CURTIN COLLEGE

THE EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY

FRPG 187E   Fall 2006                                                       Valentine 202 T Th 10:10-11:40

Word version can be found here            

FACULTY

Cathy Crosby-Currie, Psychology, 214 Flint, x5167, home: 386-4497 (between 9am and 9pm), email:  cacrcu@stlawu.edu  Seminar T Th 2:20-3:05, Valentine 117
Steve Horwitz, Economics, 168 Whitman, x5731, home: 379-9737, email:  sghorwitz@stlawu.edu,  AIM:  sghorwitz, Seminar: T Th 2:20-3:05, Valentine 105

RESIDENTIAL STAFF

CA                  Jessica Cook                jmcook05@stlawu.edu           Rebert 227                  x6203 
CA                  April Spearance           alspea03@stlawu.edu             Rebert 127                  x6161
                       
Mentor            Rebecca Gilbert          rigilb05@stlawu.edu               Dean-Eaton 2038        x6472
                       
RC                   Colleen Smith             cjsmith@stlawu.edu               Rebert 163                  x5527

COURSE OVERVIEW
“We need a return to family values” is a theme we hear frequently in the media, as the “traditional” model of the nuclear family seems increasingly fragile in the rapidly changing world of contemporary America. This formulation of the problem leaves unanswered the questions, “what is a ‘family,’” and “what do we ‘value’ about it?” Answering these questions is not easy because, as the economic and social functions that families fulfill have changed throughout American history, the forms taken by the family have multiplied and changed. “The” American family could be a single parent with children, a family in poverty, a multi-generational household, an adoptive family, a lesbian or gay family, or that “traditional” nuclear family, which has itself evolved from Leave it to Beaver to Two and a Half Men. Together, we will critically assess the American family as a social institution, asking questions such as: What are the functions of a family? How does the evolution of family forms reflect changes in the functions families have needed to perform? Is it meaningful to speak of a “normal” family? Taught by an economist and a psychologist-lawyer, we will discuss contributions from literature (The Color Purple, Oedipus Rex, and The Handmaid’s Tale) and popular culture (Pleasantville and relevant TV shows), as well as readings from several disciplines that study the family—history, psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology.

TEXTS
* denote books available at the Brewer Bookstore.
± denotes readings on electronic reserves.

*Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid’s tale. New York, NY: Fawcett Crest.

±Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York, NY: Basic Books. [chapter 2]

*Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: From obedience to intimacy or how love conquered marriage. New York, New York: Viking.

*Hacker, D. (2004). A pocket style manual (4th ed.). New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

±MacLeod, D. I. (1998). The age of the child: Children in America, 1890-1920. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers. [selected chapters]

Mary Poppins [movie]

±Mason, M. A. (1994). From father’s property to children’s rights: The history of child custody in the United States. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. [selected chapters]

±McKenzie, R., & Tullock, G. (1975). The new world of economics. Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin. [chapter 8]

Pleasantville [movie]

Sophocles. (n.d./1967). The Oedipus cycle. [English translation by D. Fitts & R. Fitzgerald]. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace-Harvest Books.

*Stack, C. B. (1974). All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

*Truss, L. (2004). Eats, shoots & leaves: The zero tolerance approach to punctuation. New York, NY: Gotham Books.  

*Walker, A. (1982). The color purple. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

First-Year Program Philosophy and Goals 2006-07

The First-Year Program (FYP) and First-Year Seminar (FYS) are the first steps in a four-year process of helping you meet the University’s Aims and Objectives and the broader goals of a liberal education.  The faculty of the FYP and FYS see themselves as partners and mentors in the process of working with you to acquire the intellectual habits of mind, the writing, speaking, and research skills, and the ethical self-reflexiveness that are at the core of a liberal education.  The FYP and FYS will ask you to consider new perspectives on the world and your place in it and will challenge you to confront many of the hidden assumptions you bring to college with you.  We hope to open you to new ideas, help you to see the complexity of the way in which knowledge gets produced and used in society, and encourage you to see yourself as an active contributor in making the world a better place.  The course topics, the texts you will read, listen to, and watch, the in-class and out-of-class activities you will engage in, and the writing, speaking, and research assignments you will work on are all designed to introduce you to the depth of critical thinking and the quality and complexity of the communication skills that will be expected of you at SLU and as a citizen of an increasingly diverse society.
  
First and foremost among our goals are those related to your abilities as a communicator.  The work of the FYP and FYS asks you to design and deliver written, spoken, performed and/or visual texts that demonstrate basic skills in the relevant modes of communication and with an increasing degree of rhetorical sensitivity.  Our focus on “rhetorical sensitivity” means that we expect you to cultivate the awareness that all of your communication, whether formal or informal, involves having to make choices about your messages, whether written, spoken, aural or visual.  To become a good communicator, you need to recognize that the creation of meaningful and powerful written, spoken, performed, or visual texts involves both a creator and an audience, and that therefore the voice you adopt in your communication, the audience you imagine yourself communicating to, and the social and ethical context of the content, matter a great deal in creating such texts.  One important way to become a better communicator is to become a better critical reader, viewer, and listener, which is why we will ask you to engage challenging materials in a variety of forms and work with you to learn how to interpret them.

Learning to read, listen, write, speak, do research and/or perform well also requires feedback.  As faculty, we submit our work for feedback from colleagues all the time, and giving and receiving constructive feedback from both friends and strangers is central to collaborative work in any field and is itself a form of critical thinking and learning.  We further recognize that this feedback process is not linear and that good communication requires that you continually rethink, restructure, and revise your work in order for it to be your best. This is why we require that your writing, speaking, and performance assignments be “projects” that include preparatory exercises and multiple drafts or rehearsals, all of which ask you to continue to reflect critically on the choices you have made in the texts that you produce.  Furthermore, we see all of these forms of communication as complementary and intertwined, which is why many of your assignments will ask you to integrate elements of the written, spoken, performed, and visual.   Finally, developing good habits of critical inquiry and communication also means reflecting on the ethical dimensions of how your work represents that of others, thus one of our goals is to help you to understand both the nature of academic integrity and the social processes by which knowledge is produced and represented.

To ensure that the program is meeting its stated goals, all FYP and FYS syllabi are read by other faculty in the program to determine if they include a variety of assignments that foster the writing, speaking, research, and critical thinking goals of the program.  All FYP and FYS courses have to be approved by faculty in the program before they are offered.

Curtin College
Fall 2006
COURSE SCHEDULE

COMMUNITY ISSUES

Before we discuss the nitty-gritty of assignments and grades, you should be aware of a few things about this course.  Perhaps the most important is that this is a “living and learning” course, in that you all both live together and take the course together.  That means that there will be a level of familiarity with one another that you will likely not have in any other course. You will get to know each other as whole people, not just “classmates.”  The nature of our relationship with you and the living and learning nature of the course also creates a certain kind of familiarity between faculty and the students.  We expect this familiarity to make an FYP classroom a wonderfully productive place.
 
But don’t misconstrue familiarity and informality as a lack of rigor.  We will know you very well, and we are here to help you in a variety of ways.  But we will also hold you to real standards in and out of the classroom.  You are responsible for doing the readings, working on the assignments and participating in class in intelligent and productive ways. 

The First-Year Program emphasizes community and close contact between faculty and students. That emphasis has at times been misinterpreted to mean that FYP plenary and seminar sessions are somehow exempt from basic rules of academic courtesy.  We do hope to build a relaxed environment that encourages participation and learning, but that does not mean that we will tolerate behavior that makes it impossible for others to concentrate on the task at hand.  We expect you to demonstrate positive citizenship and to have a professional attitude toward the course.  Demonstrating positive citizenship and having a professional attitude toward this course means being serious of purpose, attentive to your work, and collegial to your classmates, the mentor and the instructors.  Professionalism includes, but is not limited to, such qualities as: turning off cell phones before coming to class; keeping all appointments with your instructors, Becca and your classmates; knowing and abiding by policies regarding academic honesty; keeping notes and your writing portfolio for the class organized and readily accessible; having assignments ready on the dates they are due; working cooperatively and conscientiously with your classmates on all group work; giving classmates detailed, constructive feedback on their work when you are asked to do so; always arriving to class or an appointment with something to write with and something to write on. 

You are also responsible for living in Curtin College in ways that respect each other’s rights to a clean and quiet place to study and sleep and for creating an environment where everyone can feel safe.  If you do not live up to those responsibilities, we (both the residential staff and the faculty) will hold you accountable.

ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES

Your grade in this course will be determined by a number of components which are discussed below.  All of your individual writing will be graded by your seminar instructor.  All other grades will be assigned by both instructors.  Having taught together for six years, we are very sure that we are grading with the same criteria and expectations.  During the semester, if you think there are inconsistencies in the grading between the two of us, please come talk to us.  We will do whatever we can to correct any legitimate problems that might occur.

The Writing You Will Do:

You will be engaging in several different kinds of writing this semester.  These different types of writing are differentiated by the learning goals they fulfill as well as their rhetorical purposes.  Below we discuss the general guidelines regarding the writing you will be doing.  For most of these assignments, you will receive detailed assignment sheets.

Writing projects.  One of the major tasks this semester is for you to develop your skills as a writer of formal, scholarly prose.  The major vehicles we will use for that skill development will be two writing projects.  Both of these projects involve writing in stages and significant revision. You will frequently be asked to come to class with, or submit to us ahead of time, pieces of your work in progress.  You will also engage in peer review as well as meet with your advisor individually about your work.  When you turn in final drafts of projects, you will be asked to turn in all of the project materials, which you are expected to retain and keep organized (see the discussion of the course portfolio below).  The course schedule provides the due dates for the various stages of these two projects.

Atwood journal.  The last piece you will read for this course is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.  As you read this novel, you will be maintaining a journal of your responses to the book.  In addition, you will continue to reflect upon your responses to the book in light of our discussions of the book in class.  We will provide you more details about this assignment later in the semester.

Informal and smaller writing assignments.  In addition to the writing projects, we will ask you to do various informal writing assignments both in-class and out-of-class over the course of the semester, such as free writes and responses to events outside of class.  All of this writing will become part of your writing portfolio, which is discussed below.

Learning journal.  As part of each of the two writing projects as well as after each of our “conceptual workshops” (see below), you will be asked to engage in some reflective writing about the development of your writing skills and your reaction to the content of the course.  This work will be kept in one Word document that you will share with us for our reactions.  As the last entry in the journal, you will write a final reflective essay; this essay provides an opportunity for you to consider how your skills have evolved over the semester, reflect on what you have learned, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, and plan for your continued development.  The entire learning journal will be a narrative document of your learning process in the course and will be part of your writing portfolio.

Writing portfolio.  The writing portfolio is where you will retain all of your written work from the semester.  Therefore, you need to keep EVERY piece of your writing, formal and informal (including drafts with our comments and other components of the process), some place safe for the entire semester.  At the end of the semester, you will turn in your writing portfolio including a printed version of your learning journal.  We will provide you with an assignment sheet toward the end of the semester with more detail.

The Speaking You Will Do:

In addition to engaging in many types of writing, you will also be engaged in many types of speaking in this course.  As with your writing, the speaking you do in the course will have different learning goals as well as different rhetorical purposes.  Below we discuss these different kinds of speaking.

General class participation: The First-Year Program considers students to be partners in the search for knowledge.  Much of your learning in the course will occur through articulating your own thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge as well as listening to the ideas of your colleagues.  These dialogues are central to fulfilling our goals for the course, and we expect every member of the class to engage fully in classroom activities, coming prepared and ready to participate.  We will also be using Angel – a course management system – to create discussions among the class on topics relevant to the class, and we expect everyone to participate fully in those on-line discussion forums.

Before turning to the more formal speaking components of the course, we want to address the question of what is “good” participation.  Talking a lot in class is not necessarily good participation.  Good participation is about the quality and seriousness of your engagement in the course; it is about speaking to learn not to hear oneself speak.  Quality class participation includes coming to class every day well-prepared, paying attention, making meaningful contributions to class discussions, and being a pleasant, productive member of this college.  You can participate in the intellectual and social experience of this course in multiple ways, and we will try and provide many different ways for you to participate.  Expecting students to speak in class is not meant to penalize those of you who are shy or reticent to offer your opinion in class.  It is meant to reward you for attempting, in your own personal way, to engage in the learning process and to make this class an effective as well as enjoyable intellectual and social experience for you and your fellow students. 

Conceptual workshops:  Much of our work in the classroom will involve what we call “conceptual workshops”.  These are in-depth experiential learning projects that extend over several class days devoted to a given subject.  These workshops involve not only speaking, but we discuss them in this section because the major component of the workshops is collaborative in-class work that often culminates in a group presentation.  You will earn a grade for each workshop that is a combination of grades for your preparation and participation in classroom work, any oral presentation you give, and/or any written work you are asked to turn in, as well as a short cumulative reflective essay.  It is essential for these workshops that you come prepared and that you engage in the work in the classroom.  As with any experiential learning, what you put in will determine what you get out.

“Course Theme” speech:  While you will be engaging in a lot of speaking during the semester, you have only one formal, individual oral presentation—an individual speech you will deliver during the last week of the semester.  These brief speeches will be the culminating assignment for our class; the assignment is meant to bring together all that we will have learned over the semester together.  The other major learning goal for this assignment is the development of your formal oral communication skills.  As with the writing projects, we will approach this project in stages, and you will engage in revision and rehearsal of your speech before you deliver the final version.  And as with the other major assignments, you will receive a detailed assignment sheet later in the semester.

Communication skills quiz and final exam:

This course has one in-class quiz and a final exam.   The quiz will assess your understanding of basic grammatical, mechanical and writing concepts central to college-level writing.  The final exam will cover the entire semester and is scheduled at the regular final exam period for this course.  It will consist of short-answer and long and short essay questions.  The purpose of a final exam is to evaluate your ability to comprehend and critically consider the major issues and themes explored through class and the readings—how able are you to respond to the questions we pose in the course overview.  It is also an opportunity to assess your ability to integrate the diverse readings, ideas and themes with which we will be dealing this semester. 

Prior to the exam, the course mentor, Becca, will conduct a workshop on how to approach essay exams and will provide a practice question for the final.  In addition, we will hold a question and answer session on the Wednesday evening before the exam.  You should come to the Q&A with 2-3 essay questions of the type you might expect us to answer developed in collaboration with a small group of your classmates.  We will talk about these questions in the Q&A, and we might incorporate some meritorious ones into the final exam. 

Miscellaneous polices:

Late policies:  You are expected to turn in all of your work on time.  You will find the dates and times that assignments are due in the course schedule as well as in the assignment sheets for the specific assignments.  All late graded work is subject to a 0.2 penalty per 24 hours of lateness (including weekends).  Ungraded work that is turned in late (e.g., preliminary stages of writing projects) will result in a .2 reduction (per 24 hours of lateness) on the final, graded work.  Extensions will not be given except under the most extenuating of circumstances, and the request must be made at least 48 hours before the due date.  You must speak with your advisor (or with the other course instructor if your advisor is unavailable) if you are seeking an extension; do not request an extension via electronic mail. 

Changes to the schedule:  It is certainly possible that the order of events on this syllabus and due dates for assignments may change as the semester progresses.  We will make every effort to notify you about such changes as soon, and as frequently, as possible.  However, it remains your responsibility to be aware of such changes.  Attendance in class and reading your email at least once every day will ensure that you always know of any changes.