The staff in the Office of Disability Services will determine what accommodations are appropriate and reasonable under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Office of Disability Services is located in the Main Building, Room M031, and can be reached by phone at (716) 880-2391.

Academic Integrity

Medaille's faculty and administration expect all students to complete their academic assignments with honesty and integrity. Students who engage in any form of academic dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism, cheating on a test, forging a signature or an entire college document) will be dealt with severely, with penalties ranging from an F on a given assignment to failing a course or even academic suspension. Students should consult their Student Handbook for full details on the college's policy and procedures for handling formal charges of academic dishonesty.

Catalog Description of Course

This course explores forms of creative expression in visual, performing, and literary arts. Students will acquire abilities and perspectives about these arts and interrelationships among them. In addition, through exploring, developing, and demonstrating their creativity in one art form, poetry, students will enhance their understanding of artistic expression.

Student Objectives

After completing this course, you will be better able to:

apply visual, performing and literary art concepts in the creation of works of art

demonstrate an understanding of various forms of artistic expression

recognize relationships among different forms of creative expression

appreciate the visual, performing, and literary arts

recognize the roles of creative expression in society

apply visual, performing, and literary art concepts in the analysis of works of art

Outline of Course Content

day-by-day syllabus

Method of Evaluating Students

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you'll see, I'm big on formative feedback and Socratic questioning.

You will have a dozen or so assignments. Some won't be graded, but on the table below, you'll see the ones that will count toward your final course grade.

Note: I'm assuming that you will do the project's deliverables as specified on the case page. If you don't do them all, you can't pass the course.

Your course grade will be based on the following tasks. As you can see by comparing these tasks to the objectives above, the first objective is the most important: creation

Stories and Poems. You will submit three for the whole class to look at and draw from for their projects. You may show me as many more as you want to, and I will be favorably impressed by the quantity. The three should exhibit a variety of forms and techniques. You will get 5 points for each of the three, and 0 points if you don't do it at all.

Note: I will be happy to read any fiction and poetry that you write in 2007. While I will to read anything you wrote before that, I want to talk with you about it, first.

Projects. Three mashups and a web page will prepare you for your final project. If you put these off, you will fall behind quickly, so I'm going to be strict about these due dates.

The project has four oral reports: proposal, 2 readings, final. For each, you will get all the points for doing it with flair and enthusiasm, most of the points for doing it competently but without the flair and enthusiasm, and half or fewer points for doing it in a flat and boring manner. I will videotape these reports and look at the tapes with you and be happy to discuss the visible evidence for what I mean by flair, flat, enthusiasm, and boring.

Jeopardy scores. Instead of taking tests, you will be on a team playing a jeopardy-like game about the course readings. Those of you in the group of highest game scores will get 9 or 10 points; those in the next group 8 or 9, etc.

Community participation. To broaden your horizons a little, you need to participate in the local arts community in a way that have not before. To satisfy this part of the course requirements, you have several options.

Write Thing readings. You can attend all four readings in the Write Thing reading series in the library at 7 PM on these Thursday evenings: February 1, March 22, April 12, April 26.

If you can't attend these readings because of other commitments, you can attend an off-campus event of a similar nature. Anything listed at Literarybuffalo.org will be acceptable. Anything else, clear it with me beforehand.

Yet another way is to have a singing/acting role or to be sufficiently engaged backstage in the College's production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

For two of these events or activities, you will write a 300-word critique of the performance or whatever it is.

Final Project. The final project will be a web of several pages built around your poems or stories with images and audio/video embedded in the pages. You will see this project through to completion by licensing it, uploading it to one or more servers, and submitting it to Prelude, the College's literary magazine.

Course Attendance Policy

You should come to class. I'll do my part to make it worth your while. I expect you to do your part to get something out of it.

Several of the activities that you will get graded on can be done only in class and cannot be made up. For example, you'll be playing a Jeopardy-like game on a team against other students. If you miss, how can you make it up? There are twelve such class days, clearly marked on the syllabus: January 31, February 2, March 5, 7, 9, 26, 28, April 2, 4, 18, 20, and the final exam day. If you miss class on those days and miss the activity, you will get a zero for that activity.

In my experience, students who miss class also have other problems. I encourage you to keep me notified, especially via email, about your absences. I reserve the right to lower your final course grade for absences in excess of four, whether excused or not.

If you know ahead of time that you are going to miss more than four classes, especially because of sports team commitments, let me know ASAP.

Textbooks

This course is built around your projects. All the poetry and other materials we need are available online, much of it on this course web. You will access it following the links and doing your own searches.

The Syllabus | The Case
The Bistro | The Reports

Special Requirements

In order to prosper in business, you must be able to do many things other than write. These five also apply to meeting the course objectives listed above.

manage digital information

It's called a PC or Personal Computer partly because you can personalize it. How you manage your files on the computer is probably as personal and inscrutable to others as how you manage them in your physical office.

explore and discover

There's so much information only a click or two away. You have to be able to learn on your own and just keep clicking.

tolerate ambiguity

You'll never have only and exactly the information you need. You'll never have enough time. You'll rarely find that one path to the future is clearly correct and all the others are wrong. You will have wicked problems and compromises that are guaranteed not to please everyone.

think big

Transcend your and your organization's concrete situation into an intelligent awareness of broader, often abstract, contexts. A good test would be the ease with which you can draw valid inferences from articles in the news. For example, do you understand why the people are so concerned about Net neutrality? Do you understand how Verizon's and Time-Warner's clinging to old business models hurts your ability to share with your friends online? Your big thinking helps me distinguish a grade-A project from a grade-B project. In organizations, it helps the boss distinguish who gets promoted.

assess yourself

Your ongoing evaluation of your progress as a communicator is the most useful tool for your improvement.

Did I emphasize that enough? Let me try again. Careful and effective people are, at times, very self-conscious. I highly recommend that starting now you write about your work in some form of journal or file. After you have done everything else for the course, answer three questions:

what did you learn?
how did you learn it?
what could you have done better?

Reflect on the experiences of the past three months:

choices you made; lessons you learned
difficulties you encountered and the conclusions you reached as a result
successes you achieved and the new insights you gained from achieving them
things to do differently next time and why
interesting ways the course relates to previous work, especially unexpected or conflicting results
strong emotions you experienced and why

This reflection should not include simple lists of activities, reactions without explaining the reason for them, or complaints about external conditions that kept you from doing your best.

You must email this self-assessment to me. It's your way of telling me that you have finished the course. When I have the self-assessment, I will turn in your course grade based on everything you did before that date.