GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Course Goal (content)

The main goal of L216 is to help students develop intellectually from a simple, unreflective understanding of American business practice and its impact on society to a more critical perspective on that topic.  Over the course of the semester, students’ thought should grow more sophisticated, complex, and broad with respect to the way the values and goals of the capitalist/consumerist business world form and constitute society’s values, assumptions, and perceptions.

In the first two iterations of the course (spring semesters ‘01 and ‘02), I formulated the course goal as an inquiry into the question “To what extent do the values, goals, and assumptions of the capitalist-consumerist business world constitute society’s values, assumptions, and perceptions?”  Students’ end-of-the-semester comments, however, helped me discover that the course, in fact, was less an inquiry course and more a course guided by a thesis.  Therefore, I subtitled the course, “The Price of Prosperity” in its third iteration, resituating it in the context of focused social critique.  The foundational assumption, however, remained the same:  that there are hidden costs implicit in the way America conducts business. 

The change in the course’s mode from inquiry to thesis necessitated a reformulation of the course’s main goal.  It became, “Over the course of the semester, students’ thought should grow more sophisticated, complex, and critical vis-à-vis the way the values and goals of the capitalist/consumerist business world form and constitute society’s values, assumptions, and perceptions.” 

Course Objectives (skills)

L216 has four main skill objectives, listed below.  For the purposes of this portfolio, I am most concerned with the first, which I highlight with bold typeface.

In L216, students will learn or improve their ability

• To write an analytical synthesis essay that pulls together the main idea of the course and several of the texts covered in the course.
• To write about, discuss, or otherwise interpret a variety of creations from several different genres in the humanities.  In other words, to read textual art or appreciate visual art and to make meaning of it in the context of our course.
• To give professional oral presentations.
• To work collaboratively (recognizing diverse strengths among group members and employing them to accomplish a collective goal) to create a group project that can be presented to others in a competitive environment.