Honors 403.01
Office Southern Hall 118
Fall, 2000
Office hours: TT 2:00-4:00 and MWF 10-12
Richard.Conville {at} usm(.)edu

I will be in the office many more hours than this, so feel free to come by. If we fail to make contact, please leave a message with the secretary or a note in my box so we can make an appointment, or email me.

What's Gonna Happen and How Much It Counts

1. Most of us learn by doing. It sounds trite, but it seems true. That's why musicians and athletes practice, physicians do residences, and you and I do better on our third job interview than our first one. Service-learning has us taking course concepts into the field to try them out AND bringing that real world experience back into the classroom to critique the course concepts. The "field" is the community service site. We might as well be helping out the communities around us while we are "learning by doing."So, we will get ourselves involved in community service. Examples include, after school tutoring and recreation at Pine Haven or the Boys and Girls Club, helping an adult learn to read and write, and volunteering at a soup kitchen. The idea is to place oneself in a setting of genuine need, with people you probably would not be around normally, and contribute what you can, while trying out the ideas encountered in the course.

2. Keep a journal of your community service experience. Periodically I will ask you to capture the experience in writing (see no. 6, 7, and 8 below; 5, 2 page papers). Several times during the term, I will ask you to turn in your journals for feedback. After a while, our journal should focus on a primary relationship that you are developing as you work in your service site.

3. We will devise a way to share the narratives you write with each other and discuss them.

4. Parallel to this experience-and-writing, we will be doing two kinds of reading, FIRST, looking at models of documentary writing, James Agee s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, William Carlos Williams Doctor Stories, and Tillie Olsen's Tell Me A Riddle; and SECOND, examining some recent work by writers in the field of interpersonal communication who propose various ways of understanding relationships and the interpersonal communication that constitutes them.

5. The readings for a particular time period are to be incorporated into the writing we do at that time, and that will be central to my assessment of your papers.

6. a. At midterm, I will want you to practice writing a short version your final paper (albeit, for a grade). Your object will be to integrate the four strands of the course at that time, your service learning experience, the theoretical perspectives on interpersonal communication we will have read, the models of documentary writing we will have read, and your periodic writing you will have done along the way. [max 5 pp, dbl sp, APA, etc.]

6. b. your service learning experience includes your personal, subjective responses to what you see and do. To the extent that the service learning experience touches your inner life, this is your chance to dialogue with yourself (and perhaps with me and with the class) about those concerns, dilemmas, perplexities, frustrations, etc.

7. For the final, I will want you to produce a lengthy narrative of your community service experience in which you demonstrate your ability to integrate the four (4) strands of the course enumerated in no. 6 above; AND MORE, (5) enunciate your insights into the relationship your have been focusing on in the service learning project and (6) spell out your insights into the service learning experience itself. [12 pp. max etc.]

8. The core of the course will comprise 5 two-week segments. A typical two week segment will look like this:

A — TUESDAY – introduce the theory piece & model piece
B — THURSDAY – discuss and elaborate on same; # #
C — TUESDAY – meet in a different place for scintillating conversation on S-L
D — THURSDAY – writing assm* due; 5 will read

*four of these papers will be combined into one grade worth 30 % of the course; midterm paper = 30 %; final paper = 40 %.
## I may make some seminar report assignments at these points.

9. I will reserve the right to schedule tutorial sessions after midterm to help you prepare for your final paper.

COURSE FRAMEWORK THIS TERM

Introduction, Aug 22, 24, 29, 31, and Sep 5 (SL article the 24th, Putnam on the 29th, Agency visitors on the 31st, Coles on Sep 5; I will be out of town on Sep 7).

THEORY — Sep 12, Hopper. Sep 26, WBJ. Oct 10, Rogers. Oct 24, Wood. Nov 7 & 9, NCA Annual Meetings, Seattle, WA. Nov 14, Baxter & Montgomery. Nov 30, Reflection, Coles*.

MODEL — Sep 14, Agee. Sep 28, Olsen. Oct 12, Williams. Oct 26, Agee. Nov 16, Olsen & Williams. Dec 5, Reflection, Stewart**.

S-L DISC — Sep 19, Agee film. Oct 3, Coles. Oct 17, open. Oct 31, open. Nov 21, open. Dec 7, Gathering.

WRITING — Sep 21, Paper 1 (J). Oct 5, Paper 2. Oct 19, Midterm Paper 3 (J). Nov 2, Paper 4. Nov 23, Thanksgiving. Nov 28, Paper 5 (J). Dec 14, Final Paper.

*Coles, R. (1989). Stories and theories. In The call of stories (pp. 1-30). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
**Stewart, J. (1994). Structural implications of the symbol model for communication theory: Language as constitutive articulate contact. In R. L. Conville (Ed.), Uses of structure in communication studies (pp. 125-153). Westport, CT: Praeger.

CORE READINGS

Baxter, L. A. & Montgomery, B. M. (1996). Dialectical voices: Ours and others. In Relating, dialogues and dialectics (pp. 18-47). New York: The Guilford Press.
Hopper, R. (1981). The taken-for-granted. Human Communication Research, 7, 195-211.
Rogers, L. E. (1998). The meaning of relationship in relational communication. In R. L. Conville & L. E. Rogers (Eds.), The meaning of 'relationship' in interpersonal communication (pp. 69-82). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J. B. & Jackson, D. D. (1967). Some tentative axioms of communication. In Pragmatics of human communication (pp. 48-71). New York: Norton.
Wood, J. T. (1992). Telling our stories: Narratives as a basis for theorizing sexual harassment. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 20, 349-362.

A Rationale for the Course

One way of making education more holistic is to get outside the classroom and off the campus. It interrupts the programming twelve years of classroom conditioning automatically call up; the change in environment changes everything. The class becomes a social unit; students become more fully rounded human beings not just people who either know the answer or don t know it. Inside the classroom, it s one kind of student that dominates; outside, it s another. Qualities besides critical thinking can come to light: generosity, steadfastness, determination, practical competence, humor, ingenuity, imagination. Tying course content to the world outside offers a real-world site for asking theoretical questions; it answers students need to feel that their education is good for something other than a grade point average. . . . [Jane Tompkins, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/6/96, p. B 11; via Maureen Ryan, thanks]

NOTE: If a student has a disability that qualifies under the Americans with Disabilities Act and requires accommodations, he/she should contact the Office of Support Services for Students with Disabilities (OSS) for information on appropriate policies and procedures; Box 8586; Tel: 266-5024; TTY: 266-6837; Fax: 266-6035.