Assessment

Much of the work of this class is reading and preparing for discussion. Some students feel as though they do this work without it being acknowledged. In order to reward you for your reading habits, you will complete a reading accountability quiz once you've completed reading each text. The quizzes will be administered on ASULearn and will be 5 questions long. These questions will not ask you to analyze the reading, they will simply ask you about major plot points or facts about the texts (Where does it take place? What is the name of a major character?) The quiz will "open" the day before it is due. Be sure to have done the reading prior to opening the quiz, as you will only have 5 minutes to complete the quiz once it is open. There will be 12 quizzes throughout the semester; your 2 lowest grades will be dropped.

On the first day of class, you will sign up to lead our discussion two days throughout the semester. As discussion leader, you should prepare enough questions to facilitate about 30 minutes of discussion (roughly 5-7 questions). These questions can take different forms, but they should be intentionally designed to encourage discussion (rather than lead to a right or wrong answer). For example, asking how classmates interpreted a particular scene or description will engender more discussion than a factual question about where a character is from or how old the author was when she wrote the novel. You may also want to put this literary text in conversation with a previous one. You'll be assessed on the quality of questions you come up with. Feel free to experiment with this assignment!

This essay will be an interpretive, claim-driven, 4-6 page essay that closely reads a single passage or image from one of our texts this semester. A more detailed prompt will be forthcoming.

The second, 5-7 page essay will ask you to compare two texts from this semester through the lens of a single trope, grounding your analysis in evidence from each of the texts. A more detailed prompt will be forthcoming.

The final essay will involve research, and putting your own ideas into conversation with other scholars. The completion of this assignment will be broken into several, smaller steps (a proposal, a bibliography, and peer review feedback) that will be graded for completion. A more detailed prompt will be forthcoming.