English 135: Alternative Voices in American Literature - Race, Ethnicity, and Magical Realism

Fall 2023, Section 001

Policies (in alphabetical order)

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: HAVE IT. DON’T CHEAT. SEE ME IF YOU’RE STRUGGLING.

Presenting the work of anyone else (human or AI) as your own is cheating and violates Penn State’s principles of academic integrity.

If you find yourself considering cheating due to personal stresses, frustration or difficulties with the course, or any other reason at all, reach out to me about how I can help you. I’m happy to accommodate you as best and as fairly as I can—such will be a much better use of our time than going through an Academic Integrity violation process.

Visit the College of the Liberal Arts’s Academic Integrity Information for Students page for details on the policy and process for addressing violations.

ACCESSIBILITY: USE SDR AND/OR LET ME KNOW HOW I CAN HELP.

I endeavor to make the course and its materials broadly accessible, but in the event that you require an accommodation, visit the Student Disability Resources website and go through their enrollment, intake, and documentation submission process. They’ll then give you a letter that you can give to me. If they don’t, or if you’d rather not go through that process, let me know what might make this course a better learning environment for you and I will do my best to make that possible.

CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR STANDARDS: BEHAVE.

Disruption, disorderly conduct, and harassment is prohibited, as defined in the University Code of Conduct. I will dismiss you from the class meeting for these or other code of conduct violations, and may file a report with the Office of Student Conduct.

COUNSELING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES: USE FREELY AS NEEDED.

If you are facing personal challenges or have psychological needs to be addressed, please make use of the university’s services for addressing these issues. Dial the numbers below to reach trained professionals who welcome all students, are eager to help, and will keep your information confidential.

EDUCATION EQUITY: FOR. AND REPORT BIAS IF YOU EXPERIENCE IT.

We will discuss race and ethnicity in this course, and it's understood that such conversations can cause misunderstandings, and sometimes deeply hurtful ones. We will endeavor to approach these topics while giving each of our peers the benefit of the doubt, and we will encourage acknowledging mistakes and apologizing for harms when they occur.

At the same time, deliberate acts of intolerance, discrimination, or harassment due to age, ancestry, color, disability, gender, gender identity, national origin, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, or veteran status are not tolerated and can be reported through Educational Equity via the Report Bias webpage.

EXTENSIONS: YOU CAN HAVE A 7-DAY EXTENSION FOR ANY PROJECT BUT THE LAST ONE.

You can ask for and receive a 7-day extension for any Project except the last one.

Just request it for the Project(s) for which you need an extension any time before the last class meeting and I'll adjust the due date in Canvas, which will also retroactively fix the application of any late penalties incurred.

Due to a tight deadline for submitting final grades, you cannot request an extension for the last assignment.

LATE SUBMISSIONS: 9.6% DEDUCTED PER DAY.

For each hour that an assignment is late (rounded up), Canvas will automatically deduct .4% from the grade ultimately entered for that assignment. This adds up to a 9.6%/day late penalty.

PARTICIPATION

While I would like to incentivize participation through assignments (i.e., in the same way that I incentivize attendance and reading), I do find assessing participation challenging and time-consuming to do in a fair and consistent way.

Nonetheless, I strongly encourage you to engage with the course through all the means you have available, be that offering your comments and questions in class discussions, making use of my office hours, or emailing me with your questions and thoughts on what we're doing in class.

These are acts of generosity on your part (you'll improve the class experience for me and your fellow students), but also ways to maximize what you're getting out of the course. Your questions can, within reason, help steer the course to address your particular interests and needs, and while you will receive no grade for participation alone, the answers and feedback that you get out of it will inevitably improve the quality of your graded projects.

Passing the Course: Attendance and Project Submission Requirements

In addition to meeting grade requirements for passing the course, there are two high-level requirements that you must fulfill in order to pass:

  1. You must submit all major projects by the last day of class at 11:59 p.m. Even if late penalties would reduce a grade to an F (59.99), the project must still be submitted for you to pass.
  2. You may be absent from no more than nine class meetings.

Item 2 is a requirement in addition to the Attendance assignment—that assignment's purpose is to encourage consistent attendance, whereas this policy defines the absolute maximum number of absences you may incur before you are at risk of failing the course.

This is because the class meetings themselves, and not only the Assignments, constitute what it means to have completed this course. And if you've missed 9 or more meetings—equivalent to the time we would spend discussing a novel and completing an Assignment—then I cannot in good conscience record that you have completed the course.

This applies regardless of the reasons for the absences, hence the generous number of 9. Whether due to deliberate negligence or unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances, 9 is simply too many.

RACISM: AGAINST.

RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea. ANTIRACIST: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea. - Ibrahim X. Kendi, excerpt from How to Be an Antiracist

This course recognizes that racism is a socially constructed force that exists in society and materially impacts people living in the world. The academic discipline of English Literature itself has had its own role to play in supporting white supremacy, in large part by historically tending to enshrine as epitomes of culture and erudition predominantly works written by white men.

I say this not to say that those works are not worth studying, only to say that to propagate the notion that the only works worth studying are those authored by persons of one very specific race and gender combination doesn’t make much sense, unless one claims that persons of those characteristics are inherently, essentially, and disproportionately more likely to write texts worth reading than persons of others. And that’s racist.

Talking about race is difficult. We (myself included) will make mistakes, have to backtrack, apologize, refine our understanding, correct ourselves, and try again. But this is worthwhile and necessary: to not talk about how racism effects our society and culture not only perpetuates racism, but also performs willful ignorance, and we as a group of capable, smart, and curious Penn Staters are not in the business of performing ignorance, but of creating knowledge.