LEARNING, UNLEARNING, ANALYSIS

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Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.

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We will be taking two classes for sharing our insights from the course. Everyone will turn in their analysis on Thursday, but everyone should be ready to SPEAK Tuesday regardless.

You could imagine this as a quilting bee -- a reality and metaphor of importance in women's studies. The people who talk each day depend on the careful and interested listenings of everyone else.

Each person will offer a piece for the quilt -- make it as uniquely yours as you can. Imagine yourself in our Theories of Feminism knowledge quilting society, coming together to share our understandings of theories and meanings as we have pieced them together for our intellectual community this term.

Look over your paper and makes notes of the following. If for any reason you don't have your paper with you today, you still must make these notes and speak from them. We don't even need you to say whether you have your paper with you at this point....

You will speak from something you've put down in these notes:

1. Find your favorite paragraph in the paper. Put a star next to it.
2. Write down what you are most proud of in this paper.
3. Put an arrow next to the place you think best describe the argument of the course.
4. Write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what made it special for you.

Add one of these:

• Write down the moment in the course when things started to come together for you.
• Write down a note about a moment outside the course when you found yourself using what you had learned.
• Write down a note about how you found yourself included in the argument of the course

When it is your turn to speak, pick out four of these pieces to share in our quilt of the class. We want to give time for half the class today, so be mindful of the the time, but make sure your piece is special and unique.

And may we all keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship, connection, intellectual community, and joyful living!

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"Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, died Tuesday Dec. 2, 2008. She was 77." (from the AP).

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Thursday, 4 December—Theories of feminism, why theories in the plural?
• Reread & review: everything. Read parts of books we didn't get to. Reread your favorite stuff. Be prepared to say what you have read and reread and why.
What has the course been put together the way it has? How has that shaping contributed to the arguments of the course? What elements of the course have meant the most to you? What will you take away from the class?

Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.


Alison Bechtel -- the comic book as feminist theory -- see her website -- and new book

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LEARNING ANALYSIS for Feminist Theory

This is a synthetic reflection on the course and your place in it.
DUE Tuesday, 9 December: learning analysis / 6-8 pgs printed out; compact is good!
Credit given after presentation in class either Tuesday or Thursday. Make plans to be in class on all the presentation days, no matter what.

SUMMARY OF GRADED MATERIALS:
• grps and preps: 1/3 grade: 7 summary sheets, 4 submissions logbooks, 1 learning analysis
• paper: 1/3 grade
• presentation: 1/3 grade

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS, MINORS AND CERTIFICATE STUDENTS! IN ADDITION you should turn in a hard copy of all graded written assignments for ALL women's studies courses to Laura Nichols, your women's studies advisor. RECORD THIS IN YOUR LOGBOOK! After verifying whether you are a major, minor or certificate student, all identifying information will be removed. These papers are collected so that our department can assess how we are doing in getting across concepts, skills, and approaches from this field of women's studies to our students. This is not an assessment of students, but another way to assess our department's work. YOUR COOPERATION IS ESSENTIAL. Please take this need seriously and help us collect this data. All departments are required to conduct these assessments now and in our department we want to make ours as women's studies friendly as possible!
FOR THIS CLASS TURN IN YOUR PAPER AND YOUR LEARNING ANALYSIS.

The learning analysis gives you an opportunity to talk about what the course has meant to you. It includes:

(1) your description of the argument or story of the course.
Examine the syllabus (course descriptions and requirements, the reading and writing assignments), WWW sites and blog spaces, notes from class, any freewrites, lists and preps for class, imagining this information as elements in an argument about feminist theory and its relationships to social movements. How have we put together our understandings of how thinking and action interconnect?

What is the argument of the course? What are the parts of this argument, and how do they connect together? You will be trying to imagine how the course was constructed, and why it was put together in this particular way. Pay special attention to titles for days in the Reading and Writing Assignment outline. Imagine them as titles in a Table of Contents to parts of a book and try to understand the argument of the "book" of the course.

(2) put yourself into this story.
What have we created together, considering kinds of feminisms, formats of theory, and histories of women and social movements? How are you a part of the argument of the course as you understand it? What was happening with you at different points in the unfolding and building of this argument? What kind of knowledge did you make yourself in your analysis of readings, in your presentation, in your responses to others' work, in your investigations on the Web and using our blog, and how do the insights you developed connect? Use the lists you did for class, contributions to the blog and your class notes to remember your thoughts, questions, ideas. How did these change? What changed them? What were your contributions to the class? What effects did you have on the course, on your partners? How did your responses to other people's work include you in the argument of the class? What worked for you? What didn't work for you? Be sure to account for your absences from class, and talk about what you did to keep up and how you know that you got the stuff you missed.

(3) discuss 4 readings and 1 or 2 web sites from the course connecting you to the class.
Choose readings which meant a lot to you, and web sites of substance that helped you think and connect. Demonstrate that you've kept up with the reading by showing how widely you've read in the course materials. How do these readings connect to the argument of the class? How did they affect you? What was meaningful and important about them? What did you learn from them? How did they change your relationship to the course, to ideas, issues, politics, feelings? You can talk about how your life was connected to these ideas and feelings. You can suggest relationships with other readings, other courses, other experiences.

This is an exercise in synthesizing--putting things together in new relationships, making a whole shape. It requires imagination. Have fun with it. Good luck!

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