I CAN CAN U - COURSE PAGE (Fall, 2003)

n. canoe (ke-noo') - a light slender boat with pointed ends, propelled by paddles

Weekly Topics and Due Dates	Canoe Topics on This Site
From the Initial Search to the Produced Web Page	Student Web Projects

SYLLABUS

Class (day/place/time):
Plenaries: Tuesday/Thursday C212 10:10-11:55am Seminars:
Monday (Kreuzer) C212 8:30-9:30am
Wednesday (Doty) C212 8:30-9:30am

Online materials for this course will be posted on both this Course Website and on the Blackboard (Bb) site There will be detailed discussion of how to access, post, use, and otherwise enjoy these online sites. Students will be expected to check, and make regular use of, these online resources.

Philosophy and Goals for the Residential Component of the First-Year Program:

The FYP was created to help new college students understand how living and learning can be integrated in ways that foster both academic and social growth. Faculty, residential staff, live-in writing tutor, and the FYP students will work together on the goals for the residential component of the FYP to promote:

• integrating the academic and residential experience
• moving towards patterns of living together which reflect principles of mutuality and accountability
• understanding students' rights and responsibilities as individuals residing in living/learning communities
• using residential staff and faculty in exercising students' rights and responsibilities while they develop the capacity for self-management
• identifying and confronting conflicts before they become destructive of the living/learning community.

Rationale for the Course:

The Canoe is the "window to the soul," or at least it is for us. This course is really not about canoes; canoes are a surface reflection. What the course is really about is taking time to really think about what we enjoy doing. Most of one's existence is spent doing things without ever thinking through the implications of how, why, or whence: hence Thoreau's quote on lives of quiet desperation. What we are going to do is use the topic of canoes as a model of how to really contemplate something. Looking at canoes from personal, practical, political, aesthetic, historical, and local perspectives will lead us to how to look at the topics of interest to you, the students in the class. We are going to examine how people share their interest in canoes, so that we can examine how people network on topics that matter to them. Your topic is yours to choose. (See the "Choosing Your CANOE Topic" section of the syllabus.) You can choose anything that involves skills that are learned and practiced: music, visual arts, practical arts, computing, athletics, an ethnic interest, an interest tied to family, etc.

Goals for the Course:

Our main goal for the course is to enhance your writing, speaking and research skills. We do this by adhering to the requirements for teaching a course in the First Year Program:

• Students must be given diverse and repeated opportunities to write and speak, including opportunities to benefit from detailed formative feedback from instructors and peers.
• Students must be asked to assess adequately the research requirements of a particular assignment and to seek out efficiently the means of meeting those requirements
• Students must be given diverse opportunities to incorporate appropriate illustrative or persuasive detail in oral and written communication.
• Students must be required to complete at least one and no more than two projects comprising some combination of formal and informal oral, written and research activities that demonstrate a satisfactory. grasp of the program's communication goals.
• Students must be instructed in and held responsible for the ethical use of sources.
• Students must be required to assemble all their work in a portfolio that includes a written assessment of that work, and to submit the complete portfolio to their faculty for review.

Our additional skills goal is to explore ways in which we can utilize technology in our learning and teaching. (No prior tech skills are required!)

Skills training and help will be available on such topics as: "How to create a web page," "How to create a powerful PowerPoint presentation," "How to use library and web resources," "How to surf the net to find specific material," "How to write effectively in a variety of styles," "How to read and analyze a written text," "How to read and appreciate a work of art." While the major emphasis will be on improving your writing, speaking and research skills, there will be emphasis too on improving your listening and reading skills.

The assignments and projects for this course will help us meet these goals.

Required Reading List:

Christopher Angus. Reflections from Canoe Country: Padding the Waters of the Adirondacks and Canada. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. [paperback]

Jim Poling, Sr. The Canoe: An Illustrated History. Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 2000. [hard cover]

Diana Hacker. A Writer's Reference. Fifth Edition. Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 2002. [paperback]

I CAN CAN U Course Pack. A course pack of ~13 (Xeroxed) readings.

Readings from the course website (these will be announced in class)

(Any additional readings and materials will be distributed during class, free of charge.)

Choosing Your CANOE Topic:

Our discussion of canoes is really a model for your own research, writing, and doing presentations on a topic of interest to you. This is your CANOE (i.e. when you see capitalized CANOE and/or CANOEING, it refers to your personal topic which you will research and develop). Your topic needs to be an interest and skill that you have, one which has been learned and practiced, and one in which you are sufficiently invested that you can do research on it. Your CANOE can be related to the arts, to athletics, to a particular craft, to writing, and so on. It cannot be about an institution or group you happen to belong to, unless that institution or group is the community in which you developed and practiced your interest. You will learn by the end of the course that life is a community and community is a life.

N. B. It is very important for you to understand that we are really asking you to look at something familiar to you in a new way. We want you to see it for the first time, or, perhaps, to see it new again.

Another Option. For students who are sincerely interested in canoes, and want to focus on canoes for the duration of the semester--there is an opportunity to make your topic the building of a serviceable canoe. Mr. William Short, Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), has experience building boats. He has offered to facilitate the building of a canoe. If you take this option, you would have responsibility for the designing, planning, and constructing a canoe. Students who take this option will have more responsibility than simply assembling the canoe. They will have to come to an understanding of the aesthetic and functional considerations that making a vessel entails, and students will have to make decisions that get the work done. Students will be responsible for the day-to-day work of the course, however, the project will become the basis for the class presentations, reports, writing assignments, webliography, and final researched essay. Specifically,

• The power point assignment of Thursday, Sept. 25 will be a group presentation on the plan and design of the canoe. The presentation will need to demonstrate the group's research, explicate the practical advantages (and possible disadvantages of the design), and illustrate where the design fits in the family of canoes. It is expected that all the participants in the group will work on the research and presentation.
• October 3 Research Report will come out of this project.
• The webliography that you prepare for the course will be on canoes and canoe building, and must cite to sources beyond those discussed in class.
• In lieu of the final researched essay, you would be required to chronicle your work in photos and in writing. The finished chronicle will contain an account of the making of the canoe (oh yeah, you get to name it), and will include your reflection on the research, the building, and the community of classmates and others that built the canoe. Your chronicle ultimately will be developed into your group web site, or possibly web sites. Depending on the size of the group, the design and the construction process and the process of building a community may potentially be presented by different students. You have to build it; you have to tell us how you built it.

This is, in some respects, a challenging project. But it also provides an opportunity to do something out side the norm. That's a good thing.

CANOE topics must be chosen by Friday, Sept. 5.

Essays and Major Projects:

Canoe Essay This is a 5-6 page essay based on our active reading assignments in the Jim Poling text, and on your notes from our August 31 canoe trip (or the body of your canoeing experience, if you have spent considerable time in a canoe). This assignment is going to ask you to synthesize notes from several undertakings into a short essay with a thesis and argument. Due: Friday, Sept. 19

Controversies / Conflicts / Problems Essay This is a 4-5 page essay based on your critical thinking about your chosen topic. This assignment is going to ask you to pose a problem and to suggest a solution. Due: Wednesday, Oct. 15 (i.e. before Mid-Semester Break).

Webliography Project You will create a list of materials on your CANOE that can be found on the Internet: a webliography on your CANOE. Our guess is that you have experience with the World Wide Web, but it is time to consider it in a new way: as a research vehicle, one which can greatly aid projects that you will be asked to do while here at SLU. We will consider the best ways to search the Internet, and create a list of web sites, pictures, quotes, poetry, stories and other materials on your CANOE. This in turn will be posted to the Internet as an HTML document (done in Dreamweaver or some other editor). Items in the webliography will conform to the MLA style rules. Due: Tuesday, Oct. 21 (i.e. after Mid-Semester Break).

Skill Teaching Project You will do a presentation (a "performance") of a skill associated with the interest you have selected. This should be evocative of the overall CANOE but need not be (and should not be) an exhaustive (exhausting) demonstration of how to do everything that makes your CANOE a CANOE. Examples might include a certain technique for a certain effect in pencil drawing, skating backwards, a particular macramé knot for a particular effect, or the differences between canoe paddles. This will be an oral presentation; you will be required to use PowerPoint or some other technology to have supporting graphics for this presentation. Due: Week of Nov.10 or 17 (as assigned).

Researched Essay/Web Project Your Researched Essay/Web Project is meant to offer you a chance to amalgamate the various skills and themes we have been concerned with this semester. The research and writing that you do throughout the course not only will lead you into this final project, but will be a component of it. This project is going to call on you to research the characteristics associated with the community of your CANOE. This research needs to demonstrate that you have identified who is the community (age, gender, location, other demographic information), how people in this community share information and experience, how this sharing shapes the CANOE, and how this community has been portrayed in the media: media including the Internet, films, TV; Art; or print media (newspapers, ads, fiction, etc). Write your essay for a general audience; do not assume that your readers will know anything about your topic. Your goal should be that a visitor, after viewing your web page, would have a good sense of the role your CANOE plays in the lives of those who "paddle." Your essay will manifest itself as the central part of your web page; it will be combined with your webliography project (described above), and with any of your other essays or creative work you care to publish on line. Your web page will be published as part of the course web page. Essay Due: Friday, Dec. 5. Website Due: Friday, Dec. 12.

Other types of oral presentations (such as story telling, PowerPoints, interviews, etc.) and writings (Description. Report, E-Journal, Discussion Board) will be assigned as well.

Policies and Grading:

Class attendance is required and students will receive a grade on how well they do their daily work. Absences must be cleared with the instructor (ahead of time, if at all possible). For each missed class after 3 unexcused absences, the final classwork portion of the grade will go down .5

Students are required to prepare all assignments - written and oral.

Written work is to be submitted on time. There will be a .5 penalty deduction for each day an assignment is late. Any unusual circumstances which excuse you from this penalty must be cleared with your instructor (ahead of time, if at all possible).

Your responsibilities: Be in class, be prepared, participate, ask questions, offer constructive criticism, be respectful of others, stay healthy!

Our responsibilities: To carry through on our vision of what the course is and where it should go, to be able to speak specifically to student questions and concerns, to evaluate work promptly, to not get bogged down in details and lose sight of what learning is, and to stay healthy!

Grading:

10% classwork grade (preparation, participation in discussions, keeping up on assignments, oral reports, discussion leading, quizzes--if given, etc.)
20% short oral presentations
20% short written assignments; E-Journal assignments; Discussion Board
5% portfolio
10% Webliography
10% Skill Teaching Project
25% Researched Essay/Web Project (i.e. essay, web site, presentation)

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Last update 7/25/03