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Rel
490 – God and Atheism
Winter, 2004
Instructions on the Reports and Responses Each person in the class will report on one reading and be the official first respondent to some other person’s report. Each of these two jobs can earn up to 50 points. REPORTING Readings are assigned for most of the class sessions. They are normally not very long. Most of your reading time for this course will be for work on your research paper; some will be the extra work you do to prepare a report and a response. Each person in the class must sign up to report on the readings for a particular class session. Each person must also sign up to respond to another’s report. This process of signing up will be done on the second day of classes. Look over the topics assigned to each class session and decide on which three or four you might report on or respond to, in case more than one person wants the same topic. The reports should be about 8 to 10 minutes long. Think of the as mini-lectures, in which you give a good overview of the contents of the readings, with sufficient background to explain it clearly. This will normally require extra reading for the person doing the reporting. That person will probably need to find an introductory chapter, for example, to a book on the topic, to get more background on the topic. (The same will be true for the respondent.) Explicitly identify that source or sources with full reference (author, title of article or chapter, name of book, editor of book if needed, publisher, date of publication). The report should provide a good critical analysis of the reading, pointing out the argument or analysis which the reading material contains, with some comments on where the logic or the evidence is lacking, if that seems to you to be the case. To get yourself in the right frame of mind, imagine that you are presenting this little lecture not to the instructor, who happens to be grading you, but to a group of juniors at UD who are honors students. Be clear and concise; use examples to illustrate. You will feel that you are partly just repeating what everyone has already read. That is true. But you are providing the reference point for everyone to use to check whether their understanding of that reading is correct or not. RESPONDING The job of the responder is first of all also to have done a good critical reading of the material, and to have consulted with additional sources. Explicitly identify the source(s) with full reference. The second job of the responder is to initiate discussion on the reading by such means as the following: offer a different interpretation of the reading than the Reporter; agree with the Reporter’s analysis but describe some points of logic or evidence that the Reporter might have addressed more critically; agree with the Reporter’s analysis but offer reasons why the reading itself is seriously in error; note connections between the reading and previous readings; suggest some significant implications of the reading or significant questions which the reading raises. |
