The course is designed to enhance your ability to read, interpret, discuss and write about some of the most significant texts in British and American culture from the Middle Ages to Romanticism. The readings, discussions, and activities in this course are designed to create a learning environment that emphasizes the development of critical thinking, the importance of understanding context, the process of engagement with other learners, and the facilitation of reflecting and acting on reading materials.
This class will explore the usefulness of cultural and historical relativism, a particular kind of critical thinking in which phenomena are analyzed in light of the social, cultural, and historical contexts. These readings will challenge our assumptions about how the world works and give us a greater appreciation for human and social diversity. You will learn to appreciate human social and cultural diversity over time and across space.
A series of activities during the course of the semester will encourage you to understand and apply the course material by interacting constructively with each other.
You will be expected to read each text thoroughly, take good notes, participate in class discussions, and complete various writing assignments.
Course goals
Course structure
This course will be conducted online through distance learning by professor George Mitrevski from Auburn University in the United States. This outline will explain how you need to approach the various learning activities listed in the course schedule. It is assumed that you have already read the Student Guide to Moodle, the learning management system for this course, and are familiar with the procedures for logging in and accessing the various parts of the course.
The course is divided into fifteen topics and each topic is covered during one week. The actual start of the course is Monday, September 19, but you may start the course any time previous to that date. If you start the course at a later date you will have missed some assignments that you cannot make up, and this will be reflected in your course grade.
The learning activities for each week include the following parts:
Literary Readings
All of the required readings are located online. You can read them on a computer, or you can print them out. It is preferable that you you print them out so that you have someplace to write your own notes. It is important that you read the required readings during the week that they are assigned. None of the readings are very lengthy, but you should read each work carefully and look up in a dictionarry any unfamiliar words. Read the work with the study questions at hand so that you know what to focus on.
Helpful resources
For each literary work I have compiled a short list of resources that should help you understand and interpret the literary work. I will probably include additional resources as the semester progresses, so it's important that you review these lists before you take any exams.
Lecture notes
The purpose of the lecture notes (PowerPoint presentations) is to provide you with a short review of the most important aspects of the readings
.Study questions
The study questions are your best guide to what will be included on the course exams. For that reason it's important that you are able to understand and answer each question concisely and in detail. You should print out each set of questions and write a good answer for each one. You should attempt to write your answers only after you have completed all of the assigned readings and other activities. IT IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA TO SIMPLY COPY ANSWERS FROM SOMEONE ELSE!
Assignments
You will have an assignment to complete and turn in at the end of each week. Each assignment will include specific instructions about the topic and the length. The assignments count 10% of your course grade. The deadline for turning in assignments is very strict. If you don't turn in an assignment by the deadline for any reason, you will not be able to complete it at a later date and you will not get credit for that assignment. Although the assignment is due at the end of the week, you should look at it at the beginning of the week so that you can prepare it as you read the materials.
Unless you are directed otherwise, youi will need to upload all of your assignments in Moodle. At the top left corner of the assignmenr you should put your name, and below that you should put the assignment number. You should name your file like this: SurnameFirstnameAssignmentNumber. For example, for my assignment I would name the file MitrevskiGeorgeAssignment1 (without any spaces between the words).
Since none of you are native speakers of English it is expected that you will make some grammatical errors in your assignments. You should know that in my grading of your assignments I focus more on the content than on the grammar, so your focus should be on the content as well.
Some of you will be very tempted to simply copy answers from a colleague or from some ouside resources. You should know that I come from a university where cheating and plagiarism is not tolerated, and I don't intend to tolarate it in this course. I always make an effor to check any answers that I think may have been plagiarized. If you turn in an assignment, or part of an assignment that is copied from somewhere else, you will not get any credit on it. And if this happens two times, you will not get any credit for the Assignment portion of your course grade. In practice this means your course grade will be lowered by one number.
Forums
A forum is a place where students express their ideas and opinions. Each topic in the course ends with a posting to a forum. I will suggest the topic, and each student is required to post an opinion on that topic. Your posting must be substantial (at least five coplete sentences) and must be directly relateed to the topic. You will receive a grade for each posting, and your postings will count 10% toward your final course grade. The end of the week is the deadline for each posting in a Forum.
Examinations
You will have two colloquiums during the semester. Each colloquium is worth 40% toward your course grade. If you don't pass the first colloquium you may not take the second one. In which case you will be required to take the final exam (ispit). I would like to urge you very, very strongly to make sure that you take the two colloquiums rather than the final exam. The final exam is usually twice as long as a colloquium, much more difficult, and it may take you several attempts to pass it. The questions in all of the exams will come almost exclusively from the Study questions and from the Assignments. For this reason it is very important that you read the assigned works carefuly and you provide complete and detailed answers to the Study questions.
Grades
Your grades in the course will be figured this way:
Colloquium 1: 40% Colloquium 2: 40% Assignments: 10% Forum postings: 10%
Contacts:
Professor George Mitrevski, USA email: mitrevski@pelister.org Skype: george.mitrevski
You should feel free to contact me by email at any time and I will respond as soon as possible, usually the same day. Also feel free to ring me any time you see me logged in on Skype. All of our communication must be in English. I will not respond to any messages that are in Macedonian. If you are contacting me needing help you should explain in exact detail what the problem is. I can't respond to messages such as "I have a problem with Moodle.", or "Question number two is confusing.", or "I don't understand the poem ...". The more specific you are, the better I can help you.
Josif Petrovski, Pedagogical Faculty Assistant, responsible for helping with Moodle and accessing internet resources. email: josif.petrovski@yahoo.com
Bisera Kostadinovska, Pedagogical Faculty Assistant, responsible for helping with administrative matters. email: k_bisera@yahoo.com