Fall 2003 Evaluation Instructions and Check-List
Evaluation Instructions: Filling out the items below will help you to structure and develop your self evaluation. Your assessment will also be useful for your faculty's discussion with you during your evaluation conference. On Thursday or Friday (Dec. 11 or 12) submit 1) a portfolio (all papers, drafts, outlines, etc. with faculty markings) and 2) this form (filled out with evaluative comments about how you feel you did). If you submit these on Friday, please leave them in your faculty's mailbox. To the evaluation conference, bring a narrative self evaluation that is no longer than one page in length. If you are continuing into the winter quarter, your self evaluation will be treated as an "in-house" document; you will not submit a formal evaluation (on the official template) until the end of winter quarter. If you are not continuing in this program, you must submit a signed formal self evaluation on the official template.
Program Engagement
Readings
Film Series
Class Participation
Attendance
Writing Components
Argumentative Essay, Outline and Draft
Weekly Reading Response Papers
Web Crossing
Writing Practicum
What were your strengths in this term?
What were your weaknesses?
What did you achieve?
What did you learn?
Program Description
Fall Quarter combined American constitutional law and political history to explore the long established relation of legally sanctioned civil inequality with political and legal dissent. Instruction began with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution at the founding the republic and continued through the turn of the 20th Century. Program study and materials examined African-American slavery, economic inequality among citizens, the suspension of civil liberties in wartime, and the legal subjugation of women. Program content followed a series of often controversial Supreme Court decisions and precedents that served to codify the political and economic foundations of social inequality in the 19th Century.
The primary goal for student learning was the integration and synthesis of legal and political events and themes into a single historical narrative examining how dissent and injustice have operated in the making of America. Elements of this learning included the historic and contemporary structure and workings of the legal system, a brief introduction into the principles of constitutional law, and the development of a general knowledge of the American political past. Successful learning required adequate, self-motivated academic engagement with reading and writing assignments, as well as participation in the learning community through regular attendance, classroom participation, and faculty and peer communication and review.
The weekly class schedule coordinated a law workshop, political history lecture, writing practicum and film series with small group discussion seminars in the classroom and on line. Weekly writing components included a formal reading response paper for seminar discussion, informal classroom writing exercises in the writing practicum, and summative or retrospective essay with peer responses at the end of each week on line. The writing class combined peer writing review exercises, organized instruction in grammar and style, and instruction and practice in the organization and completion of a formal argumentative essay as the term writing assignment. The film series included screening and classroom analysis of documentaries and Hollywood feature films representing legal and historical themes.
Assigned readings included, Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court; Saul Cornell, The Other Founders; Theda Purdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Removal (1995); Kenneth S. Greenberg, The Confessions of Nat Turner (…..); Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1997); William H. Rehnquist, All The Laws But One (1998); Robert M. Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage (2001); David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case (…….); Brook Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson (…..) ; Nancy Wolloch, Muller v. Oregon (……); Joyce Moser and Ann Watters, Creating America (2001). Hollywood films included, Drums Along the Mohawk (dir. John Ford, 1954); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford, 1961); Little Big Man (dir. Arthur Penn, 1970); Amistad (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1997); Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991); Jefferson in Paris (dir. James Ivory, 1995).
The following paragraph will not be in the program description for the transcript, but you may find it useful as you write your self evaluation. These are key cases we studied. Cherokee v. Georgia (1828) sanctioned Native American dispossession. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1859) denied national citizenship to free African-Americans. United States v. Reese (1875) determined that the Reconstruction Amendments established no positive federal suffrage guarantee to recently freed men or women. United States v. Cruikshank (1875) determined that federal protection of civil liberties in the states did not extend to violations by private actors. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned racial segregation. In re Debs (1895) sanctioned the use of legal injunction to suppress the unionization of paid labor. Muller v. Oregon (1908) codified women’s inequality in paid labor with sanction of sex-specific protective labor legislation.