Assignment Overview:

  • A growing portfolio of documents, composed in MultiMarkdown and committed to a Github Classroom repository
  • Students work individually
  • Reading prep entries are due before each week (generally Monday, with marked exceptions); reflective entries are due one week after the end of each week.

Details:

“Building a (Better) Book” is an experiential course that moves between discussion of readings and applied activities each week. In order to help you attend closely to our course texts, prepare for our discussions, and reflect on our studio work, for each week you will contribute two types of entries to an expanding digital fieldbook. These entries will be of two kinds:

Reading Prep:

For each week in this class, you will be assigned articles or books to read, files to watch, websites to browse, etc. In order to help you attend closely to our course texts and prepare for each class, you should prepare 3 questions or observations prior to each week of the class syllabus (in general, the Monday of each week, with marked exceptions). This means three questions/observations in total not three per reading.

These reading responses will serve as prompts for our conversation and demonstrate your initial engagement with the ideas of our class. Your responses should be written down and ready to submit at the beginning of class. In order for your reading responses to be “Satisfactory,” they should, in general:

  1. Get beyond basic questions or observations of fact and instead work toward questions or observations of significance.
  2. Demonstrate close thought about the themes, style, arguments and other elements of our texts, as well as about the relationships among them.
  3. Emerge from (and refer to) specific ideas, pages, quotations, scenes, &c. from our assigned texts rather than broad or generic concepts.
  4. Genuinely open toward discussion and debate during class (i.e. no leading the witness, your honor).

Reading prep will be deemed “Unsatisfactory” when it indicates lack of preparation or inattentive reading, and will have consequences as outlined in your grading contract.

You should draft each reading prep fieldbook entry in its own .md file, following the naming convention outlined below, and commit it to the reading-prep folder of your fieldbook repository prior to the pertinent class period. To emphasize: each class preparation entry should be saved as a separate file in your Github repository.

You should name your reading prep entries following the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD-readingPrep-WeekName.md

Reflective Entries

After a given week, you should write should prepare a 3-5 paragraphs responding to the core readings in light of discussion and our class activities during the week. This means a 3-5 paragraphs in total, NOT 3-5 paragraphs per text. Your entries should synthesize and bring readings into conversation, and should focus on a few ideas you want to highlight rather than attempting to summarize everything in the readings. You should highlight aspects of the activities brought into relief by our readings, or vice versa, or point to disjunctures between theory and praxis. Reflective entries for a given week are due by the end of the following week.

You should draft each reflective fieldbook entry in its own .md file, following the naming convention outlined below, and commit it to the reflective folder of your fieldbook repository within one week follow the end of the pertinent week. To emphasize: each reflective entry should be saved as a separate file in your Github repository.

You should name your reflective fieldbook entries following the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD-reflective-WeekName.md

Flexibility

This is a challenging and full class. The semester will include eleven weeks of readings (the final weeks are largely devoted to in-studio work). To give you some flexibility, you may choose to forgo fieldbook entries a few times during the semester, in line with your chosen grading contract. I strongly recommend you not delay starting this work, but instead begin early and work steadily so that you can use this flexibility as the inevitable stresses of the semester emerge.