Soci/Anth 3327 Contemporary Minorities Professor Spener Fall 2002

SOCI 2314-1 SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND HUMAN VALUES

PROFESSOR SPENER SPRING 2004

GROUP AUDIOVISUAL PRESENTATION ASSIGNMENT

As a member of team of apprentice sociologists, you will conduct research on a contemporary social problem and its possible remedies. You will present the findings of your research and your proposals to remedy the problem in an audiovisual presentation to the class. This presentation must be documented electronically so that it can be posted on the course website. Teams must email to the instructor a written proposal for their presentation no later than 5:00 PM on Friday, February 20, 2004. Presentations will be made to the class on Tuesday, April 27 and Thursday, April 29, 2004. Another session outside of regular class hours will be scheduled if there are too many presentations than can be accommodated in just two class sessions.

ORGANIZING YOUR TEAM'S PRESENTATION

Picking a topic

Get in touch with other classmates who are writing their brief on a social problem similar or related to yours. An ideal group size is 3-4 students. The maximum size for a group is 5 students. You should organize the presentation around a unifying theme or set of themes that link the individual topics you are writing about. The “audience” for your proposal is the same as for the written briefs you are working on, i.e., “people who care about the social problem in question and are in a position to do something about it, but who are not experts about it and do not have the time to conduct their own research into how to best deal with it. They might include people such as government officials, directors of non-profit organizations, church leaders, businesspeople, or foundation representatives.”

Length and format

Each team will have 30 minutes to make its presentation. Each member of your team should play an active role in preparing the presentation, though you need not divide time "on stage" equally among yourselves. The team should strive towards making an integrated and coherent presentation, not one that consists of a compendium of loosely-related individual presentations made by separate “talking heads.”

The proposal

A written proposal for your team's presentation, including a working title, abstract, outline, division of labor, and bibliography must be submitted to the instructor by email no later than Friday, Feb. 20, 2004 at 5:00 PM. This written proposal will count towards 1/3 of your team's grade for the presentation. The proposal should contain the following items, in order:

1 1. Title page, including the course name and number and names of all presenters; 2. 150-200 word abstract introducing the topic and summarizing how you intend to cover it; 3. Outline of topics to be covered and activities to be carried out during the 30-minute class presentation; 4. Bibliography, following ASA citation style, including at least TEN (10) citations from sociological research (see note on sources below) that will be used by the team to make its presentation; 5. Participant responsibilities agreement, signed by each member of the presentation group, which details who will be responsible for carrying out each of the major tasks of preparing and making the presentation.

Submit your proposal as an attachment to an email message sent to [email protected].

Electronic documentation of presentations

Each team will need to prepare electronic documentation of its presentation to be posted on the course web site. This documentation must be provided to the instructor on CD or via email on or before the date the presentation will be made. At a minimum, the documentation should include:

 An abstract and outline of the presentation;  Any handouts, charts, photos, or diagrams used, including Power Point presentations; and  Links to other relevant sites on the Internet.

A note on scholarly sources

Appropriate research sources for this assignment include:

 scholarly books written by sociologists or other social scientists employing approaches consistent with those used by sociologists;  sociologically-oriented articles published in scholarly journals (i.e., journals aimed at an academic audience, not a general readership--examples include The American Journal of Sociology, Racial and Ethnic Relations, and Social Science Quarterly; and  published research reports written by sociologists or other social science professionals that take sociological approaches to their topic--examples include reports written to foundation funding sources or for government agencies (e.g., the U.S. Department of Justice, the General Accounting Office, or the U.S. Bureau of the Census).

You can locate appropriate sources by using on-line databases available to you through the Trinity University library. These databases include Social Science Abstracts and Sociological Abstracts.

You are welcome--indeed encouraged--to include journalistic reports and articles (from newspapers, popular magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, or on-line sources such as CNN.com) in your bibliography, but these citations do not count towards the minimum number of ten SCHOLARLY citations. For additional guidelines for distinguishing between scholarly and popular publications, see the Coates Library web page titled "Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals."