GENS 175-G Exploring Complex Questions: Childhood

Whitman College

Fall 2020:  Monday, Wednesday & Friday 11-11:50am

 

Professor: Patrick R. Frierson                Webpage: http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/                    E-mail: frierspr@whitman.edu

Office Hours: Tuesday 8-9 PM, Thursday 1-2:30 PM, and by appointment.       

“Office”: https://gather.town/8jEXqjctapnnCpJM/Patrick's Office Hours   

                                                                    

Course Description

What is a child?  What is childhood? And who gets to be a child? When did you stop being a child? Are you still? How are childhoods and children's experiences framed by social, historical, geographic, and cultural contexts?  This course addresses questions about how children can be treated, what is distinctive about the children’s stage(s) of life, what kinds of tools we can/should/do use to understand childhood and how children are theorized about, represented in art and literature, and included in academic research.  The texts in the course draw from a range of disciplines (including film/art, philosophy, literature, and social scientific investigation).  All sections will start with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child and include texts like the documentary Babies, writings by Piaget and Montessori, and creative depictions of childhood. Over the course of the semester, talks by each of the participating faculty will help guide students’ exploration of these questions.  Each talk will be followed by debriefing sessions with students from other sections within the learning community.  If circumstances allow, students will interact with community organizations to facilitate understanding children's experiences in the Walla Walla Valley.

 

Course Learning goals

• Students will demonstrate improved ability to ask increasingly focused and complex questions.
• Students will demonstrate improved ability to read inquisitively and generously, with attention to detail and nuance.
• Students will demonstrate improved ability to formulate productive questions that guide exploration of a complex text (broadly construed)
• Students will demonstrate improved ability to use writing and discussion as means to discover and reconsider ideas.
• Students will demonstrate improved ability to understand how a writer’s overt purposes and readers’ expectations influence the structure and style of writing.

Required Readings

Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (Scholastic, 1999), ISBN:0-439-30340-6.

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper Perennial, 2012), ISBN: 978-0-06-206525-4.

(Optional) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or, On Education (Basic Books, 1979), ISBN:0-465-01931-5

 

All other readings, along with the syllabus and handouts, will be available on our course Canvas site. 

 

Course Structure

One of the guiding principles of this course is that the deepest engagement and insight about these challenging texts and issues come about through dialogue:  each of us articulating ideas and questions in relation to the ideas and questions of others.  While I will sometimes present background information, alternative interpretations, or so on, those occasions will be rare and brief.  The bulk of our class time will be spent actively working with the readings and the larger issues that they suggest, through whole-class and small-group discussions and through short writing focused on discovering and reconsidering ideas.  This happens best with synchronous (real-time) discussion. So please make sure to reserve our scheduled time slot for Zoom and GatherTown meetings. If you are in a distant time zone and/or do not have access to stable internet, I will do my best to make alternatives available.  At present, I plan to have most Wednesday and Friday meetings held synchronously as an entire class.  With the exception of the first and last class days and days, most Monday meetings will be small group collaborations, where you will work with 2 or 3 other students on projects I assign, at a time you schedule yourself.  During these meetings, I will be available in our GatherTown classroom and I invite you to have your small group meetings there as well.

 

Course Expectations and Requirements

The first-year seminars are designed to cultivate your intellectual curiosity, develop your abilities to

inquire into complex issues, formulate and support coherent arguments, and engage in constructive, transformative dialogue with your professors and peers. Therefore, they key elements of the course are reading carefully, reflecting on what you read to come up with interesting ideas, discussing those ideas with me and your classmates, and then revisiting your initial ideas after class discussion.  Following the recommendation of my colleague in the psychology department, I will give you a labor-based grade in this course.  If you complete a minimum number of assignments, participate in class, and submit a final reflection, you will earn a B+. Additional optional assignments are available for students who want to raise their grades. Details are provided in a document on the Canvas site called “Expectations and Assignments GENS 175.

 

E-mail, Canvas, Zoom, and GatherTown

I will distribute important announcements, reminders, and clarifications through e-mail.  It is your responsibility to check your Whitman account every day.

You can log into Canvas from the main Whitman web page or simply go to canvas.whitman.edu and log in with your campus username and password. This course will appear as an icon; when you click on it, you will find the syllabus on the main landing page and a menu that includes Files (where all the readings live) and Assignments (where all the assignments live).

Our synchronous meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays will all be held on Zoom.  I have a zoom meeting site for our synchronous meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays at 11.  Click on the link or use Meeting ID: 970 1379 1723.  The password is Montessori.  You are expected to be present for all class meetings unless you have an excused absence or have worked out an alternative arrangement with me in advance.  When we meet in zoom, everyone should have their cameras turned on.  Seeing one another’s faces is an important part of live class discussion.  If you cannot do this, please ask me in advance and I will excuse you from this requirement.  If there are students who have legitimate reasons for not being able to attend synchronous classes, I will record our class discussions and make them available to classmates for 48 hours after each class session.  Then they will be deleted.

There are two GatherTown venues relevant to this class.  The first is my GatherTown Office, where I will hold office hours.  I recommend that you visit that room immediately, just to look around.  You’ll see that it has different areas.  I will usually hang out on the comfy couches in the middle of the room.  When you get to the room, come on over.  If I’m alone, come talk to me.  If I’m meeting with another student, you can hang out on the periphery of the room, or you can come closer and listen in to what we are talking about.  If a student needs to talk to me about something private, we will go to the desks in the lower left corner of the room.  If you see me meeting with someone at those desks, please do not disturb us or listen in.  If you have something particularly private to discuss, we can set up a separate meeting.  I feel like this room is a fun simulation of an office I wish I had, but we’ll see how it goes.  I will also probably hang out in GatherTown at various other times while I’m doing other work at my computer.  If you see me there and want to chat, come on over.  I have also created a (much bigger) GatherTown venue specific to our class.  I’ll usually be hanging out on the beach at the end of the main path, either contemplating the non-sunset or just playing in the sand.  You can use this class to meet with others in the class outside of class hours, and I’ll hang out in this space during our regular class time every Monday (where it would also be a good place for you all to meet as a small group), and I may use it to have class gatherings.  The password for this site is Montessori. 

Students with Disabilities or Special Learning Needs

    If you have a documented disability and will need accommodation in this course, please meet with Antonia Keithahn, Assistant Director of Academic Resources: Disability Support, for assistance in developing a plan to address your academic needs. All information about disabilities is private; if I receive notification from the ARC that you are eligible for accommodation, I will provide accommodation as discreetly as possible. Even if you do not have a documented disability, if there are specific ways that I can accommodate your learning style in a way that allows you to better accomplish the learning goals for the class, please let me know and we can work together on accommodations.  My goal is to help every single student do their best work in this class, so please talk with me about how we can make that happen.

 

Academic dishonesty

    Cheating or plagiarism will not be tolerated in any form.  You have signed a statement indicating that you understand and will abide by the College policy on plagiarism.  Any student caught cheating or plagiarizing will result in a minimum of a zero on the assignment, and a maximum of receiving an F in the course. All instances of cheating will be reported to the Dean of Students.  (For more details, see the Student Handbook.)

 

Table of Readings and Assignments (by date)

The table below lists the format of our class (synchronous or asynchronous) with a link to the relevant Zoom or GatherTown site, the readings that should be completed before class for that day, and the