Assignments for Spring 2002 Sunday Night Film Classes

For all sections:
  1. Attend eleven films (or ten and one make-up).
  2. Web assignment:
    Go to http://globalvillage.pepperdine.edu; click on "Course Offerings"; click on "Links for Film Students." You will find a number of resources there for further film study including reviews by Roger Ebert and other critics, links to film scripts, and other film related sites. You can use this as a way of finding a film review for each of the films shown in class. (Let me say here that reading these film reviews is not necessarily an "academic" experience. It will be my goal to put the seeing, reading, thinking, and talking about films into an academic perspective. But I am concerned about "life-long learning" and think that this approach to film study will have life long outcomes for you.)
  3. Reading Assignments:
    Sections 1 and 3 students must read very carefully my essay, "Developing an Impression of Culture." (Students in Sections 1 and 3 should also read at least one film review for each film seen.) Section 2 students must read the material on reserve in the Library. Section 4 students must read my e-mail on the Great Ideas/Great Issues.
  4. Writing Assignments:
    Section 1 students should review my essay, "Developing an Impression of Culture," and then write 3 ½ to 5 pages on the prompt: "We are only different in the ways that we are the same." These papers should be typed. They should evidence that the writer is trying to form an "impression" of culture, and is responding to the films' implicit and explicit content about "social organization and/or religion and/or political structure and/or economic organization and/or material culture."
For Section 2 and 4 students: With my introduction to each movie, with the handouts, with the material on reserve in the Library, I hope you have had the opportunity to think about films as a source of information about students and teachers. I am now interested in the "expressive outcomes" of your learning in this course. Eisner describes expressive outcomes as, "essentially what one ends up with, intended or not, after some form of engagement. Expressive outcomes are the consequences of curriculum activities that are intentionally planned to provide a fertile field for personal purposing and experience." I hope the film class has been such an opportunity for you. This is now an opportunity for you to "express" in three to five pages what educational "outcomes" you find that you have had during the course of our work together. Thus, describe what it is that you find that you have learned in the context of our course. Because I will have so many papers to read, please type.

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