Perception
Fall and Winter 2003-2004
Fall 2003 Syllabus
Faculty and Staff:
Nancy Murray (Program Coordinator) – Lab 2, 2269; 867-5497;
Thad Curtz – LAB 2, 3274; 867-6731;
Charles Pailthorp – LAB 2, 2266; 867-6158;
Sara Rucker-Theissen (Academic Advising) – LIB 1401; 867-6909;
Office Hours: TBA
Administrative introduction:
Please read this carefully and ask about any sections of it you don't understand or don't feel comfortable with now. We’re handing it out and discussing it with you at the beginning because we want to proceed on a common ground with you about the expectations and procedures of this program. Unless we hear otherwise, we'll assume that you’re willing to live with these policies. We want to be as clear as we can to start with about our expectations, but this doesn't mean we intend to be closed minded about proposed changes in the future; you’re responsible for raising any questions you may have about the program or its content as we go along. We will all need to reflect on our experiences as we go along, and talk about whether any changes might improve the program.
Our program theme is “Learning From Our Mistakes.” We think it applies to what we’ll be studying together (and will sometimes apply to how were studying it as well). How and why it is the program theme will get clearer as we go along, and we hope that by the end of our work together in March this simple phrase will seem a lot richer and more meaningful to you than it does now.
Weekly Schedule:
Our weekly schedule, how to contact us, the writing assignments, some of the reading handouts, and much of the rest of the important week-to-week information about our work will be posted on the program’s website at
If you want to, you can print out your own copies of pages you want to carry around with you everywhere, but we will also be adding to this site and probably sometimes adjusting the schedule as we go along. You need to bookmark these pages and check them regularly, at least before you start the work for each week, to see if there are any announcements or updates and to find out what you’re supposed to be doing and reading in the next few days.
Some assignments will require you to be at school at other times besides these, to use the library or the computer lab. Please note that if you're also enrolled in Beginning the Journey this quarter, you'll need to be going to the Wednesday sessions, not the Monday ones. You're all invited to a dessert potluck at Thad's house this Wednesday evening, October 1st at 7:30; it isn't mandatory, but we hope you'll all come. We’ll be going on a field trip to Fort Flagler for two nights next week, leaving Tuesday morning October 6th and coming back Thursday afternoon October 9th. (Please consult us right away if this is going to complicate your life seriously.)
Remember that evaluation week is part of the quarter; we will be doing evaluation conferences for most of that week. Please don't plan to leave early in that week before you consult with your seminar leader about when you can do your evaluation conference.
Book List:
The books for the quarter are on the syllabus page on the web site – they are available in the campus bookstore (or will be soon – a couple of the ones for the end of the quarter haven’t arrived yet. There will also be some xerox and digital handouts.
The bookstore will send back all the books left on the shelf shortly after the middle of the quarter. Make sure you have them all before they vanish.
Writing:
There will be a number of different kinds of writing in the program this quarter.
For each Tuesday seminar, you'll write a short piece on the reading for the day, due at the beginning of the class. These are to help you deepen your understanding of the readings in preparation for the discussion. Until further notice, the assignment for these is to formulate the main points of the reading as clearly as you can, and then to list three questions that you would like to discuss. (These should not be small questions of fact - though it's fine to ask those in discussion. Nor should they be huge, vague, sweeping, unanswerable questions. They should be questions that you aren't sure how to answer, that you think our group might be able to throw some light on, and that are actually interesting or important to you.) Figuring out questions like this is actually not too easy most of the time - try to do the reading early enough so that you can think about your list for a couple of days; talk to other students about the book or exchange e-mail with them; try to make your questions as good as you can...
For each Thursday seminar, you'll write a paper on the reading for the week, due at the beginning of the class. These will mostly be short expository papers (three to five pages long), although we may occasionally ask you to do some other sort of writing for this piece. In these, you'll be working on developing some idea or insight of your own about the reading - interpreting, explaining, or criticizing something about the text. Each of these papers should have a thesis, some central point that you are trying to make, and develop an argument with evidence to support that thesis.
Lab notebooks:
The laboratory notebook is the primary tool of scientific documentation. There are many different philosophies of lab notebooks. Many of you had to write up labs in high school: they were very scripted and formal and neat. They taught you want should be in a lab report, but they didn't give very valid insight into how scientists really work. The experimental method isn't about not making mistakes or following an exact form. It's about documentation: explaining what you're trying to do, outlining (and drawing) how you're going to do it, recording your observations, hypothesizing what they might mean, working out your calculations in a way that you can spot mistakes, and so on. It's your proof of what you've done, both for yourself and for the world. The ability to create a good lab notebook is one of the most important and useful laboratory skills you can develop; we will help develop this skill during the program.
A well-maintained lab notebook is important and useful for several reasons:
- It is your contribution to the continuation of the process of science; your successes and mistakes are lessons from which others can learn.
- It is a vehicle for you to learn from your own previous work and ideas, to make improvements and develop new insights.
- It serves as documentation and proof that you have actually done the work you claim to have done.
You may argue that your memory is just fine-that you'll remember to write it down later. But I doubt it. We live in an age of written reminders, and a level of background distraction that works against memory. Besides, the one really great idea or insight will always be the one you lose or forget.
How formal should your note taking be? That you have to answer for yourself. At a bare minimum it should contains the following information:
Date: date each page when you put something on it
Title: a good experimental title goes a long way toward clarifying your thinking and helps keep things focussed.
Description/Goal: generally resembles a statement of purpose, what you are testing and why
Procedure: an outline of how you will proceed
Data: numbers, observations and calculations
Summary/Conclusions: what you learned
School journals:
You’ll be working with kids in a classroom or day care for half a day each week – on Wednesday morning or afternoon or Friday morning. In the first part of the quarter you’ll be getting used to the kids and the teacher’s ways of working, and working on deepening your own perceptions of the situation - trying to learn to see and hear and understand what’s going on better. In the second half of the quarter, you’ll be spending a little of your time each week exploring some sensory experiences with the kids and talking with them about how they think the senses work. In addition to being fun, we hope these explorations will help you think more about the issues we’ll be studying in the program’s work about epistemology and developmental psychology, where we’ll be concentrating on Piaget’s theories about how kids perceive, understand and learn more about the world.
Each day that you’re in the schools you’ll write one journal entry. It’s intended to help you practice seeing what’s going on in your room and thinking about your experiences. You should pick one moment that you thought was puzzling, interesting or complicated. It should be a moment that somehow involves issues about learning and knowledge (or failing to learn and not understanding something.) It can involve one or more people learning from a mistake, but it doesn’t have to. You can focus on trying to understand an experience of your own or an experience of other peoples’. You should jot down as many quick notes about it as you can as soon as you’re able to – get yourself a little pad to keep with you for doing this. You should write it up as soon as you can after you leave the room.
First, your entry should just describe what happened as clearly and carefully as you can. Try to keep interpretations out of this first account. Go on to them in the second part of the entry, and try to think in that about what might have been going on, exploring possible ways of understanding or explaining what you saw and heard.
There will also be a five page paper for the individual project, and the collaborative mid-term exam will include various essay questions.
Individual Projects:
We're asking each student to study some unusual kind of perceptual experience of his or her choice during this quarter. This can be an experimental phenomenon like sensory deprivation, a cultural phenomenon like trance states, a psychological phenomenon like synesthesia, an artistic phenomenon like color field painting, and so on. (Next quarter these individual projects will be about the life and work of some particular poet, painter, musician or other artist of your choice, focusing on how he or she structures and uses sense experience artistically.) You should plan to spend roughly five hours each week on this project.
At the end of fall quarter, you'll be responsible for a fifteen minute presentation in which you do your best to convey the quality of the experience you’ve been studying to some of the rest of us. You can read out loud, show images, do performance art, lecture – whatever you think will have the best chance of helping us personally register the quality of this sort of perception to the rest of us. This presentation should also help us think about and better understand the psychological and cultural and biological processes involved in experiences of this kind. Each of you will also write a short paper (five pages or so) about this second question – discussing current ideas about this kind of perception, the current evidence and support for those ideas, and any problems with them.
Time Budget:
As the handouts for the program have said, it is designed as the equivalent of a standard 16 credit class load. That is, you should expect it to take about 45 hours a week altogether. We will try hard to avoid piling on any more work than that, and would like to hear from you if you find that the program is demanding more of your time. On the other hand, you should not expect to be able to participate well in much less time than that, unless you are a phenomenally quick study. We think that meeting deadlines is an important skill to acquire; we won't be accepting late work or giving incompletes (except in truly amazing circumstances, such as personally witnessing you being abducted by aliens with your last paper clutched in your hands.) If you do not have 45 hours a week available, and can't rearrange your life to obtain them at this particular point, we recommend choosing a different program.
Skills:
We assume that you have well-rounded beginning college skills. If you’re shaky about basic skills in some way, we’ll expect you to work hard on them with us, and/or the Learning Resource Center, the Quantitative Reasoning Center and tutors. We really hope you’ll consult with us right away if you start to feel as if you’re in over your head – it will be a lot more pleasant and useful for both you and us to talk about it and start working together on improving the situation than for you to go along feeling badly and hoping things will magically get better. We don’t assume that you’ll know anything particular about the psychology or biology or film or the other subjects we’re studying at the beginning. If you do the work, by the end of the program your skills will have improved, you’ll know more about the content and specialized language of each of these disciplines, and you’ll will have improved your ability to participate in the collaborative intellectual activity of the seminar.
Evaluation:
Your seminar leader will be talking individually with each of you during the second, fifth and final week of this quarter about how things are going and how you're doing. You should also be getting regular feedback about your progress through the routine functioning of the program - comments from us and from fellow students, both written and spoken, on your work, both written and spoken. However, you should feel free at any time to make an appointment with your seminar leader to talk if you feel like it, or feel unsure about how you are doing.
At the end of the program, in March, we'll write a formal evaluation of your work and you'll write a formal self-evaluation; we'll share and discuss those at your final evaluation conference, then revise them if it seems needed. These go in your transcript. At this conference, you’ll also turn in a final formal evaluation of each of the faculty. (If you’d rather, you can give these to the program secretary, who won’t give them to us until our final evaluations of you have been filed with the Registrar, but usually faculty and students talk about these along with the other evaluations at final conferences).
We will do our best to be supportive - but also frank, detailed, and honest - in all our evaluations of your work. We’ll base them on your writing your comments in discussion, the projects you present, your completed quizzes and exams, and the strength of their self-evaluation.We will discuss your work’s quality, the level of your understanding, the consistency and usefulness of your participation, and the extent of your improvement. (If you haven't done any significant pieces of the work, we will say so.) The central bread and butter things you should be focusing on are:
l. Informed and prepared participation in seminars, workshops, peer study groups, and other assigned classes.
2. Timely completion of all assignments.
3. Demonstrated competence in the subject matter.
4. Improvement of your academic skills.
5. Active participation in meetings.
6. Sensitivity to the needs of fellow students.
7. Completion of both informal and formal self-evaluations, evaluations of faculty, and program evaluations.
8. Willingness to work as a member of the program community.
This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, and we will try to pay full attention in our conversations and evaluations to the particular character of your own interests, talents and progress as well as to these pretty generic standard college student virtues. We expect that almost everyone will participate fully, actively, and successfully in the program and that as a consequence, almost everyone will find the evaluation process satisfying and pleasant. If a student repeatedly disrupts other people’s attempts to learn by harassing them, coming to class drunk, or engaging in whatever other sort of disreputable behavior you can imagine, one or more of us will warn the student that continuing this behavior will result in his or her dismissal from the program. If it doesn’t stop, we’ll make the person leave the program at whatever point the three of us agree that we’re tired of putting up with it.
Attendance:
Full participation means regular attendance. We expect you to be here on time; set your alarm clock early, get a friend down the hall to wake you up; go to bed early enough – be here when we start. We expect you to attend all the classes, unless you are sick, or your child is, or you're called away by an emergency. In such cases, please be sure to ask someone what you missed. You are responsible for knowing what went on. We will place any left over copies of handouts in a folder on the table in the lounge down the hall from Nancy’s office; please check there if you have to be gone and discover you missed getting something.