About the project
What is the use of knowledge if it is not shared?
This project was born out of the frustration of teaching contemporary issues in US culture and society while rarely connecting it to the outside world. If the connections were obvious to me as an instructor, I was never certain my students saw the point.
This year's US presidential election provides us with a great opportunity to bridge in-class knowledge with current news. And so does the advent of new media which facilitates the creation of online tools to share students' work with a broad audience.
The purpose of this weekly magazine is to explain (and thus understand) the 2016 campaign for the US presidency by reverting the learning process. Instead of teaching and learning for the exam, students will have to learn frm current events in order to teach others. This includes their classmates, students of the English Departement, of other departments in Humanities, their friends, their relatives and the whole wide world! Each issue will be both online and in print.
Barring exceptional events, every week a new issue will go online, each divided in 5 sections:
All the articles will be researched, prepared and written by students, either individually or in groups.
So all the credit as to the research and content will be theirs.
Students will be assigned tasks or "jobs" as
My jobs will be to provide support during the preparation phase, to update the website and check for good practice (no plagiarism for instance).
We all hope you will enjoy this project as much as we enjoy making it.
Peter Marquis
Associate Professor of American History and Culture
Department of English Studies
Rouen University, France
[email protected]
http://univ-rouen.academia.edu/PeterMarquis
https://petermarquis.wordpress.com/rouen-us-history/
This project was born out of the frustration of teaching contemporary issues in US culture and society while rarely connecting it to the outside world. If the connections were obvious to me as an instructor, I was never certain my students saw the point.
This year's US presidential election provides us with a great opportunity to bridge in-class knowledge with current news. And so does the advent of new media which facilitates the creation of online tools to share students' work with a broad audience.
The purpose of this weekly magazine is to explain (and thus understand) the 2016 campaign for the US presidency by reverting the learning process. Instead of teaching and learning for the exam, students will have to learn frm current events in order to teach others. This includes their classmates, students of the English Departement, of other departments in Humanities, their friends, their relatives and the whole wide world! Each issue will be both online and in print.
Barring exceptional events, every week a new issue will go online, each divided in 5 sections:
- The News This Week: a selection of two to three noteworthy pieces of information, digested and made clear to non-experts.
- What to Look At in the Coming Week: some pointers as to what the upcoming events are and what stakes they hold.
- Background Check: a focus on a topic or issue that needs further investigation, such as the electoral process, campaign financing, swing states, immigration, gerrymandering, etc.
- Cartoon of the Week : because a picture is often worth a thousand words... yet each cartoon will come with commentaries on the point of view and the artist's agenda.
- Freedom of Speech: a section is for the editorial, the rant, the fiction, the banter, the endorsement, etc.
All the articles will be researched, prepared and written by students, either individually or in groups.
So all the credit as to the research and content will be theirs.
Students will be assigned tasks or "jobs" as
- editors in chief (two for each issue)
- staff writers (two per section)
- proofreader (one per section)
My jobs will be to provide support during the preparation phase, to update the website and check for good practice (no plagiarism for instance).
We all hope you will enjoy this project as much as we enjoy making it.
Peter Marquis
Associate Professor of American History and Culture
Department of English Studies
Rouen University, France
[email protected]
http://univ-rouen.academia.edu/PeterMarquis
https://petermarquis.wordpress.com/rouen-us-history/