Faculty and Staff:
Nancy Murray (Program Coordinator) – Lab 2, 2269; 867-5497; murrayn@evergreen.edu
Thad Curtz – LAB 2, 3274; 867-6731; curtzt@evergreen.edu
Charles Pailthorp – LAB 2, 2266; 867-6158; pailthor@evergreen.edu
Sara Rucker-Theissen (Academic Advising) – LIB 1401; 867-6909; ruckers@evergreen.edu
Shane Peterson (Science Instructional Technician) – LAB 1, 2017; petersos@evergreen.edu
Office Hours:
Tuesdays 3 – 4, or by appointment.
Administrative Introduction:
Please read this carefully and ask about any sections of it you don't understand or don't feel comfortable with now. We're handing it out and discussing it with you at the beginning because we want to proceed on a common ground with you about the expectations and procedures of this program. Unless we hear otherwise, we'll assume that you're willing to live with these policies. We want to be clear about our expectations, but this doesn't mean we intend to be closed minded about proposed changes in the future; we're expecting you to raise any questions you may have about the program or its content as we go along. We will all need to reflect on our experiences and talk about whether any changes might improve the program.
Our program theme is "Learning From Our Mistakes." We'll be exploring different aspects of this complicated idea in a lot of different ways through the material we'll be studying together (and it will sometimes apply to how we're studying together as well). How and why it is our theme will gradually get clearer during the program, and we hope that by the end of our work together in March this simple phrase will seem rich, resonant and meaningful.
Our weekly schedule, the writing assignments, some of the reading handouts, and much of the rest of the important week-to-week information about our work will be posted on the program's website at http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/perception/home.htm
If you want to, you can print out your own copies of pages you want to carry around, but we will also be adding to this site and probably sometimes adjusting the schedule as we go along. You need to bookmark these pages and check them regularly, at least before you start the work for each week, to see if there are any announcements or updates and to be sure about what you're supposed to be doing and reading next.
Some assignments will require you to be at school at other times besides these, to use the library or the computer lab.
You're all invited to a dessert potluck at Thad's house this Wednesday evening, October 1st at 7:30; it isn't mandatory, but we hope you'll all come.
We'll be going on a field trip to Fort Flagler for two nights next week, leaving Tuesday morning October 7th and coming back Thursday afternoon October 9th. (Please consult us right away if this is going to complicate your life seriously.)
Remember that evaluation week (December 15th – 19th) is part of the quarter; we will be doing evaluation conferences for most of that week. Please don't plan to leave early in that week before you consult with your seminar leader about when you can do your evaluation conference. [to top]
The books for the quarter are on the syllabus page on the web site – they are available in the campus bookstore (or will be soon – a couple of the ones for the end of the quarter haven't arrived yet). There will also be some xerox and digital handouts.The bookstore will send back all the books left on the shelf shortly after the middle of the quarter. Make sure you have them all before they vanish.
There will be a number of different kinds of writing in the program this quarter.A. Seminar papers:
For each Tuesday seminar, you'll write a short piece on the reading for the day, due at the beginning of the class. These are to help you deepen your understanding of the readings in preparation for the discussion. Until further notice, the assignment for these is to formulate the main points of the reading as clearly as you can, and then to list three questions that you would like to discuss. (These should not be small questions of fact - though it's fine to ask those in discussion. Nor should they be huge, vague, sweeping, unanswerable questions. They should be questions that you aren't sure how to answer, that you think our group might be able to throw some light on, and that are actually interesting or important to you.) Figuring out questions like this is actually not too easy most of the time - try to do the reading early enough so that you can think about your list for a couple of days; talk to other students about the book or exchange e-mail with them; try to make your questions as good as you can.
For each Thursday seminar, you'll write a paper on the reading for the week, due at the beginning of the class. These will mostly be short expository papers (three to five pages long), although we may occasionally ask you to do some other sort of writing for this piece. In these, you'll be working on developing some idea or insight of your own about the reading - interpreting, explaining, or criticizing something about the text. Each of these papers should have a thesis, some central point that you are trying to make, and develop an argument with evidence to support that thesis.B. Description and Interpretation/Analysis
Throughout the program we'll be studying the tricky and complicated relationship between perception or facts or observation or description on the one hand, and understanding or theory or analysis or interpretation on the other. Two ongoing writing projects will focus on this.
1. Lab notebooks:
The laboratory notebook is the primary tool of scientific documentation. There are many different philosophies of lab notebooks. Many of you had to write up labs in high school: they were very scripted and formal and neat. They taught you what should be in a lab report, but they didn't give very valid insight into how scientists really work.
The experimental method isn't about not making mistakes or following an exact form. It's about paying attention and trying to work in a way that will let you see and understand more about some interesting phenomenon: explaining what you're trying to do, outlining (and drawing) how you're going to do it, recording your observations, hypothesizing what they might mean, working out your calculations in a way that will let you spot mistakes, and so on. It's a way of recording what you've done for the world and of helping yourself remember it. The ability to create a good lab notebook is not really a matter of format; it depends on having learned to see more and to think more astutely about what you're seeing – not just in the lab but everywhere. We'll be practicing roughly the same skills while working with kids in schools.
2. School journals:
You'll be with kids, their teacher, and another student from the program in a classroom or day care for half a day each week – on Wednesday morning or afternoon or Friday morning or afternoon. In the first part of the quarter you'll be getting used to the kids and the teacher's ways of working, and working on deepening your own perceptions of the situation - trying to learn to see and hear and understand what's going on better. In the second half of the quarter, you'll be spending a little of your time each week exploring some sensory experiences with the kids and talking with them about how they think the senses work. In addition to being fun, we hope these explorations will help you think more about the issues we'll be studying in the program's work about epistemology and developmental psychology, where we'll be concentrating on Piaget's theories about how kids perceive, understand and learn more about the world.
Each time that you're in the schools you'll write one journal entry. It's intended to help you practice seeing what's going on in your room and thinking about your experiences. You should pick one moment that you thought was puzzling, interesting or complicated. It should be a moment that somehow involves issues about learning and knowledge (or failing to learn and not understanding something.) It can involve one or more people learning from a mistake, but it doesn't have to. You can focus on trying to understand an experience of your own or an experience of other peoples'. You should jot down as many quick notes about it as you can as soon as you're able to – get yourself a little pad to keep with you for doing this. You should write it up as soon as you can after you leave the room.
First, your entry should just describe what happened as clearly and carefully as you can. Try to keep interpretations out of this first account. Go on to them in the second part of the entry, and try to think in that about what might have been going on, exploring possible ways of understanding or explaining what you saw and heard. As we said, sorting out these two things is a tricky and complicated process – we'll keep working on it.
C. Other writing
There will also be a five page paper for the individual project, and the mid-term exam will include essay questions.
We're asking each student to study some unusual kind of perceptual experience of his or her choice during this quarter. This can be an experimental phenomenon like sensory deprivation, a cultural phenomenon like trance states, a psychological phenomenon like synesthesia, an artistic phenomenon like color field painting, and so on. (Next quarter these individual projects will be about the life and work of some particular poet, painter, musician or other artist of your choice, focusing on how he or she structures and uses sense experience artistically.) You should plan to spend roughly five hours each week on this project.
At the end of fall quarter, you'll be responsible for a fifteen minute presentation in which you do your best to convey the quality of the experience you've been studying to some of the rest of us. You can read out loud, show images, do performance art, lecture – whatever you think will have the best chance of helping us personally register the quality of this sort of perception. This presentation should also help us think about and better understand the psychological and cultural and biological processes involved in experiences of this kind. Each of you will also write a short paper (five pages or so) about this second question. Here again, we'll want you to pay attention to the relations between description and analysis. The paper should 1) describe these experiences as vividly and persuasively as you can, 2) present and discuss current competing interpretations or explanations of them, and 3) work out the relations among those interpretations and explanations, showing how they are compatible or conflict. [to top]
As the handouts for the program have said, it is designed as the equivalent of a standard 16 credit class load. That is, you should expect it to take 45 hours a week altogether. We will try hard to avoid piling on any more work than that, and would like to hear from you if you find that the program is demanding more of your time. On the other hand, you should not expect to be able to participate well in much less time than that, unless you are a phenomenally quick study. We think that meeting deadlines is an important skill to acquire; we won't be accepting late work or giving incompletes (except in truly amazing circumstances, such as personally witnessing you being abducted by aliens with your last paper clutched in your hands.) Many students say that learning to manage their own time was perhaps the most important issue they dealt with in their first quarter of college. We expect you to be here on time, and to make a real effort to learn as rapidly as you can how to be here in good working order (with enough sleep to be able to think and have a good time). If you do not have 45 hours a week available, and can't rearrange your life to obtain them at this particular point, we recommend choosing evening or weekend studies instead of a full time program.
We assume that you have well-rounded beginning college skills. If you're shaky about basic skills in some way, we'll expect you to work hard on them with us, and/or the Learning Resource Center, the Quantitative Reasoning Center and tutors. We really hope you'll consult with us right away if you ever start to feel as if you're in over your head – it will be a lot more pleasant and useful for both you and us to talk about it and start working together on improving the situation than for you to go along feeling badly and hoping things will magically get better. We don't assume that you'll know anything particular about psychology or biology or film or the other subjects we're studying at the beginning. (If you do the work, by the end of the program your skills will have improved, you'll know more about the content and specialized language of each of these disciplines, and you'll have improved your ability to participate in the collaborative intellectual activity of the seminar.)
Your seminar leader will be talking individually with each of you during the second, fifth and final week of this quarter about how things are going and how you're doing. You should also be getting regular feedback about your progress through the routine functioning of the program - comments from us and from fellow students, both written and spoken, on your work, both written and spoken. However, you should feel free at any time to make an appointment with your seminar leader to talk if you feel like it, or feel unsure about how you are doing.
We'll do written informal evaluations of your work and discuss them with you at the end of fall quarter. At the end of the program, in March, we'll write a formal evaluation of your work and you'll write a formal self-evaluation; we'll share and discuss those at your final evaluation conference, then revise them if it seems needed. These go in your transcript. At this conference, you'll also turn in a final formal evaluation of each of the faculty. (If you'd rather, you can give these to the program secretary, who won't give them to us until our final evaluations of you have been filed with the Registrar, but usually faculty and students talk about these along with the other evaluations at final conferences).
We will do our best to be supportive - but also frank, detailed, and honest - in all our evaluations of your work. We'll base them on your writing, your comments in discussion, the projects you present, your completed quizzes and exams, and the strength of your self-evaluations. We will discuss your work's quality, the level of your understanding, the consistency and usefulness of your participation, and the extent of your improvement. (If you haven't done significant pieces of the work, we'll say so.) The central bread and butter things you should be focusing on are:
l. Informed and prepared participation in seminars, workshops, peer study groups, and other assigned classes.
2. Timely completion of all assignments.
3. Demonstrated competence in the subject matter.
4. Improvement of your academic skills.
5. Active participation in meetings.
6. Sensitivity to the needs of fellow students.
7. Completion of both informal and formal self-evaluations, evaluations of faculty, and program evaluations.
8. Willingness to work as a member of the program community.This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, and we will try to pay full attention in our conversations and evaluations to the particular character of your own interests, talents and progress as well as to these generic college student virtues. We expect that almost everyone will participate fully, actively, and successfully in the program and that as a consequence, almost everyone will find the evaluation process satisfying and pleasant. If a student repeatedly disrupts other people's attempts to learn by harassing them, coming to class intoxicated, or engaging in whatever other sort of disreputable behavior you can imagine, one or more of us will warn the student that continuing this behavior will result in his or her dismissal from the program. If it doesn't stop, we'll make the person leave the program at whatever point the three of us agree that we're tired of putting up with it. [to top]
Full participation means regular attendance. We expect you to be here on time; set your alarm clock early, get a friend down the hall to wake you up; go to bed early enough – be here when we start, above all for the Monday labs. (You won't be able to participate if you miss the prep and safety discussions at the beginning of some sessions.) We expect you to attend all the classes, unless you are sick, or your child is, or you're called away by an emergency. In such cases, we'd really appreciate your doing your best to let us know what's going on by phone or e-mail; please be sure to ask some other student what you missed. You are responsible for knowing what went on. We will place any left over copies of handouts in a folder on the table in the lounge down the hall from Nancy's office; please check there if you have to be gone and discover you missed getting something.
This is a full time 16 credit program. If you do all the work and come to all the classes you'll get 16 credits; if you don't do all the work or miss classes you're likely to receive less than 16 credits. If you miss more than four classes during the quarter (that's roughly eight percent), or fail to turn in more than two pieces of the assigned weekly seminar work (that's roughly eight percent, too), or if you don't do some big assignment, we'll think that you haven't gotten enough of the basic work of the program done to justify getting all of the credit. (If some extraordinary circumstances arise, like a serious medical problem or a death in the family, we'll try to work out some way for you to make up the work you've missed. Please let your seminar leader know right away if something comes up that's interfering with your work.) The requirements for credit are the same in all seminars; we will be checking with each other to apply them uniformly. [to top]
In an academic community, sharing and taking responsibility for our own ideas is vital. Acknowledging our use of other people's ideas is equally important. Work that you submit has to reflect your own ideas. When we're incorporating other people's views (whether published authors' or other faculty's or students') we have to acknowledge our sources. Since some of the work in this program will be collaborative and the ensuing ideas may reflect the contributions of more than one person, you need to get in the habit of acknowledging the people and ideas that have influenced you.
There will be times when you'll be asked to take individual positions - in essays, research projects and seminar discussions-and when you'll need to assert your own distinctive interpretations and judgments. The final work you do needs to reflect your own judgment and analysis while also recognizing the contributions of people who have influenced your learning.
Presenting the work of others as your own or failing to acknowledge your use of other people's ideas is plagiarism. If we find out that you're doing this, bad things will happen. At the very least we'll give you a hard time and stop trusting you. We may make you leave the program, and you may be required to leave the college.
If you have a serious problem of some kind with somebody else in the program (which we certainly hope won't happen and don't expect), Evergreen's grievance procedures involve taking the following steps in this order:
1. Take up the concern with the parties involved in the grievance (unless the nature of the problem clearly makes that inappropriate.) If not resolved:
2. Meet with the seminar leader. If still not resolved:
3. Meet with the faculty team. If still not resolved:
4. Meet with the academic dean. [to top]
We expect to be talking about a number of complicated issues about which people will feel and think quite differently. We hope that you will all work at listening carefully to each other's ideas and feelings, as well as at trying to understand what they are and the reasons for them, especially when you don't share them. We also hope that you'll all work at telling the rest of us what you feel and think about the things we're reading and making and discussing, and why, even if you think that other people may not share your feelings and ideas. (We'll be happy to talk about and try to help with either of these things, in the life of the program as a whole or in your own work, if you ask us.) We realize that talking frankly with faculty is difficult, especially in your first year – a couple of us barely managed to call our teachers by their first names until we got to graduate school! But we don't think things should be that way, and we hope you'll do your best.We expect you to promote a cooperative and supportive atmosphere within our program, helping to ensure that all people have the opportunity and encouragement to speak freely; to treat each person with respect, especially when disagreeing with his or her ideas, attitudes or assumptions; and to remain sensitive to any issues of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination within the program context. [to top]
Keep track of all your work; we will want to see it again to prepare for evaluation conferences. Buy a notebook, a binder, or a portfolio immediately in which you can keep all program handouts and all program work. Don't throw anything away until the program is over. There will be no basis for writing your evaluations unless you can resubmit all your work in an organized fashion. If you start being organized right from the start, you won't lose anything, and you will have no scrambles or frantic searches when evaluation week arrives.
As we work together, we hope to help you form a community of inquiry. We expect to work hard, to cooperate in helping each other learn a lot, and to have a terrific time together in the process.We think that a passage from John Cage, a famous modern composer, may offer the best general advice we can think of about how to do well in the program, at the college, and in getting well-educated anywhere. You might put these maxims on your refrigerator or over your work table and check them out once in a while.
Rule 1: Find a place you can trust, and then try trusting it for a while. Always be around. Come or go to everything; always go to classes, reading anything you can get your hands on; look carefully and often. Save everything: it might come in handy later.
Rule 2: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students. General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher and your fellow students.
Rule 3: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 4: Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 5: Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and there is no fail...there is only make.
Rule 6: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
Rule 7: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
Rule 8: Be happy whenever you can manage it. (Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.)
Rule 9: "We're breakin' all of the rules...even our own; and how do we do it? By leaving plenty of room for the 'X' factors!" [to top]