Requirements: final blogs (7 entries—one for each week since your last submission); 450 words each.
After reading each chapter, you will write an end-of-unit “Academic Blog” entry.
You will have considerable latitude in the format of your academic blog and are encouraged to craft your own topics. Your academic blogs can contain work in a variety of media; the only proviso is that the entries should connect in direct ways to the themes and issues we are exploring that week and that they are in-depth and analytical in nature.
When evaluating your academic blog, I will look for thoughtfulness and engagement: try to tackle topics and ideas that interest you and stretch your thinking beyond a “knee-jerk” or superficial response to the topic/text you are considering. Feel free to offer your own opinions; I am not looking for you to adopt a “party line,” but I am looking for you to subject your own views, as well as the ideas of others, to critical scrutiny. This implies that you will go beyond agree/disagree statements. It also implies that you will not merely “relate” to a text/connect it to your experiences but find ways to analyze these connections.
Make sure that you are not simply turning in a patchwork of connections/references or numerous images/websites without analysis. The use of visual work is encouraged, but if you don’t analyze the images you use, you will not be as successful as if you integrate them into your writing.
When constructing topics on your own, you might consider the following lines of approach:
critically reflecting upon and extending material discussed in class (What was left out of the online classroom discussion? What didn’t you agree with, and why? What insights or new ideas did you gain? What do you plan to think further about in the future?)
critically reflecting upon the reading (What new information did you gain from the reading? How did the reading make you re-think something you took for granted? Did you change your views this week?)
finding recent reports and articles in the media that illustrate topics discussed in the class and reading, drawing connections between current issues or historical issues and the texts we read that week.
illustrating the class discussion and reading with examples drawn from the arts (e.g., movies, literary fiction, visual arts, popular music); if you elect to use your own artwork (e.g., collage, photography, poetry, drawings), be sure to include an artist statement to justify your approach/artistic choices.
finding websites, blogs, YouTube videos that illustrate or extend our classroom topics and analyze the connection in detail.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
Use only chapters 6 -12 from beyond the binary
7 diffrent blog entries. Each entry 450 words
if you make direct use of the words of others (e.g., by bringing in material from a website), you must acknowledge this and provide appropriate citations.
You can extend a topic that you worked on in our discussion, but you cannot copy and paste the text you submitted that week.
Format: You may elect to create a blog with the online platform of your choice (Wix or WordPress are often utilized by students). I’m open to various formats, as long as the content is thorough and well-designed (visual rhetoric is a component of this assignment).
Here are samples, to help you visualize this assignment, but please note that there are many ways to achieve the goals described above and that these are samples from a different class.
https://medium.com/@pamelahanson_5175/the-female-body-creativity-control-and-power-993d0aa69829Links to an external site.
https://bodiesandgender.wordpress.com/home/Links to an external site.
https://imagesofwomen.weebly.com/Links to an external site.
