Course Requirements/Grading

Course Grading

Presentation and Discussion Participation – 15%
Wiki Exercises – 20%
Book reviews and Webibliography – 15%
Research Paper/Final Project – 50%(10% for presentation)

There are four graded assignments for this course:

1) Students will be assigned a particular set of readings for which they will need to be prepared to offer short presentations and facilitate the seminar discussion.

2) Throughout the course students will build an annotated bibliography of books, articles, films, and web media dealing with the topic of sacred space. As part of this each student will produce a short (c. 2000-2500 word) book review article. The article should be theme oriented and include a number of works (not necessarily only monographs) and assess this literature (or other media) through the lens of the class discussions. The idea is that this may serve as part of the literature review that many of you will do as you develop your final papers/projects. But it will also serve as a way for your colleagues to access more scholarship than could be done individually.

3) Throughout the semester there will be four exercises that will hopefully give a more practical or at least hands on entry into the readings and ideas with which we will grapple over the course of the class. These will take the form of postings on the course wiki that will have a level of freedom of form so as to give you space to think a bit more creatively about this rather ethereal topic that is often poorly modeled and understood with only the written word and classroom discussions.

4) The final requirement is an extensive (20-25 pages) research paper which will be due at the end of the semester. Students may choose to research any topic that has relevance to the course without geographical or temporal restrictions. Sometime around the fifth week of the semester I will ask for a one page proposal of the research topic and will arrange to have office hours to discuss the proposal. In week eight you will submit your reviews which should ideally serve as a starting point for these papers. While not required, students are encouraged to give me a rough draft of their papers before the end of Week 12. Our final session of the course will be devoted to student presentations of their research projects. The format will be as a 20 minute conference paper that will be delivered to the class. This will mean that students should consider offering only one aspect of their research project rather than a synopsis of their larger argument.

I am certainly willing to consider projects whose final product is not necessarily in the form of a research paper. Should you wish to produce a film, a piece of creative writing or something else altogether it must still engage in a high level of research (which does not need to necessarily be in the library but can be in the field). If you think that you might want to go in this direction please speak with me early so that I can be sure that the project will be significantly well thought out and appropriate for the class and its goals.

Further details of these assignments will be provided as the semester progresses. Please watch the Assignments page.

Note:

While it goes without saying, plagiarism will not be tolerated. Any incidents of dishonest work will be reported to your academic advisor and the appropriate dean. These are serious matters. If you feel that you are headed in this direction, see me immediately and we can solve this together, before it leads down the road of disciplinary action.