Policies

Spring 2016: ENG/WRD 401: Section 003
Special Topics: Comics and Conflict: Graphic Representations of the Israel/Palestine Conflict(s)
Professor: Janice W. Fernheimer,(jfernheimer [at] uky [dot] edu, www.fernheimer.org)
Class Times: Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45 am, Patterson Office Tower Rm. 03
Office hours: Patterson Office Tower 1303, 2-3pm Tues/Thurs and by appointment.
Contacting Dr. Jan:  The best way to reach Dr. Jan is by email. jfernheimer [at]uky  [dot] edu
Class Website: http://wrd401.fernheimer.org, Twitter hashtag: #uk401

Course Objectives:

  • Gain familiarity with the graphic narrative genre and Scott McCloud’s theoretical concepts for understanding/analyzing sequential art.
  • Identify key terms, concepts, and topoi relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict(s).
  • Practice (and ideally improve!) research and writing skills, especially time management, collaboration, and research strategies for longer writing assignments.

Provide an introduction to Israel in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian and Israeli/Arab conflicts, but to do so in a way that students leave with a more complicated understanding of Israeli and Palestinian societies than when they enter the course.

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to do the following:

1)    Identify and employ key concepts for rhetorical/literary/sequential art analysis such as ethos, pathos, logos, identification, gutter, closure, panel, frame, color, moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, non sequitur, commonplaces/topoi, mythic rectification.

2)    Explain key political, geographic, and symbolic developments in Israeli and Palestinian societies from 1948-2016.

3)    Generate a list of relevant topoi related to the Israel/Palestine conflicts and use these commonplaces to help analyze key events (past and present) and representations related to Israel/Palestine.

4)    Summarize, contextualize, and analyze outside source material fairly and accurately.

5)    Use or include secondary critical material in students’ writing as evidence for students’ own arguments concerning graphic narratives about the Israel/Palestine conflicts.

6)    Participate in public conversations with each other, the instructor, and others using Twitter.

7)    Write a sustained argument about a topic related to the course content in 10-15 pages. Develop time-management skills related to researching and writing a lengthier essay.

8)    Develop and employ strategies for collaborating productively with others.

9)    Demonstrate an ability to talk and write about multiple sides to an issue, representing all fairly, even those with which the student does not agree.

10)   Demonstrate empathy and understanding for multiple aspects of Israeli and Palestinian societies and their conflicts.

Required Texts and Materials

  • Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
  • Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
  • Alan Dowty’s Israel/Palestine, Third Edition
  • Guy Delisle’s Chronicles of Jerusalem
  • Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi
  • Joe Sacco’s Palestine
  • S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh
  • Miriam Libicki’s Jobnick!
  • Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me
  • Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds
  • Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II
  • Frank, David and John Rowland. Shared Land Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use. Michigan State University Press, 2002.
  • Readings available electronically on the class reserves. You will be required to print and mark-up materials or electronically highlight them.
  • Internet Access and a functioning UK email account.
  • A Twitter account. If you don’t already have one, we’ll walk through the steps to set one up in class.
  • A flash drive for backing up your work.
  • An open mind and willingness to explore your ideas and others’ in an intellectually rigorous but also compassionate way.

Recommended texts:

  • Refaat Alareer, Ed., Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine
  • Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza

* Note, graphic novels can be more expensive than traditional print texts and typically textbook publishers won’t or can’t buy them back at the end of the semester. I’ve tried to order paperbacks where possible, but since many of these texts are very recently published (some just came out within the last six months!), they are not yet available in paperback form. To help cut down on costs, I recommend that you choose a chevruta, (traditional Hebrew word for a study partner) with whom you share books. That way, each of you only buys half of the texts, but you both read all of them while also saving money!  You might even try reading together, though I realize schedules won’t always permit this strategy.

Scholarly Writing in Practice
Over the course of the semester, you will have the opportunity to practice and hone your scholarly writing in several genres that you will be asked to produce throughout your academic career: the abstract or proposal, the research or conference paper, and the short essay response paper. I encourage you to begin thinking about the issues, ideas, and concepts you’d like to learn more about early on and to talk to me and your peers about appropriate venues for further research and/or possible presentation and publication.

Assignments:

  • Critical Precis of Scholarly Article—5% Due Feb. 23
  • Short writing Assignment—5% Due by Feb. 25. Students will choose a text that intrigues them and write a short reading response paper of no more than 2 pages single-spaced (1000 wds). Papers are due at the beginning of class the day we discuss the chosen text.
  • Mid-term—20%  Due March 10. Students will complete an in-class quiz and a take-home essay portion. The quiz portion will take place on  March 3 and the written portion will be due March 10.
  • Major Research Project Proposal— 5% Due by March 24. Students will write a detailed project proposal, which identifies a research question, locates key resources to be read in the research process, and offers a hypothetical thesis. This proposal is 1-2 pages long (single-spaced) and will be evaluated based on the sophistication of the research question—is it engaging, controversial, arguable?; as well as the variety and quality of research materials identified. In addition to the proposal, students will also include an annotated bibliography of materials they have consulted or plan to incorporate into the final paper.
  • Major Research Project First Submission—15% Due April 19. Students will bring a full draft of their final paper to class for peer review.
  • Peer Review of a Colleague’s Major Research Project—5% Due April 19.
  • Contextualizing Presentation—10% Due April 21. A 10 minute well-researched oral presentation about an important segment of Israeli or Palestinian society (list provided by instructor) or a specific historical moment/critical context. Along with your presentation you will create (or assemble) some visuals (properly attributed photos or clips into Power Point slides or an old-fashioned poster-board) and a 1-2 page bibliographic hand-out to be distributed to the class.
  • Major Research Project –25% May 3 9:30 am. Students will write a 10-15 page research paper based on a research question of their own choosing. Full grading criteria will be available on the assignment prompt. Final submission.
  • Twitter contributions—5%. Students will tweet a minimum of twice a week about contemporary news events related to class materials.
  • Class Participation—5%

Total =100%

Extra Credit Opportunities
Scholarly Book Review or Additional Reading Response for up to 5%.

Additional Contextual presentation of material related to the required readings for up to 5%.

Attendance at Passport: Year of the Middle East events, along with accompanying reflective essay for up to 5%.

The total possible extra credit points available is 5%, however you combine the above options.

Grading

You must complete all assignments to receive a passing grade in the course.

Grades in the class are determined by your performance in two related but different tasks:

1) Your daily performance, participation, and engagement (weekly reading and short papers, conferences with me, attendance) and

2) Your performance on time-bound tasks that constitute the major assignments in this course (abstracts/proposal, précis, mid-term, papers, peer review, final paper). For major assignments, you will receive a letter grade.  At the end of the semester, final grades will be calculated on the following scale:

A 90-100%

B  80-89%

C 70-79%

D 60-69%

E 59% and below.

Attendance and Participation.

It probably goes without saying that part of the joy and delight of upper division courses is that you get out of them what you put into them. In order to help ensure that we have a productive semester together, I require the following:

1) Each student will come to every class on time, prepared to actively discuss and engage the assigned reading material. In my experience, students who follow these guidelines tend to do better in college generally and my courses specifically.

Daily Questions

In order to help you come prepared, I require you to post questions to the Canvas discussion board by 8:00 am the day of class.  You must post at least three questions, and you do not have to post questions if you are submitting a writing response that day.  Over the course of the semester you are allowed to miss 3 classes’ worth of questions without penalty.  If you miss more than 3 classes’ worth of questions, you will lose points from the class participation part of your grade. You can assume you are receiving full credit for your questions, unless I contact you to inform you that you are not asking appropriate or acceptable questions.

Daily questions are important because they help you stay on top of and engaged with the reading, and they allow me to understand what you understood, what you didn’t, and what needs further explanation. Questions must demonstrate you’ve done the reading, but can also ask for further clarification of definitions, issues, historical context, etc.

You are allowed to miss three classes no questions asked (though if work is due that day, it needs to be turned in to Canvas, even if you aren’t there). Notice I don’t distinguish between excused or unexcused absences, so save your absences to use when you are sick or when you have an emergency.  If you find that an unavoidable problem prevents you from attending class, please discuss the problem with me. After your fourth absence, your final grade for the course will be reduced by 5 points or ½ a letter grade. After six absences, you will fail the course, in accordance with University of Kentucky Policy. If you contract an illness that requires you to miss more than the allotted three classes, please contact me and provide appropriate medical documentation. Notice, your ethos will be substantially stronger if you contact me by email before you miss class.

2) Each student will treat our class as a safe intellectual space and community, one that values challenging questions but which does not tolerate hateful language or behavior. I ask that you engage one another in ways that are respectful and productive and that you treat each other and me with collegiality and humanity. In our reciprocal community, sometimes the best way to demonstrate your respect for a person, text, or idea is to ask a difficult question, disagree with someone or something, or challenge the assumptions that gird a belief, idea, or response. I ask that we each find ways to challenge each other so that our responses further rather than shut down the conversation.

3) Part of building our reciprocal community requires that each person not only participate, but also be aware of his or her participation. Challenge yourself to both notice and moderate how much “verbal space” you take up in class. If you are the kind of person who participates freely and easily, challenge yourself to make space for others to participate. If you are the kind of person who often doesn’t speak much in class, challenge yourself to become an active participant.

Late Policy
Late arrivals are distracting for class activities. I will count two tardies as one absence.  If you are more than 10 minutes late for class, you will be marked absent for the day. In order for you to fully contribute to both the workshops and class discussions, it is important that you are not only physically but also mentally present in class. Although it is my general policy to let you know about exams or quizzes ahead of time (they are clearly marked on the daily schedule), I reserve the right to add quizzes to the class agenda if too many class members appear to be unprepared. So be prepared and on time.

A note on preparation: When doing your reading, talk back to the text—ask questions, write in the margins, connect ideas to things you already know or are learning in other classes. Being prepared means being able to respond thoughtfully to the reading, not just doing it. Help yourself by taking notes so that you are prepared to discuss issues in depth. If you’re reading the material on an electronic device, there are several applications that will allow you to annotate the electronic text. Please bring either physical notes (in terms of paper and pen or those you made electronically) with you to class along with the text we’re discussing.

Late Assignments
Your assignments for this course are due at the beginning of class on the dates indicated in the class schedule below. You may request (in advance) one two-day extension of the due date of a major assignment (not the first submission of the final paper or your reading response).  Late assignments are not accepted unless a two-day extension has been requested and approved in advance of the deadline. If you cannot attend class on the day an assignment is due, you must post the assignment to Blackboard by the beginning of class.  You may not miss class on the day of peer review.

Plagiarism
Part II of Student Rights and Responsibilities (6.3.1; online at http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/Code/part2.html) describes what constitutes academic dishonesty and what the penalties are.  It states that all academic work‚ written or otherwise‚ submitted by students to their instructors or other academic supervisors‚ is expected to be the result of their own thought‚ research‚ or self–expression.

We will be using MLA citation methods in this course, and I will expect you to follow them. You are responsible for making sure you follow proper citation methods, however, for all materials whether or not we explicitly discuss them in class.  If you ever have a citation question, please come talk to me. Plagiarism is serious stuff, and I’m always happy to talk with you about citation so that everyone’s ideas are properly credited.

Any material you use from someone else’s work must be appropriately recognized as such or you will be committing an act of plagiarism (regardless of whether you intended to or not). Any time you use someone else’s exact words you must put them in quotation marks and provide appropriate citation of the original source. Any time you use someone else’s ideas but express them in your own words, you must provide the name of the author and the page number where you read about them as well as a full listing for the source in your works cited. If you do not follow proper citation methods, you will put yourself in danger of failing the course.

Some Ways Students Commit Plagiarism
When students submit work purporting to be their own‚ but which in any way borrows ideas‚ organization‚ wording or anything else from another source without appropriate acknowledgment of the fact‚ the students are guilty of plagiarism.

Plagiarism also includes reproducing someone else’s work‚ whether it is a published article‚ chapter of a book‚ a paper from a friend or some file‚ or another source, including the Internet. Plagiarism also includes the practice of employing or allowing another person to alter or revise the work which a student submits as his/her own‚ whoever that other person may be. Plagiarism also includes using someone else’s work during an oral presentation without properly citing that work in the form of an oral footnote.

Whenever you use outside sources or information‚ you must carefully acknowledge exactly what‚ where, and how you have employed them. If the words of someone else are used‚ you must put quotation marks around the passage in question and add an appropriate indication of its origin. Plagiarism also includes making simple changes while leaving the organization‚ content and phraseology intact. However‚ nothing in these rules shall apply to those ideas which are so generally and freely circulated as to be a part of the public domain.

You may discuss assignments among yourselves or with me or a tutor‚ but when the actual work is done‚ it must be done by you‚ and you alone. All work submitted must be new, original work; you may not submit work you have produced for another purpose or class.

Collaboration is something we will be doing a lot of in this class. Collaboration differs from collusion, which is an unsanctioned kind of working together that becomes an act of academic dishonesty. I have explicitly asked you to collaborate in specific ways for your oral presentations, sharing resources for final projects, doing peer review, and that’s all fine. Collusion would involve a case where two of you turned in the exact same assignment without acknowledging one another (i.e. it has the same structure, form, and uses the same examples even if the wording is not verbatim).  If you have a question about the nature of the collaboration you are engaging in, please come talk to me, BEFORE you turn in your assignment.
A Note about Cellphones: I understand they are helpful and useful, but please turn them to silent/vibrate during class. If you have an emergency (someone is in the hospital or something of that nature of dire consequences), please let me know and then feel free to step out to answer when it vibrates.

Class Online Syllabus
I am responsive to student requests for changes in the schedule if you make a persuasive case for them, which means that the daily schedule may change during the semester. You will be responsible for checking the online syllabus and schedule before beginning your homework for each of our class meetings for any changes or updates. I will post all assignments on the class website. If you lose an assignment page or handout, you are expected to get a copy from the class website rather than me.

Gender and Pronoun Reference
It is no longer customary to use the masculine pronoun for cases of indefinite pronoun reference, e.g., “When a professor grades papers, he is often swayed by a student’s degree of effort.” Instead, stylebooks recommend changing pronouns to the plural form, e.g., “When professors grade papers, they are often swayed by a student’s degree of effort.” It is standard procedure in professional settings and this class to use “gender-fair language.”

Electronic Document Exchange

All of your work in this class must be turned in electronically (as either a Word or Google document)  to jfernheimer [at] uky [dot] edu, to the appropriate folder in Blackboard, and available in hard copy. In general, all assignments will require a title, your name, my name, the name of our course, and the date.

Backing Up Your Work
Technological failures are bound to occur and you’ll need a back up. If you follow my advice and back up to three places, you’ll be amazingly unbothered when your hard drive crashes or your roommate spills coffee on your laptop. Trust me.

You are required to save all work in at least three places: a flashdrive, Googledocs/drive, and your dropbox account. You may also opt to back up your materials to other locations such as your email, or a CD-R/RW. If your assignment is lost in cyberspace, you will be expected to repost it within the same day.

“My computer crashed” is today’s equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and neither will be accepted as excuses for late or missing work!

E-mail Policies

Regardless of how you address your friends, family, or peers, remember that in this class e-mail is an officially recognized mode of communication for class business. It’s an electronic letter and should be treated as such. When you e-mail me, please make sure you include a subject, i.e. “ENG/WRD 401, Comics and Conflict, Your student,” so I know it’s one of my students trying to reach me. In the text of the e-mail itself, be sure to use an opening and closing salutation, i.e. “Dear Dr. Jan:,” or “Hi Professor Fernheimer,” and “Sincerely,” “Best wishes,” or “See you in class.” Most importantly, make sure that you sign your name, so I know to whom I am responding. This part is especially important if your handle is something like “sugarspice or cooldaddy@hotmail.com.” Of course, if you’ve got a handle like the aforementioned, you probably want to consider opening an official UK account for class-related correspondence.

In general, I will try to respond to your email within 48 hours, though there will be times in the semester when it may take me longer. I also do not check email on the weekends, so plan accordingly if you have an urgent question. I encourage and invite you to make use of office hours or email me for an appointment if your schedule conflicts.

Alternate Class Meeting Spaces
If it’s nice and you can stay focused, we may meet outside (consider that an incentive). On temperate days, you may want to dress accordingly (short skirts and kilts may make sitting outside less comfortable).

Writing Center
The Writing Center is located in W. T. Young Library, Hub B108B, you can schedule an appointment online at their website, http://uky.mywconline.com ukwrite.wordpress.com (phone: 257-1368). The staff can help you with all aspects of your writing at any stage of the process, including brainstorming, organization of ideas, revising. I will not require you to go to The Writing Center, but I strongly recommend that all of you go at least once and try it out. Remember the folks who work there are trained writing professionals, so do not expect them to simply “correct” or  “edit” your paper. Rather, know they will challenge you to think about your work and how to advance it! To have the best possible session, be sure to bring your assignment instructions along with whatever drafts, peer comments, or instructor feedback, or rubrics you’ve received.

Students with Disabilities. If you have a documented disability that requires academic accommodations, please see me as soon as possible. In order to receive accommodations in this course, you must provide me with a Letter of Accommodation from the Disability Resource Center (Room 2, Alumni Gym, 859-257-2754, jkarnes@uky.edu), for coordination of campus disability services available to students with disabilities. We can then collaborate on the best solution.

If you have a physical or other condition which is not quite a disability but might impair your ability to participate in class (an instructor who regularly keeps you late, a bad back which prevents you from sitting for long periods, the need to keep your blood sugar up, the feeling that you’ve lost all energy and motivation), please let me know. Although I’m not a medical doctor, I do know about a wide variety of student services that you have access to but might not be aware of, and I’m happy to point you in the right direction. If you’re not physically or otherwise comfortable, you cannot be fully intellectually engaged. There are ways to make arrangements so that everyone gets the support they need to be happy, comfortable, and thus productive. After all, you’re human, not just student automatons.