REQUIRED
TEXTS:
Ibsen
A Doll House
ISBN:0-451-52406-3
Hurston Their Eyes Are Watching God
ISBN:0-06-091650-8
Nawal El Saadawi Woman at Point Zero
ISBN:978-1-84277-873-9
Anderson
A Recognition of Being ISBN:
1-894549-12-0
Other readings as
assigned.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In Ibsen’s
novel, A Doll House, when Nora is told that above all else,
she is a wife and mother, Nora replies:
“That I no longer
believe. I believe before all else I am a human being.”
What is our human nature? How do we separate into two forms? What does it
mean to be a woman or a man in our culture and world? What variations are there?
What is the nature, construction, and role of parenting, that is mothering and
fathering? Do we need marriage? What if women don’t
want children? Who should work and where? Can we distribute economic worth with
equity? How do we raise our children? Are men really more aggressive and women
more moral? Who should control our bodies? Who controls conversations? Is
silence passive or active? What have we learned historically? Who has shaped our
thinking? Are we our own ideas or does the media
“play”
with our psyches? How would we behave and think differently in another culture?
How is our thinking and behavior different in this culture if we come from a
race or class different from our own?
Can we answer all these questions? No! We can, however,
begin the journey and this class is a beginning. It is a survey course designed
to wet your appetite, to encourage you to quest further, to provide you with a
foundation for further learning, and to give you some tools for critically
viewing yourself, your gender, and the cultural constructions of race, class and
gender beliefs and behaviors. We will read broadly to expose you to historical,
cultural, fictional, and non-fictional works; to open little port holes in a
variety of directions that will hopefully tug at you for further inquiry.
The purpose of the course is the quest.: an
interdisciplinary quest to examine the biological, social/psychological, and
historical events, theories, beliefs, and customs which have shaped definitions
of sex and gender. Explorations will be about how and why we live our lives as
"women”
and “men”.
The implication of gender as a cultural construction will be broadened with
historical and cross-cultural examples along with the personal experiences of
our service learning, as we focus on contemporary issues.
The major goal of the class is to assist you in learning to
critically examine cultural assumptions about gender, race, and class, and to
identify and critique these gender assumptions in theories and research of
various disciplines which inform our thinking. To assist you in achieving these
goals, we have a service-learning project.
Specific goals are: To provide a demanding
intellectual experience for students.
To recognize
the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, class, and other aspects of identity
intersect in shaping experience and theory-making.
To
appreciate the ways in which different disciplines contribute to the
understanding of gendered selves.
To analyze
one’s own experience as
a gendered individual and recognize some contexts and processes which have
framed one’s own development.
To
effectively and critically use a variety of writing styles for critical
thinking, analysis, and persuasive communication.
To learn
about women’s
contributions to knowledge.
CLASSES REQUIREMENTS AND ASSIGNMENTS:
Attendance includes participation: To participate
means not only being in attendance in class and in your community setting, but
also providing thoughtful, and informed input as your part of the classroom
discussion.
You are expected to be logged on to the Mercer e-mail
system, our private Facebook group, and the Mercer Blackboard system for out of class communication, grading
updates, calendar changes, and syllabus information.
Leading Discussion:
In
pairs or individually, depending on class enrollment, students will take
turns leading class discussion on readings, films, and activities.
Group
Presentations: Each student will be responsible for his/her
portion of two group projects and class presentations.
Papers: There will be
three papers, four to five pages in length, redrafted and developed to articulate a particular theme. The due dates
are noted on the calendar.
An important task for many Mercer classes is to teach you to read
and engage with texts actively and responsibly.
Students are to keep a small
three-ring binder
to use as a portfolio of all their written work, including dailies,
journals, in class writings, revisions, etc. I am not usually picky
about minor details, but I do mean a small three-ring binder. In
this way, you have the option to type your reflection work and place
it in the journal, or write in your binder directly. We will have
intermittent revision sessions and students need to have access to
their prior, graded work.
This assignment provides a place to record your daily work with
texts, while also giving you a chance to create a lasting record of
your thoughts as you move through the course.
It also allows you to literally “do” something with your
reading, so that it goes beyond “busy work” or a mere requirement
and becomes instead a resource for both your required participation
in class discussions and for your more formal writing assignments,
as your initial response to texts and ideas from class discussion
feed directly into the papers you will write for the course.
Borrowed, with permission, from Dr. Denasi.
The journal/portfolio is
also the place where you should take notes during class discussion.
Please note that this is a requirement of the course.
To summarize, the following kinds of material should
be recorded in your Composition Book on a regular
(class by class) basis:
a) Ideas drawn from your thorough annotation of EACH
of the texts assigned for that day.
This information may be in the form of an
outline or bullet points but should be detailed and
concrete and must include a citation in the text for
each point (page numbers for prose, line numbers for
poems, and act, scene, and line numbers for drama)
so that you can locate specific passages during
discussion.
b) Two questions to share during seminar discussion.
Please Note: these should NOT be
informational questions, such as: “what color was
the lady’s dress?”
Instead, your questions should focus on
larger issues raised in the text, especially issues
that seem related to identity or the self, such as:
“how do the clothes the characters wear affect their
sense of self?” or, “why should a woman’s clothes be
more important in composing her self than a man’s?”
c) Detailed notes taken during class discussion.
It is not necessary to write down every word
that is said during the discussion, but you should
listen and speak with your Composition Book open and
a pen in your hand.
As ideas emerge in the conversation that
strike you as important and potentially useful, you
should record them in as much detail as possible.
At the top of EACH page of notes, be sure to
record the date and the title of the text(s) under
discussion.
Entries that are not dated, with complete
information on the title of the texts will not be
counted when the Composition Book is graded.
***** Students must have their journals during every class period
inside or outside of the classroom. No journal means a zero for the
day.
Final: Your final is a
digital story highlighting one of your passionate "ah hahs" from this class as
it relates to you. The digital story process will
be thoroughly explained in class and supported with a lab in the media center.
Script writing and story circles are part of the process of developing digital
stories. For additional information go to Blackboard or to this webpage:
DS Instructions.
Grades Per Activity:
Attendance and Participation, including
leading discussions
20%
Average of two group projects:
20
Average of three papers
30
Completed Digital Story 10
Journal
20
90-100 = A
77-79 = C+
87-89 = B+ 70-76 = C
80-86 = B 60-69 = D
You are responsible
for the Policies and Grading section of the syllabus. See link above or use the
link in webct.
Unusual circumstances may necessitate a change
in the syllabus and/or calendar.
