Syllabus-Homepage

Course News.

Nov 17

Internment projects due tomorrow

Nov16

Iraq's lessons, on the home front
Volunteer veterans help California city use counterinsurgency strategy to stem gang violence

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Course Description

What is an American? This course is an exploration of that paradoxical question through autobiography, fiction, drama and essay to explore the meaning of culture and the process by which an ethnic group or individual in America forms an identity. We will examine major issues in the three major U.S. ethnic groups: African American, Asian American and twentieth century Chicano immigrants and their children.

Course texts

Laban Hill, Harlem Stomp

All are available at the bookstore, which will sell unsold copies back starting in about four weeks. I also allow overloads in class quite liberally. So, buy your books as soon as you can.

Class Assignments

Illustration Project: Negro Speaks of Rivers (10% of grade)

You first assignment will have you illustrate a Langston Hughes poem

Weekly Reading (totals 20% of the course grade)

For each weeks reading I'll have a discussion guide posted. Twice during the term you have to meet me outside of class time and have a ten minute conversation with me about what your are learning. Here are the questions I will ask.

1. What person, event or cultural artifact (song, poem etc) that you learned about in class readings di you find intersting?
2. What did you to do to learn more about that person, event or cultural artifact (song, poem etc)?
3. What did you find out by doing this research?

:You should have half a page worth of information for each question that you can refer to as we talk.

2 small research (30% of the grade)

:You will provide two short research projects. One will be a comparison of the formation of Black Harlem and Chicano East Los Angeles. The second will be about Japanese Internment.

image essay

(an MS PowerPoint document --must have .ppt as suffix)

• 5-10 postcards about the topic of your choice Thinking of the powerpoint slides as postcards might be a useful metaphor since a postcard contains an image and a message from someone traveling in a foreign land. Well, I've sent you to a foreign time, send some postcards..
• Introductory slide by author identifying parties in the conversation and the "thesis" of each writer.

annotated bibliography

(an MS Word document--must have .doc as suffix)

• annotation includes:
  • market demographics (race, class, gender, other)
  • topic of interest
  • major conclusions
  • qualiy of data sources
• web resources (they represent the curent culture's knowledge base)
• at least 1 major cultural source from the period(magazines, tv, radio, more on internet)
• at least 1 academic resource (lecture notes, book you've read in other courses, journal, website by credible expert

We can turn these in on the class computer.

Civil Rights Timeline(30% of the grade)

groups can be any size. Two is the smallest and more than five is hard to coordinate

Course Policies

please arrive on time

turn off you cells and pagers

do the reading on time

don't cheat

be respectful of one another's feelings