grading+and+assignments

=Assignments=

As this course is intended to allow you to develop your critical thinking skills and cultural awareness, some of the grading requires you to produce a body of work that can be assessed for accuracy, fluency, and style of presentation. Your accomplishments in this class will be assessed in four different ways:
 * 1) exams (a midterm and a final exam - essay questions)
 * 2) Research projects: 2 research projects, each about 4 to 5 pages long) with sources provided in MLA format. Topics to be assigned by instructor.
 * 3) Web quests (8 different web quests)
 * 4) Pop quizzes (16 quizz, 1 each week on the readings)

Research Projects (Two projects 10 % each totaling 20 %)
To develop writing/critical thinking skills, you will prepare two research projects, each one focused on one theme in Native American literature. One project is to be submitted before midterm exams; the second project to be submitted before Thanksgiving. Projects will use MLA style formating.

Each research project is worth 10 % of your grade. You should aim 3 to 5 sources in your research, and develop in the project a thesis, as well as your interpretations and insights. The general themes for the research projects are:
 * land
 * community
 * Spirituality/Religion
 * identity/blood/mixed blood

Exams (40 %)
Two essay exams are given, one at midterm and one as a final. The final exam is 2 hours long, and you should expect to write three papers. Each exam is worth 20 % of your grade

Webquests (24 %)
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videos. We will use Short Term Web Quests. At the end of a short term Web Quest, a learner will have grappled with a significant amount of new information and made sense of it. A short-term Web Quest is designed to be completed in one to three hours.There are 8 web quests. Each web quest is worth 3 % of your grade (total for web quests = 24 %). Your response will take the form of about two typed double spaced pages illustrated as you see fit. Instructions are provided in the word document attached to this page. I will evaluate your response to this webquest as follows. > > Note: You cannot cut and paste text from a website to answer the webquest. Copying other people's writing is plagiarism, and is penalized VERY heavily at this college. You are required to attach to your Webquest Response a signed sheet documenting that the work you are handing in is your own.**
 * An excellent response to a webquest will be a well-written couple of pages, illustrated with images, maps or diagrams, and providing the reference to the website(s) you investigated to gather the information. Your text will answer all of the questions using your use your own words, will be free from grammatical or typographical errors, and will be well organized.
 * A good response will adequately address all questions, but may be weak on organization, poorly referenced or be marred by poor grammar, or typographical errors.
 * A poor response will lack detail, references, and show little organization. It may also have many errors.

Each webquest, once completed, will provide you with a substantial piece of information relating to Native American cultures, history or society. A webquest is simply a task that asks for specific pieces of information which you gather by visting different websites (some of which I link you to; others you find on your own). The benefits of a webquest are: you find, read, absorb and understand the information you gather, thus developing your own knowledge about a particular theme or issue. The information you gather will be useful to you in the following ways. First, you will be able to study your completed webquests to answer quizzes I set you in class. (If you do not complete the webquest, or do a poor job of gathering the information, you will not do well on the quizzes.) Second, as you complete the webquests you will be establishing a foundation of understanding about Native American culture and history, which you will use to interpret and enrich your reading of the texts we will study in this class and which you will demonstrate by answering the Midterm and Final exam essay questions.

Webquest 1. Timeline of Native American Prehistory Webquest 2. Stereotypes and images of Native Americans. Webquest 3. Laws affecting where and how Indians can live. Webquest 4. Navajo Sandpaintings Webquest 5. Tricksters Webquest 6. The Trail of Tears or the Long Walk Webquest 7. The Pueblo Revolt or The Sand Creek Massacre Webquest 8. Indians Making Movies:

Quizzes (16 %)
There are 16 quizzes (one each week) some of which relate to the texts we are reading and others which require you to have completed a webquest in order to answer the questions on the quizz.