School and Society
News Project
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Each
group will be responsible for one week in the news. This assignment has
several parts. The first part is reading. You will
be reading three sources of news for a week: the Galesburg Register
Mail, which you may buy or read on line at http://www.galesburg.com/, The New
York Times and one other on-line national
newspapers of your choice from the list on the course website.
(Please note: The last item on the newspaper list is the URL for a
comprehensive list of addresses. If you don't like the ones I've listed, you
may choose your own, though you must get my permission first.)
For the second part, from your reading, you will create some kind of visual
summary of the main topics that appeared during your week -- my
preference is that you do a poster board or a PowerPoint presentation. You
will need to display this for the class to look at while you do your news
report. You will also create a "News Log," which
lists all the news stories that appeared that week. You will hand that in to
me with your paper.
The third part is for your group to give a "news report." At
the beginning of the class period prior to the one in which you do your
presentation, you will distribute one article you want the whole class to
read. Choose a story which your group thinks ties in with the issues of
the course and challenges our thinking about schools. When you do your
presentation, you'll want to give an overview of the
current issues about education in the news for your week and then help us
focus on the article you distributed. Your group will lead a class
discussion of the article. You'll have 20 minutes for the presentation
and ten minutes for the discussion of the article. See that you stick
to your time. At all times, keep your focus on the
"education news." (For this part of the
assignment, each class member must bring one question about the contents of
the article to class. Everyone must have a question. I will collect them at
the end of class.)
The final part of the "News Assignment" is for each member
of the group to write a two to three page overview of the week's news,
highlighting themes you see in the articles. Are there common concerns
across the country? Are there issues that are specific to the Identify your papers as follows: in the top left corner of your paper put the following information.
On the next line, centered, put "News Assignment" as the title of your paper. On each subsequent page, in the upper right corner,
put your last name and the page number. I expect well-written essays. I expect them to be neatly typed,
carefully edited, and following all the usual conventions of college-level
writing. I expect your name and the page number on each page, I expect the
pages to be printed on only one side of the paper, and I expect the pages to
be stapled together. You should get help from the I require that you
print off and include a copy of these instructions with your paper to insure
me that you have read them.
Your prime purpose in these oral reports and written overviews is to
briefly tell what is in the news and what we, as education scholars, can tell
about society and education from keeping up with the news.
To receive a grade for this project, you must do all four parts. Your grade
on these papers will be a combination grade reflecting both the quality of
the paper and the presentation. I
will grade these with an A through F scale. The grade criteria are as follows: A =
Excellent/Superb, beyond my wildest dreams, far beyond what I should
reasonably expect of second year college students; B = Better than Average, goes
beyond the requirements, better than the class average; C = Meets the
requirements, but doesn't go beyond them; pretty much the same as the class
average; D = Doesn't meet the requirements, but shows some effort, below the
class norm; F = shows little to no engagement in the assignment. If you have
any questions about your grades, please come see me, but be prepared to show
me precisely how your paper meets the above criteria. |