You are being assessed on the basis of whether or not you as a student are not only deriving something from the learning environment, but also whether or not you are actively engaged in shaping and improving the learning environment by being involved in it.
That’s a tall order. Can you rise to the challenge? We call this participation (or engagement), and it’s a lot more than just showing up…
- Attendance: …but showing up helps. Being present in class is obviously essential to measure your performance. But it only gets you on the board. You still have to participate in order do well in this measure. You do not get exempted for being absent. You are either learning course material or you are not. If you are sick or facing a family emergency, no need to explain. Your reasons for being absent are your own business. But try to make up for the missed class in a measurable and observable way. I don’t give “make-up” assignments. But I do hold office hours. There you can ask what you missed, or better yet, review what you missed and show up ready to chat about the material. Ideally, you would do this at your earliest possible convenience after your absence, and you would come prepared.
- Punctuality: Every teacher is different. But I do not want my class to feel like a prison, or even like a “job”. So if you need to leave early or arrive late, I get it. But you might be interrupting something — a film, an activity. So be cognizant of that and respectful of the learning environment if you need to plan a late entry or early exit. Use your judgment. Prioritize the class. Use your calendar or diary to set aside time for the class itself and the work it entails in your off hours. Write down deadlines at the beginning of the semester. Plan to get assignments in early or on time, and not late.
- Preparedness: You will get a lot more out of the experience of being in the class if you come to it prepared. Homework is a pain, I know, but it’s there to supplement your learning, not as a make-work project. Do required AND recommended readings, if they’re available.
- Alertness/attention: Please respect the learning environment: do not loudly chat during the lecture or when someone else commands the floor; silence your cell phones and put them away during class (if you must use your phone, leave class and then come back); restrict computer use to note-taking only. If staying awake is a tall order, go home and go to sleep. If something on Youtube is more interesting than what’s happening in class, the people behind you might disagree, so leave. You may eat or drink during class so long as you do not disturb others while doing so (and other teachers might not share this view, so tread carefully!);
- Professionalism/Respectful behaviour: Our class will likely have a low-stakes, low-pressure, and sometimes even informal atmosphere. But your peers and I expect you to comport yourself according to commonly understood norms of respectful and professional behaviour, to adhere to the “Golden Rule,” and to refrain from oppressive or dehumanizing language. Everyone comes to this class with different experiences, knowledge, and expectations; please respect your fellow students by engaging their ideas without personal criticism. This is a class where we all come with different capacities, capabilities, cultures, language skills, and social mores. Sometimes the wrong word might be chosen, or we might accidentally say something we didn’t mean. This is normal. However, displays of intentional contempt and scorn, or deliberately chosen malicious and dehumanizing language, are subject to a zero tolerance policy.
- Positivity: It is not my objective to regulate your personality. We all have good days and bad days. You should bring whatever level of zeal to the course you can, or want to. But bringing an obviously disinterested or belligerent attitude to the classroom, especially during a participation-based activity where you have to talk to other students, can be contagious and bring the whole vibe down. If there’s something about the course or the class that has you feeling less than ok about it, bring them to the attention of your teacher and we’ll work together to resolve it.
- Quantity of participation: Students who never speak up give the instructor no ability to measure their participation. Students who frequently speak up provide more fodder for your teachers’ assessment of you. So quantity matters. But students are also expected to understand the nuances of this: speaking up too much (monopolizing the discussion) is adverse to a broad conversation in class. Moreover, students who blurt out responses without thinking about them, or provide only one-word answers, will find themselves doing more poorly relative to students who provide rarer but more carefully thought out and well-constructed responses. Use your judgement, read the room, and if you’re unsure if you’re speaking up too much or too little, ask.
- Relevance of contributions: Comments that actually answer the questions posed, and keep on topic, are rewarded, whereas comments that are irrelevant or off-topic, may signal incoherence or unpreparedness.
- Originality of contributions: You are in a college/university environment. You are already highly skilled in reading and listening and then repeating back the information your read or heard. But in this course, you have to do more than that. You have to contemplate the information you have learned and show your classmates and your instructor that you as an independent agent can articulate your own response.
- Providing insight: What does it mean to offer insight? I’m thinking here of the mode in which you contribute: do you make statements, do you ask questions, or do you do both? I think you should strike a balance between the two. But if your only contribution to class is asking the teacher questions, *especially* if it’s questions that are clearly answered in the material, it may come across like you’re not paying attention, not taking initiative to find out the answer, or you are too trepidatious about your own thought process. Moreover, questions designed to emulate participation rather than signal actual sincere interest in an answer, may backfire. If you are confused or curious about anything, do not hesitate to ask. But supplement your questions with declarative, insightful statements too; you should be able to forge your own insights. Show your thinking process.
- Connections: The components of every course that I teach are more often than not, and in more ways than one, connected with each other. A topic in one week may be connected to a topic in a totally different week. A source I use in class may shed light on not only this week’s topic but last week’s topic, and perhaps another topic 3 weeks from now. Something in class may reverberate through time or be relevant in the news. Your challenge is to be aware of the ways in which concepts, themes, and patterns overlap, and to be an actively engaged student who pays attention to the world around you.
- Dynamism/versatility/adaptability: The course may need to change at a moment’s notice. A reading may no longer be on the library website after the syllabus got distributed. A class may be cancelled or delayed. Everything from snowstorms to strikes to pandemics have led astray “the best laid plans of mice and men”. You need to adapt. Are you on top of things? Have you read the syllabus? Are you asking the teacher WHEN their office hours are as if it’s not already emblazoned everywhere within eyeshot? Do you check your email? I’ll try to give you sufficient notice of things, as they happen. But you need to do your part too. Are you navigating the course page sufficiently to pick up *where* things are? Even in a class discussion, the trajectory of the conversation can go in unanticipated directions with no notice. Are you versatile enough as a thinker to adapt to these constantly shifting micro-dynamics?
- Initiative: I will provide you with everything you need in this course (unless there are books for purchase, which sometimes happens, in which case you need to take the initiative to go get them). But you are also adults in a complicated world. I’ll do my best to make sure I define things, but, what happens if I drop the word “globalization,” or “communism,” or “NATO,” or “Doukhobors,” and you have no idea what it means? I’m assuming you already know. If you don’t, raise your hand and ask. Take the initiative. If you encounter something you don’t fully understand in a course reading, you are welcome to research it. You’re a student at a post-secondary institution with library services available to you. Be brazen and go use it. Research something. Learn it. This applies to group work too: is your group slacking off, and you’re waiting to see who’ll fire off the email to corral together your groupmates for a team meeting? Be the one to take the initiative.
- Leadership: Students who tend to do the best in participation are capable of different forms of leadership in the class. Every week, I will hand the class over to you somehow—you will be expected to discuss topics and plan or coordinate a low-stakes activity of some sort. Students who can “take the reins” and lead others (but also know how to share that authority as well) excel in their participation grade. There are limits to this, however. The best leadership is not domination of others but uplifting of them. This is an extremely nuanced thing, and it can not be taught. It can only be evinced.
History Avenue 