Assignments

Class participation (20% of grade): Students will be expected to read assigned readings, come to class prepared to discuss them critically, and then actually contribute to the discussion. Often the readings on any given day will contradict one another or exhibit other tensions. Don't be surprised; instead, be prepared to discuss and/or complain about these contradictions. We will also carry out some in-class appraisal exercises, both individually and in teams, and I expect you to participate fully as requested.

Online discussion (20% of grade): Students will be expected to contribute at least one substantive posting, based on the week's assigned readings, to the week's Discussion on Canvas by Saturday midnight of the previous week. The online discussion will provide a springboard for discussion in class; you should offer your own observations but may also reply to others' posts.

Contribution to construction of the Keep-o-meter (20% of grade): The whole class will collude during the course to construct a theoretical Keep-o-meter by focusing our discussions in class around how to place different theorists' concepts of appraisal on a "Keep-o-meter" (apologies to PolitiFact's Truth-o-meter^TM) that will include obviously a scale from "keep" to "toss" but that also needs to be nuanced in a bunch of ways. This activity is an experiment that will call for some design skills as well as taxing our ability to think in several dimensions.

Becoming a historical appraisal expert (40% of grade): This is a new assignment, based on the relatively low enrollment this spring that makes such an assignment feasible. With that said, this assignment is still a work in progress so I will be adding to it during the first week after class.

Each student will undertake to study in as much depth as possible the works of one recognized appraisal expert; on the first day of class students will draw a name from a hat (or whatever container I can find). The student will first read everything by that expert that is listed in the syllabus for the course and will then go farther to read as much as they can of that expert's work. In the class, when the relevance of your expert's work comes up, either through readings or through contrast with readings, we will expect you to be the go-to person for information that will help us understand how your expert affected or attended to the topic of the class (or avoided it like the plague). When we are discussing issues on which one or more experts were especially active, you will be expected to take your expert's position and argue for it not from what people think s/he said, but from what was actually said in the expert's work.

You will also be expected to establish several sets of facts for your expert during the semester as you read more and more of the expert's work. Below is one example; I think there will be about three deliverables related to this part of the work.

You will build a timeline of the person's life, including employment, major events, published appraisal and other archival literature. It is important for us to understand whether and why the person's opinions about appraisal changed over time. There will be a handout connected with this task suggesting how to arrange it for the benefit of your classmates, and I expect that these handouts will be a useful product for all students in the class to take away with them.

Students should make a quick environmental scan to put together a bibliography of your expert's work, which you should turn in to me by the second meeting of class on February 2, including a paragraph stating how you plan to schedule your reading. Completed handouts will be due toward the end of the course (probably in April).

Grading policy:

Since class participation is so important in this class, attendance is also important: you can't participate if you are not there. If you are actually ill I don't want you to come and spread contagion, but please notify me if you must miss class and I will suggest a make-up activity. Grading itself will make full use of the plus/minus system.