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this page 1 our countries reflective pieces | tests | essay attendance | timely completion |
I realize that this is a very long page, but I thought it was better to have all of this assignment information on one page. If it's scattered around, you'll always wonder whether you missed something. Note that I keep track of completed assignments on the reports page.
Overall, you have five oral presentations, each with an accompanying wiki page, six short reflective pieces, two tests, and an essay.
You will make five oral presentations for this course.
The first is informal and with your partner. The final one is a short
individual presentation
summarizing your learning. Both will require a web page on our wiki.
For each of the other three, there are two options: you
do
one and your partner does the other. Again, each of them will require a
web
page on our wiki.
For those three especially, the purpose is not a display of your presentation skills. The purpose is exposing us to the culture of your country. Ninety-five percent of your task is choosing what we're going to see and hear and making an insightful and interesting wiki page (see box below). Five percent will come during quarter-hour in front of the class, when you will use your wiki page to briefly introduce and contextualize each of your choices. Then you should get out of the way and let us watch and listen.
The wiki page will include all of the examples you will use during your
presentation (see examples of annotated items below), as well as
many others. If your presentation intrigues some of your classmates to
learn more, they will be able to come to your wiki page to launch their
own exploration.
For the written profile, you will get full credit for an interesting, insightful essay that uses lots of specific data. If it is too short or just dumps data without characterizing the country, you will get less than full credit.
To help understand the geo-political context of your country's arts, you will use the data on the countries page and cultures page, about your country and the others, to write (sentences and paragraphs) a profile that characterizes your country.
What do I mean by a profile? You do this all the time with people. ("That guy over there, what's he like?") With people you know, you think a little bit about your experiences with them, and then you respond with a few claims. ("Peter? He's a party animal, but he gets his school work done, too, and he'll definitely treat you right. He's just like John except he's not very athletic.") Your friend seems interested, so you then recount the experiences you've had with Peter. The experiences should support your claims (party animal, studious, respectful). Your friend may end up dating Peter and coming to very different conclusions, not because you were wrong but because she had different experiences.
So look at the data about your country. What does it
say about life there? Look at where your country appears on the various
lists, that is, compare it to other countries. Read the summaries about
your country on the Wikipedia, EveryCulture.com
and Freedom
House. Go to YouTube and look at
some videos about
your country. Listen to some music from your country. Download Google Earth and zoom in on the capital
city. If Street View is available for your city, you can take a stroll
through the capital. None of our countries is land-locked, so check
out
the beaches. Go to Google Images
and download some interesting pictures taken in your country. Don't
just look at them. Examine each one in detail; imagine yourself there
taking that picture.
Then write an essay
that characterizes your country, as best as you can from the
limited knowledge you have right now. The summary characterization
(party animal, studious, respectful) is your thesis statement. The data
and images you have collected are your evidence. Use the evidence to
support your thesis. Post it on the wiki by February 21.
To help understand what I have in mind, look on the wiki for my profile of the Netherlands. It is about 750 words long, and yours should be about that long, too. If it's even longer, all the better.
Here are two other examples, both recent NY Times op-ed
essays about Egypt by David Brooks: The 40
Percent Nation and by Thomas Friedman: Up
With Egypt.
You will do one of these presentations with accompanying wiki page. Your partner will do the other.
While you make your presentation, have the wiki page on the screen, and then you can click on the video links.
You will get full credit to the extent that your report has at least five items with insightful, interesting annotation that follows the format below.
You and your classmates will write reflections based on
all these presentations and wiki pages. Give us something to write
about. Start the conversation.
Insightful and interesting means answering the questions like the ones in the box on the right.
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annotated items format:
image(s) or other media like embedded YouTube video, name of work, creator (person or org), medium/genre, date, your interesting description, your insightful comment, links to more info
Antonia's
Line
The Dutch produce two or three dozen feature films per year that are listed in the INDB. Seven times, Dutch films have been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Three have won, including Antonia's Line in 1996, written and directed by Marleen Gorris and starring Willeke van Ammelrooy. See the trailer on YouTube and the poster for the German version on left.
Often described as a "feminist fairy tale", Antonia's Line tells of a strong-minded, nonconforming Dutch woman and her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. All the men in the film are either evil or in various ways mentally, emotionally, and physically deficient.
Movie critics everywhere gave Antonia's Line very rough treatment for its lack of realism and objectivity. Ms. Gorris, to them, had some feminist messages to send and she seems to have sent them too bluntly for these critics. Personally, I found the movie beautiful and entertaining and the performance by Ms. van Ammelrooy compelling. The view of Dutch life and character was illuminating, even though the film is set in the one tiny part of southeastern Netherlands that has some hills; the rest of the country is flat and largely below sea level.
Dutch
Golden Age genre painting
The Dutch ruled the world of commerce, education, and visual arts in the 1600's, their Golden Age. They had a society that was noted for its lack of interest in religion, its tolerance, and its (relative) empowering of women. The religiously themed paintings that were produced in other European countries were replaced by genre paintings in the Netherlands. Genre paintings depict scenes from everyday life, usually with anonymous subjects, such as this happy couple on the right. The Dutch could also deal with women painters, the most prominent of whom was Judith Leyster (1609 - 1660), who painted the happy couple as well as the self-portrait on the left. On the other hand, she did all of her famous paintings in the six years before she started bearing her five children, only two of whom lived to adulthood. She died at age 50.
So on each of the wiki pages described below, I would
like to see at least five of these kinds of items to introduce the arts
of your country to your classmates.
What's going on?
If you're studying or working abroad, you pass through the tourist
stage in a very
short time, a matter of days or weeks, at most. Then what? You're not
exactly a native, not by a long shot. But you're still living there.
You can't study or work 24 hours a day. So after you're done for the day,
what's going on? The easy way is to hang out with other foreigners,
other
ex-patriates. The hard way is to venture out
where the locals
are.
what's on TV and radio? what are the
young peope in your country listening to on their iPods?
current events. What's the latest disaster? Who's
popular, the local "stars"?
what newspapers do people read?
what's in the movie theaters, the sports
stadiums, and the concert halls?
what's in the clubs and bars?
what's the most popular beer in your country? Beers
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Beers Can you find a commercial
for that beer on YouTube?
Where do the ex-pats hang out? Where do the locals hang out?
For your presentation, show us the videos, play
snippets of music, show
us the clubs' web sites, etc.
The worldwide sites listed in the Tools section of the syllabus page will get you started. In addition, search using these terms -- television, nightclubs, etc. -- and your city and country. For example: < clubs Buenos Aires Argentina >
People in every country have places they are so proud of that they protect. Usually, tourists are welcome. So if we had only a short time in your country, what two or three places are on the must-see list? The ones you choose don't need to be the top tourist destinations. For example, there are many places in Egypt other than the pyramids that would be well worth our while.
Every country also has a history. Even if the country
once had a different name or different borders, the history still counts.
Show us something about the history of your country, too. This doesn't
have to be a video covering all the events over all time in a broad
sweep. It can be just a point in time, such as how Pakistan divided
from India according to religion or how some Britich marketing executives concocted Nigeria out of a
marketing supply chain, regardless of religion. Or it can focus on a
specific cultural aspect, like A Brief History Of The Tango, about Argentina's famous dance, or Music kept me alive, about South Africa under apartheid.
Often, the "official" videos are not as interesting as the less formal videos made by other people and organizations.
For history videos, type the name of your country followed by the word history in YouTube's search box.
For cultural heritage, the best source: UNESCO's World Heritage List
Next best: Lonely Planet's Destinations
Plus some I've run across recently: Turkey, Argentina, the S African town of Ladysmith, Discovery.com's Atlas - Brazil, China, Egypt, India, and South Africa.
You will do one of these presentations with accompanying wiki page. Your partner will do the other.
Your wiki page should picture, describe, and analyze a musical instrument originating in your country or region. I am especially partial to ancient musical instruments that are still used today. Last semester, students analyzed these instruments, among others: jarana jarocha, steel drum, el cuatro, đàn bầu, bandoneon, nyatiti, xalam, djembe, shofar, santur, kemenche, sarangi, sheng, zampogna, lyre, dulzaina.
Depending on the instrument, the analysis may include but is not limited to:
technical details, specifications, sound
properties
materials and
processes of construction
methods of use, history of use, cultural significance
musicians and composers associated with the
instrument.
Since this is a report, bullet-point lists and picture
captions will go a long way. Lots of links to your sources and to
additional information are very important. You will get full credit for
a report that has at least 750 words. In other
words, give us a lot of detail about that instrument.
For your oral presentation, let us hear the instrument
in a variety of settings, old, new, concert hall, street, etc. Can find
a video of someone making the instrument?
If you can find one of these instruments to bring to class, that would be terrific!
This assignment is very similar to the one above, except it's about a work of art or a building. Pick an art form practiced in your country and a specific example of that art form. Analyze the art work, that is, describe it and break down the formal elements. Last semester students analyzed everything from marble scupture to a mosque to Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" to the different types of Latin dance steps.
Depending on the art work, your analysis will include the relevant terms discussed on the analysis page and in my lecture in January.
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raw
materials: What was it made from?
tools:
What was it made with?
techniques:
How was it made?
parts:
What are its parts?
elements:
How do they work together?
This is a factual report and not an essay in support of a thesis statement, so bullet-point lists and picture captions will go a long way. This analysis is very similar to the musical instrument analysis below. Lots of pictures, of course, and lots of links to your sources and to additional information are very important. You will get full credit for a report that is at least 750 words long. In other words, give us a lot of detail about that word of art. Check with me if you are unsure.
To get started, you may want to explore the art history of your culture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
You should have the idea by now. Make a wiki page with
annotated items. During your oral presentation, show one or more music
videos, with or without dancing,
from your country. Look for traditional music as well as for concerts
and dance clubs. YouTube is your best bet, but there are plenty of
other sites hosting video, too.
What do movies, theater, and TV show about life as it is lived in your
country?
Using the wiki page you made to set the context with
insightful and interesting comments, show one or more trailers/clips
from movies and TV
shows set in your country. In addition, every country has a home-grown
film industry. The most popular is India's Bollywood (Bombay +
Hollywood). Try to find video set in your
country and produced and acted by people in your country.
The videos don't have to be in English. We may not understand the dialogue, but movies tell a lot with the images. We'll also be able to pay more attention to life as it is lived in your country.
What did you learn in this course? Some of the learning was convergent, for example, the two tests. I asked: did you learn this? did you learn that? Most of the learning, however, was divergent. You all learned different things.
The final days of class, you will have the opportunity
to reflect on your learning.
3 minutes - First, tell us what you learned in this
course. Then, tell us what
your final essay is about while you show slides of images from your
final essay and wiki pages.
3 minutes - Find a study abroad program or work opportunity in your country via the links on the Expats page, something that you find interesting, and tell us more about it. Finally, replay a favorite video from one of your earlier presentations or show us one you didn't have time to get to during an earlier presentation.
A relective or reaction piece is not an essay in the
sense of having a thesis, supporting data, and explanations. A
reflective piece is 300 words about what you noticed and
reacted to
while you watched and listened to the presentations. What did you like
or not like? What was the most interesting / compelling / odd / hard to
listen to parts? How was it similar to what you already know? What did
it make you feel / think? Why do you think it's popular in that country?
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Spelling and grammar are important, of course, but a reflective piece can be structured any way you want. Insight means you saw below the surface and the obvious and that you made connections to other things we have been talking about and experiencing in this course. Flair means that you wrote with an engaging, vivid voice. Don't write a stiff, formal thing for school. Don't write a report listing all the presentations you saw. Instead, talk to us, one human to another. Write it like a chatty email to a friend who couldn't attend.
I expect these reflective to be as varied as the
individuals who
wrote them. When I read them, here's the scenario I imagine. It is
similar to the one I related on the course's welcome page.
You and I are part of a semester abroad program in your country, you the student and me the faculty advisor. We go out with some people who were born and raised in that country. We go somewhere where we experience the art of their country -- a museum or performance or gallery or club or just on the street.
Then we all go to the Blu Jaz Café for a bottle of Tiger, the local brew, as you can see on the menu boards in the photo above. Someone turns to you and asks, "What did you think about" whatever we just saw?
The reflective piece is what you would say to them,
what you were thinking about when experiencing
the art. So my question is whether your reflective pieces, in the words
of our official course objectives, show that you can "communicate with
reflection, sensitivity, and intelligence about the arts in non-U.S.
cultures because of your increased awareness of cultural diversity."
Sensitivity and intelligence are the key words.
After the first informal presentation about your countries, we will have six rounds of presentations about the arts in one form or another. You will write one reflective piece for each round: pop culture, cultural heritage, music, art/architecture, music/dance, and movies/TV. You will then post them to the Blu Jaz Cafe forum on our course wiki.
You are welcome to take notes during the in-class presentations, but you should write these reflective pieces very soon after class. The due dates for posting them on the wiki are the first class day after the end of that round of presentations.
You will get full credit (3 points) for at least 300 words written with insight and flair. Think about the Blu Jaz and make the faculty advisor proud of you! You will get less than full credit for shorter, less insightful pieces.
You will take two tests on the information and ideas presented in my lectures. The tests will ask for objective responses, that is, data -- names, dates, places -- instead of the more subjective approaches asked for in the other written assignments for this course.
The first test will be on geography, testing your
ability to memorize some of the most basic geographical information
about the world we live in. You'll get a blank outline map of the
world's land masses. You need to add the following about each of the countries (13 of them, including
the Netherlands) that we are studying, two points each for:
- locating the country correctly on the map - write the name where it is
- roughly drawing the general outline of the country, giving at least a sense of its magnitude in relation to its surroundings; in other words, get its size roughly correct if not its exact shape
- naming the country's capital and spelling it correctly
- locating the capital more or less accurately within the country (esp. coast/inland) - use a star or large dot to locate the city
The second test will cover my lectures in class, each of which has its own page on this web. If this course has a textbook, these eight or nine pages linked to the syllabus are it. The test will have multiple-choice and true/false questions that will be mostly copied and pasted from these web pages.
A textbook for a course like this, if it existed, would be very thick. My web pages try, in under 20,000 words (maybe 80 printed ink-on-paper pages), assisted by lots of images, to organize some of the information that I think a well-educated, sophisticated college graduate in the 21st century should know about the world. The test distills that information even further.
I think you should know about time and place, that is,
have a sense of the quantity of time that has passed. It matters that
99% of the time that humans have been a separate species was spent in
what we now call the Stone Age (because only stone artifacts have
survived). Who came first? What came first? It matters that the lyre
was invented thousands of years before
paper and that Mohammed lived six hundred years after Jesus, who lived about five
hundred years after
Siddhartha Gautama, the original Buddha.
In addition, I think you should have a basic grasp of place. You should be able to visualize the Earth from afar and from up close: the shape, size, and relative position of the continents and the countries is important, as well as the general distribution of humanity -- those areas with lot of people and those with very few.
These tests will give a rough measure of the clarity and accuracy of your mental model of the world we live in.
Note that April 27 is when this essay is due. If you
meet that deadline, I will respond quickly and you will have a week to
revise it for a higher grade. If you don't send a finished essay until
May 3, then it will be late and you will not have the opportunity to
revise it.
This assignment asks you to research and write an essay, that is, a thesis statement supported by evidence and explained in an engaging voice. (Compare the artwork and musical instrument analyses above, which are reports, not essays.) Your essay should have an introduction and conclusion. Spelling and conventional punctuation and grammar count, as does an MLA-formatted Works Cited section. I encourage you to use images and videos that you refer to in your text.
You will get full credit for an insighful and
interesting essay. I want you to sound more like a thoughtful,
knowledgable, sophisticated citizen of the world and less like a kid
who just graduated from high school in Western New York and doesn't
know much about the world yet. The course outline calls it to
communicate with reflection, sensitivity, and
intelligence. On the welcome page of this course web, you read
about the Blu Jaz Cafe in Singapore and the best
you can get out of this course. This essay is your opportunity to
show those people around the table in Singapore what you got.
You will not get many points if you write a report instead of an essay -- that is, all data, no insightful and interesting ideas that you developed from the data. A report was the earlier assignments about the art work and musical instrument. The point of those assignments was to organize the facts. This is an essay. You start with the facts just as though you were in that cafe in Singapore. There, you'd start with the facts, the sight-seeing you have done. And now you're sitting down for a drink.
After the waitress leaves, someone turns to you and
asks, "What did you think about that singer we heard this afternoon?
And the way she danced!" The singing and dancing are the facts. Your
response is the
essay.
Too often, when you sit down to write in college, you
come up with an idea and then look for data to support it. That's not
realistic. When you write in the real world, when you get asked a
question in Singapore, you will be surrounded by
data and information, usually way too much. So do yourself a favor and
find the data before you do too much thinking about this essay. What
will function like the sightseeing in Singapore? Think numbers and
pictures.
Examples of data:
the data on the countries and cultures page of this course web
a collection of images you downloaded
a collection of videos, such as the ones used for the presentations in class
a collection of websites
Google Earth -- if you select various filters, you will
be exposed to an enormous amount of data about your country.
International
Flows Of Selected Cultural Goods And Services
Pop Internationalism: Has a Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?
Heilbrunn Timeline
of Art History
Safeguarding
Intangible Cultural Heritage
UNESCO
Intangible Heritage Channel on YouTube
To get you thinking, check out these three videos by Hans Rosling:
200
Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
The
Best Stats You've Ever Seen
To get full credit for this assignment, you should send
me a list of URL's or a folder full of saved files that I consider
adequate for this assignment. It may be just one URL to a web site that
has a ton of data. Or it may be a folder full of images. The best way
to be sure is to inquire via email.
Listen to the data. Examine the numbers. Look at the
images. Listen to the music. What is it saying?
For this essay, I would like you to grapple with some messy ideas that don't have easy answers. In the arts of all the cultures we are studying, we see forces driving change and forces restraining it.
| PHATES | Forces | |
|---|---|---|
| driving --> | <-- restraining | |
| Political | less powerful people | more powerful people |
| Historical | modernism; globalization | tradition |
| Artistic | ? your country ? | ? your country ? |
| Technological | electronic; internet | analog |
| Economic | poor | rich |
| Social | young; out | old; in |
Thesis: Somewhere in your dataset and
that nexus of
ideas -- applied to the country you have researched, the countries you
have been exposed to by other students' presentations, and our own
culture -- you need to find a thesis. The thesis statement, perhaps
more than a single sentence, should say something interesting that has
come out of your study of the data and your experiences in this course.
Because most of your research was in your country, I
would
expect that most of your essay would focus on your country, too.
However, you should feel free to include anything that you learned or
were exposed to in this course. Comparisons between countries can be
very interesting.
Here are some examples from previous semesters of thesis statements that were helpful to the writers:
| Like many
artists before him, Akon’s critical decision to move from
Senegal to the United States directly contributed to his achieving
recognition for the pursuit of his artistic passion.Art, especially music and dance, helped Black
South Africans resist oppression during apartheid.The Bible greatly influences almost all of the
art that is done and created in Israel. Italian renaissance painting has influenced
paintings to this day. |
Indians
intermingle the country’s cultural, religious, and political elements
to create the new arts, especially Bollywood films, music, and dance,
that characterize today's India without losing the best of their
tradition and heritage.Its
architecture, film, music and contemporary art show
how Nigeria is not the typical third world country that people think it
is.Through repression and censorship, the Chinese
government targets the arts to help maintain control over the people of
China. |
Audience for your essay: fellow students who are going to study abroad in your country for the next school year. Or perhaps they want to study abroad but aren't sure which country to choose. They have already read everything on your wiki pages, so they are better prepared to experience and enjoy the arts in that country. Finally, they are going to read your essay.
I am not expecting you to be an expert in your country or in the arts. But I do think it's safe to say that you know a lot more than you did when you started this course and you thus know a lot more than the students who are interested in studying abroad. Give those fellow students the benefit of your learning this semester.
Purpose of the essay: to help your audience adapt to their foreign culture more quickly and intelligently. After reading your essay, they will be able to impress natives of that country with how deeply they have thought about the arts in that society as well as other non-U.S. societies. You will not be able to cover all the arts in all the countries throughout all of history, so explain the focus of your essay in the introduction.
Remember that this is not a stand-alone essay. You do not need to repeat sections from other writing on this wiki. You are welcome to link to pages about other students' countries as well as your own. You should refer to these other sections and link to them, but assume that the readers have already read them and can click to quickly learn more. The purpose of your essay is to help them make sense of what they have read, seen, and heard on the wiki in preparation for their own year abroad.
Examples of what you can do to make this an essay, not a report. Explain things to your audience, evaluate things for them, tell them the story of the culture, make connections to other arts and other cultures, relate it to U.S. culture.
Organizing principle: How will you organize the body of the essay?
One way would be classifying things according to the arts: a section on music, a section on movies, a section on dance, etc.
Another way would be to compare and contrast: compare your culture to other cultures, although I would avoid comparing it to the "home team", the United States. The terms of comparison might be the arts or the PHATES. Or you could compare the traditional arts to what has happened under the influence of modernism.
Another way would be cause-and-effect. What's important? What caused it? What did it lead to? That is, what did it cause. (Just become a first thing comes before a second thing does not mean the the first thing caused the second thing. If you're writing about causes and effects, stick to causes and effects.)
Another way would be a process analysis. Trace the development of something over time.
Beyond specifying the audience and purpose, I want to give you room to develop the data and your ideas and experiences into a thesis statement. By April 6, I would like to see your thesis statement.
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After the first couple weeks of lectures, almost all the rest of the class time in HUM 300 will be spent listening to music and watching videos from foreign cultures. If not that, we'll be involved in hands-on arts activities like dancing and drumming.
We are tightly scheduled, so you can't make up a missed presentation (though you are welcome to trade with someone from another day). Also, watching the videos on your own is important and encouraged but can only supplement, not replace, the communal classroom experience. Thus attendance is very important.
We have about thirty class sessions, so it seems to me that missing a tenth of the classes is acceptable. However, beginning with your fourth absence, for whatever reason, including athletics, I will start to deduct points from your final grade.
I can predict from experience that many of you are highly skilled procrastinators, so you'll be happy to know that this course is a procrastinator's delight. There are more than a dozen deadlines, that many occasions for you to procrastinate. However, doing an assignment at the last minute before it is due is very different from doing it late. In this course, you can revise all your written work, so there is even less reason not to post whatever you have on the wiki when it is due.
In addition, everything on the wiki is time-stamped, and every page has its history available with a click, so lateness is a factual matter of matching dates, not a matter of opinion.
Beginning with your third missed deadline, I will deduct one point from your final course grade. I will deduct another point for each week it continues to be late.
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