COM/ENG/LAN 128: Gender in Humanities

Online, Section 003

May 18-June 11, Summer 2015

Instructor:Dr. K. Megan Hopper

Office:454 Fell Hall

Office phone: (309) 438-2688

Email:

Virtual Office Hours:By e-mail & appointment

Course Catalog Description: Examination of gender roles, norms, and stereotypes from a broad range of perspectives within humanities across centuries and cultures. May not be taken under the CT/NC option. Also offered as ENG/LAN 128. Prerequisites: ENG 101; COM 110 or concurrent registration.

Continued Enrollment:Your enrollment in this class constitutes agreement with all aspects of this syllabus and any additions or alterations that may be made to it during the course of the semester. Additions include my welcome letter to students, announcements I post for the class in ReggieNet or make in class, and e-mail I send to class members. Such additions include information about the course, assignments, and so on. These announcements and e-mail are equally important when it comes to evaluating your work, because announcements may contain clarifications or other help that fit within assignments’ requirements.

Required Text: Schneir, Miriam. (1994). Feminism: The essential historical writings. New York: Vintage. ISBN: 978-0679753810. Price (new): $16.00.

Readings posted on ReggieNet under the Resources & Materials tab.

Course Policies and Expectations

COURSE CONTENT SUMMARY:This course is an examination of (1) language as a personal and culturally dictated communication medium and (2) gender as social construct. This course is a middle-core, general education course, which means that it builds on and extends those skills that you have learned (and mastered, I hope) in the inner core general education courses. You should have completed Foundations of Inquiry, Language and Communication, and Language and Composition before enrolling in this class. Please refer to the welcome communications about this course e-mailed to you before this summer session began.

This course serves, therefore, as a kind of case-study opportunity where you get to apply those oral and written skills and critical thinking skills you have already begun to develop in previous courses. The case study this course provides is a look at language and a look at gender as cultural phenomena. We begin this course with a look at various definitions of language, as personal and cultural construct and as surface and deep structure. Then we look at various definitions of gender and various theories of how gender is constructed and enacted in a society. The balance of the course is a more or less a general historical treatment of both constructs: classical concepts of gender, medieval views toward the sexes, legal attitudes and decisions toward gender and language, and, finally, some contemporary examples of gender as embodied in language forms such as magazines, romance novels, television situation comedies, rock videos, quiz shows, advertising, and film.

Gender in Humanities is a humanities course, rather than a social science course. This implies that we will examine language and gender by examination of how texts have, throughout history, served as language and embodied gender, in both obvious and subtle ways. A social science approach would tend to focus on how research has demonstrated and revealed language and gender in our culture. Consider, however, that definitions I present here of the two approaches are very arbitrary and that both approaches often overlap and inform each other in considerations of language and gender.

I consider this course to be a course on gender, not a course in feminist scholarship. We will consider both genders and problematize female and male gender construction in historical texts and practices. And, finally, please feel free to disagree and argue with any text's position presented in class. I have chosen several of these readings not because they are "correct" or because I think them "accurate." Several readings have been chosen for their opposing or questionable definitions of language and gender. It will be your responsibility to question and to decide whether you agree with the ideas presented in class.

Course Format: This course will be run completely online over ReggieNet. (See my welcome letter sent by e-mail.) Assignments you must complete are summarized below in the “Assignments” section, including general requirements and grading criteria. Details about each assignment will be shared separately and posted on ReggieNet. Depending on class needs, I may also hold real-time meetings using ReggieNet’schat function, so everyone can benefit from the conversation. These chats would be announced in advance.

An entire semester’s worth of work will be covered and completed within four weeks. To manage the workload for this course, you must “attend” class every day. That means you actively engage with the material that is available to you online and in the textbook each day. You must also turn in work on time or before any day something is due.

Student Expectations: The following information outlines what is expected from you, the student learner, in this online, asynchronous course.

  1. You are expected to participate in the course on a regular basis. You should access course material every day to remain current and make sure you are aware of any changes in the course. Changes will be posted in announcements.
  2. You must make a commitment to learning. In a normal academic term, the university would tell you to schedule two hours per week for each credit per course for learning activities. In this course you will have an additional two hours, which is the time you would normally be in the classroom.
  3. Collaborating with other students enriches your learning activities. The course is designed to encourage and reward collaboration. Therefore, you are expected to participate in discussion forums and contribute to the body of knowledge for this subject throughout the course.
  4. You may communicate with me via mail, e-mail, telephone, or in person. For this course you must use ISU’s e-mail system. My e-mail is listed on the first page of this syllabus, in the university’s faculty directory, the department’s website, and my profile in ReggieNet. You may also ask your fellow students for assistance except when I instruct you not to.
  5. You are expected to remain civil and polite in all online communications. Although disagreements and dissent should be part of learning, you must remain respectful to other participants and me. You will carefully monitor your use of language while online or in official communication with other participants. Improper language or tone will not be tolerated and will be penalized by deducting all discussion-participation points for the session.
  6. This online method of delivery places responsibility for learning on you, the learner. You are expected to contribute your own work and to properly site the works of others submitted in the course. You will honor privacy among other students. You will be especially sensitive to honoring copyright. When in doubt, you are better served by providing a link to an online source, rather than copying it into your own work.

SPECIAL NEEDS:Any student needing to arrange a reasonable accommodation for a documented disability should contact Disability Concerns, Fell 350, 438-5853 (voice), 438-8620 (TDD).

Academic Dishonesty: Plagiarism and any other form of academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. Plagiarism (presenting someone else’s work as your own or without proper acknowledgment) or any other type of academic dishonesty will be considered justification for failure for that particular assignment or the entire course, depending on severity. Although you may discuss with each other any assignment and course material, bounce ideas off each other, and share the university's resources available to you, you cannot share actual work you do with others. All work must be that of the student (or students involved in a group assignment) and developed during the current semester for this course. Sources must receive credit using APA or MLA style. For information regarding academic integrity and procedures for academic misconduct, see ISU’s Code of Student Conduct, Section V.B.1.

Online Communication:I use e-mail to communicate directly to you as an individual and as a class. Also check ReggieNet’s “Announcements” area. Not checking your e-mail or ReggieNet’s announcements is not grounds for any excuse for not doing or not doing well on any assignment.It’s your responsibility to (1) keep your e-mail accounts open and up-to-date and (2) monitor your e-mail and ReggieNet class announcements frequently.

Assignments:Assessment of students’ learning shall be done through a combination of activities, which are covered in subsections below. Your attentiveness, questions, observations and other comments relevant to the course and the material being covered will be important to you and everyone’s learning. Feedback and guidance in- and outside of class should prove useful as well.

Readings: You must keep up with the readings in this course. There are one to four readings each day. You must stay on schedule and complete the readings for the days they are due on the “Course Schedule” later in this syllabus. The many ideas about gender, its construction, its evolution, and its role in society are found in the readings. The readings, then, are the foundation of this course, as they give us starting points to (1) thinking about how we think and feel about gender, (2) consuming notions about gender in the various ways that we do daily, and (3) acting on our thoughts, experiences, and feelings about gender with others and within given contexts.

Papers: Three papers will be assigned in this course—one for each of the three units in the course. They are due before 9 p.m. on the dates shown in the “Course Schedule.” You must apply critical thinking skills about the concepts covered in this course to specifically, thoroughly, and concisely address the problems given in the assignments. The papers will be assigned separately and specific assignment guidelines are posted on ReggieNet. Because this course is a communication course, it also requires you to express yourself effectively in your use of the English language.

Good writing is both strong in content and technically correct in its presentation (i.e., grammar, style, discourse conventions, layout, and printing). So your papers will be judged on the quality of your arguments in response to the assignments and English “mechanics”—correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, thesis statements, content organization, transitions, avoidance of sentence fragments and run-on sentences, parallelism, good paragraph development, formatting of your text, etc. (See the grading criteria below.) If the writing in any assignment does not meet these expectations, I reserve the right to give lower earned grades, depending on the severity of the writing’s inappropriateness/ineffectiveness.

The writing assignments in this course are meant to (1) apply principles and concepts covered in this course to realistic problems and (2) build upon and challenge you to improve your current skill level—to be more consistent with “real world” demands for written work. To ensure that I should be able to easily open your files, all papers must be typed and submitted to me through ReggieNet’s “File Drop” function in a Microsoft Word or PDF file. Failure to do so will result in an automatic grade of F for a paper that does not comply.

You cannot say absolutely everything you can in a paper, so you must learn to edit your writing to fit space and length requirements. The formatting rules for your papers are given below. Failure to follow any of these rules will adversely affect your assignment’s grade; whereas, a one or more grade reduction will be imposed based on the extent and severity of formatting errors.

  • Page layout for an entire paper must be in “portrait” orientation, not “landscape.”
  • 1-inch margins all around for the main text of your paper all pages (set headers and footers at ½ inch inside top and bottom margins).
  • Number all pages in the upper right corner of the header, and include your last name with the page number.
  • Double-space text throughout.
  • 12-point Times New Roman type throughout, including headers. You may use italics for emphasis and titles of major works. (NOTE: An article or book chapter is not a major work. Journals, magazines, newspapers, books, movies, TV shows, and websites are major works. Articles, chapters, episodes, and webpages are parts [i.e., “minor” works] of their respective major works. Because minor works are part of major works, minor works’ titles always go inside double quotation marks and are not italicized when stated in the text of your papers. Formatting minor and major works’ titles for the references list may be different. MLA and APA style show and explain these things, and it’s very likely you learned this in other classes, going back to high school.)
  • Indent all paragraphs ½ inch for the first line only. Do not have any extra space between paragraphs.
  • Use a cover page with the title of your paper, your name, the course title, and due date.
  • Do not write an abstract for your papers, as the style manuals suggest.
  • If you use any secondary sources (including readings from class), you must document them according to MLA or APA style in the text and in a list of references. A document with the publication data for all course readings is posted on ReggieNet in the "Data about Readings for Source Citations and References Lists"file in the Resources & Materials area.
  • Only the number of pages assigned will be graded. Papers longer than the page limit will receive one full grade reduction, and more than one-half page shorter than the page limit will result in the same penalty.

For your own protection, you are expected to keep electronic copies and/or photocopies of all assignments submitted to me. As you work on any computer remember to save your work frequently, always backup your work on another disk or other medium, and always protect your files and computer from viruses and malicious software. I will not forgive work turned in late because you had technology problems of any kind, especially because you didn’t keep backup files, couldn’t find a computer to use, or didn't have or lost Internet access. This policy applies to both papers and online disucssions.

Online Discussions: A number of online discussions will be conducted using ReggieNet’s “Discussion” tool. These discussions are meant to challenge you to think about and apply the concepts of the material we will have covered to that point in the semester. As the “Student Expectations” section asserts, your participation in these discussions is important. Each discussion will be available for only for the days indicated in the course schedule—opening at 12:00 a.m. the first day and closing at 11:59 p.m. of the last day before the next discussion starts.

Once a discussion closes, it is closed. No excuses shall be granted for missing any discussion, except for documented personal emergencies (i.e., directly affecting you). Documentation must be provided to me immediately upon your return from the emergency, and that documentation should be a scanned image of official paperwork (e.g., physician’s note) sent to me by e-mail or fax. If you can no longer participate in the class because of the emergency, you must contact the Dean of Students office.

Everyone must participate in each online discussion, and that means everyone must participate well—share your thoughtful, well-argued, and respectful view—at least once for each discussion. Because this course addresses a heady subject, I want to see how well everyone expresses their "takes" on it within the context of the readings. So of course the more you participate beyond the required one-time and thoughtful posting of your own for each discussion, the better it will be for your learning.

Your participation in all ReggieNet discussions will be graded according to the rubric given below, which includes letter grades for what I observe holistically as the quality of your engagement with the course material during all discussions. All discussion grades are final.

  • Exceptionally engaged (A) — valuable questions, comments, examples, observations, or insights shared every time in online discussion forums; obviously apparent that all assigned readings have been completed; well-prepared for discussions; positive attitude toward the course and/or learning perceived at all times; attended all or nearly all discussions and arrived on time or early.
  • Well engaged (B) — interesting and usable ideas, comments, or observations shared during online discussion forums; all assigned readings seem to have been completed; prepared for discussions; positive attitude toward the course and/or learning perceived; attended many discussions and arrived on time.
  • Engaged (C) — reasonable comments and questions shared during online discussion forums; appeared all assigned readings were completed; prepared for discussions; positive to neutral attitude toward the course and/or learning perceived; attended most discussions and arrived on time.
  • Barely engaged (D) — basic or simplistic comments or questions shared in online discussion forums; appeared to not have completed assigned readings; under-prepared for discussions; neutral to negative attitude toward the course and/or learning perceived; absent from several discussions and was either on time or late when attended discussions.
  • Not engaged (F) — overly simplistic, irrelevant, or no contributions to online discussion forums, which may have added little or no value; comments or other behavior may have detracted from discussions or were disruptive; appeared to not have completed assigned readings; under- or unprepared for discussions; negative attitude toward the course and/or learning perceived; absent from many discussions and was either on time or late, if attended discussions.

Grading policies