Sociology 211
Social Problems
Fall 2002
Dr. Scott Schaffer

Journal Assignment -- Details

The following information is provided to make my expectations of the journal more clear for you.

The purpose of the journal is to give you a space to think about the course readings and topics we discuss outside of class. Your success in this course depends not only on ensuring that you submit reasonably well-constructed assignments in a timely manner; it also depends on your willingness to entertain the perspectives presented to you in class, to see how they provide a different kind of insight into your life outside of class, and to decide if they "work" for you in some kind of way. You cannot do your best in this class if you think of it as only happening on Mon/Wed/Fri from 2pm to 250pm.

The journal gives you two ways to deal with this "outside thought" requirement. The first is by asking you to reflect on the course readings and issues -- what you think about them, how they have an impact on you, your agreement or disagreement (and why)... whatever it is you need to think about to ensure that you "get" what's going on in class. This section of the journal can appear in whatever way you need it to appear -- notes on the readings, thoughtful reflections on what the readings/lectures/discussions have said to you, thoughts about the relationship between the course and your life. You should make an entry in your journal after every class session; however, the bare minimum to pass this section of the journal assignment is one to two entries per week.

The second way you're asked to deal with the "outside thought" requirement is by seeing how these social problems operate in the larger world and how other societies view or understand them. In order to do this, you're asked to read and discuss at least one article per week from a foreign national newspaper. A web page with links to these newspapers can be found at http://www.millersville.edu/~schaffer/courses/f2002/soc211/newslinks.htm. Your discussion of these articles must include the following things (and a report form is available on the web site):

• The title of the article, the newspaper it was in, the date the article was published, and the URL of the article (zero credit will be given if this information is not present);
• A summary of the article;
• A discussion of the relationship to the course materials and issues being discussed that week -- does the article confirm or refute what we've read? Does it give us additional insight into a particular social problem? Does having this international perspective help you understand how we view (and attempt to solve) our social problems;
• And an evaluation of the article using the analytic tools we will be developing in class.

There must be at least one fully completed article report for each week of class, save for those weeks just before the submission of the papers. Not having a completed report, or submitting a completed report on an article that doesn't happen that week, will result in no credit being given for that week.

I hope that you won't think of this assignment as busy work -- that's not its intent. A course like this will inevitably impact on how you think about and understand the world around you and your place in it; the journal is designed to help you grapple with that impact and figure out what to do with it.