DeRogatis Music & Media in Chicago Fall 2017 Syllabus Music & Media in Chicago A “Big Chicago” First-Semester Experience 48-1103 “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning...”—Carl Sandburg Section 01, Mondays 9-11:50 a.m.; Section 02, 12:30-3:20 p.m. Main Lecture: Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., Room 813 SEE THE FILE ON CANVAS FOR YOUR ASSIGNED BREAKOUT GROUPS AND WHERE YOU WILL MEET WITH THEM DURING MOST WEEKS FOR THE LAST HOUR OF OUR CLASS Jim DeRogatis, Instructor Department of English, Columbia College Chicago; 33 E. Congress Avenue Contact: Email preferred: [email protected]. Office hours: Room 2K, English Department, third floor, 33 E. Congress Mondays 3:30 to 5 p.m.; and by appointment (including during the breakout sessions). Required Materials The device of your choice (phone, tablet, laptop) to access the Internet when asked during Monday lectures, plus regular Internet and computer access at home. Columbia College Chicago seeks to maintain a supportive academic environment for students with disabilities. Students who self-identify as having a disability should present their documentation to the Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) office. After the documentation has been reviewed by the SSD office, a Columbia College accommodation letter will be provided to the student. Students are encouraged to present their Columbia accommodation letters to each instructor at the beginning of the semester so that accommodations can be arranged in a timely manner by the College, the department, or the faculty member, as appropriate. Accommodations will begin at the time the letter is presented. Students with disabilities who do not have accommodation letters should visit the office of Services for Students with Disabilities, Room 304 of the 623 S. Wabash building (312-369-8296). - 1 - DeRogatis Music & Media in Chicago Fall 2017 Syllabus Course Description Music & Media in Chicago will provide an overview of the past, present, and future of the many genres of music thriving in Chicago. It will examine how this city put its stamp on the development of these sounds as they spread around the world, as well as introducing the tools of the historian, sociologist, musicologist, and cultural critic via lectures, video, film, online and dead-tree readings, and vibrant discussions. The class also will review the past, present, and future of Chicago media—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the blogosphere—examining the city's journalism culture and infrastructure, and, as with music, providing an understanding for an informed and critical reading of these texts so students can become active and involved citizens participating to the fullest extent in everything this extraordinary metropolis has to offer. Students should expect to do some writing for each class, providing their reactions to and analysis of their choice of one of several examples of the music or media being discussed that week, and in some sessions sharing their work with the class or in breakout groups. Learning outcomes The learning outcomes for all of the required first-year freshman experience “Big Chicago” courses are as follows: • Students will emerge being able to demonstrate an understanding of the City of Chicago as “text” and as a site of questioning, creativity, and exploration. • Students will be able to identify frameworks/epistemologies for new and/or deeper ways of thinking for understanding the urban context and communities that surround Columbia College Chicago. • Students will participate in a robust one-to-many/many-to-many learning environment using a combination of large-scale presentation and peer-to- peer (face-to-face and online) learning activities. • Students will experience aspects of the city of Chicago first-hand and reflect on those experiences with a cohort of student peers. The learning outcomes specific to Music & Media in Chicago are: • Students will identify important developments and traditions in Chicago’s rich musical history. • Students will identify key milestones in the development of Chicago journalism. • Students will use critical texts from a variety of disciplines in their investigations of issues raised in the course. • Students will explain how music and media in Chicago reflect and contribute to the history, geography, cultural institutions, neighborhoods, and socio- economic divisions of the city. • Students will hone the skills of informed critical readings of music and media “texts.” - 2 - DeRogatis Music & Media in Chicago Fall 2017 Syllabus Course Rationale Students arriving at Columbia College Chicago are embarking on a journey that will shape and inform their professional careers and indeed the rest of their lives, not only through the courses they pursue in their chosen disciplines and the studies they undertake in the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, but through their interactions with students in every field at this school as well as with the vital and vibrant city that surrounds it. Music & Media in Chicago will provide an overview of Chicago’s extraordinarily rich musical scenes and diverse genres as well as the many media outlets in print, broadcast, and online that report on and shape the dialog about myriad cultural, political, and social issues in this complicated and unique city. Most importantly, the course will lay the groundwork for knowledgeable and inspired readings of musical and media “texts,” creating a foundation and imparting the skills for deep interdisciplinary critical thinking by honing research, writing, and discussion skills and the utilization of digital tools, aiding and informing students in their future studies, career pursuits, and lives in this city by the lake or wherever their paths may lead. Music is by far the largest entertainment industry in Chicago—generating $84 million annually and employing 13,000 people, according to a 2007 study by the University of Chicago Economics Department—yet it does not always get the respect and appreciation it deserves from city government or the public. It will in our class, from blues, gospel, soul, R&B, and classical music, to rock, hip-hop, alternative country, and house music. Similarly, vital to being a connected and engaged Chicagoan is understanding the media here, which, as is the case worldwide in the wake of the digital revolution, is on troubled and unfamiliar new ground. But at its best, Chicago journalism upholds a strong tradition of groundbreaking and dare we say artful work, from Upton Sinclair and The Jungle in 1906 to the many iterations of Ben Hecht’s The Front Page, and from Studs Terkel and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative exposes to Bozo the Clown and This American Life. Student Experience The course will be divided into two sessions every Monday: The full-class lecture for the first part, followed by a smaller-group breakout work and discussion session. Students are expected to attend every Monday lecture (14 classes) and complete every weekly assignment via the Canvas Learning Management System. Students will be assigned to breakout groups, and these groups will meet as scheduled in files posted on Canvas, every other week, six times during the semester. Each Monday lecture by the instructor will examine one or more of Chicago’s musical genres and/or journalistic/media institutions, charting their history and development; examining how this city shaped and informed them; the impact they made on Chicago in turn; how they were shaped and informed by the rest of the world, spreading beyond the city’s borders, and introduce some of the most notable - 3 - DeRogatis Music & Media in Chicago Fall 2017 Syllabus artists or practitioners, providing students with the skills to “read” their contributions (songs, albums, videos, written texts, or audio or video broadcasts) so that they may provide their personal responses to these texts through the weekly written reactions, with solid theses backed up by context, evidence, and insight. The group breakout session will be devoted to discussions and writing per assigned groups consisting of in-depth examinations of the texts for that week’s topic and the subjects of that week’s written assignment. Graduate-student teaching assistants will lead these smaller-group sessions based upon prompts from the instructor, and students will hone their individual written responses to one of those texts of their choice. Students who are not scheduled for a breakout work and discussion session on that particular Monday will examine these texts via Canvas, choose one, and produce their written responses on their own time, leaving after the lecture. Additionally, every week during part of the Monday lecture, selected students will present to the entire class some of the best reaction pieces to the music or media texts, as determined by the teaching assistants and the instructor, providing further insight into these topics as well as models for everyone to improve their work. Policies and requirements Writing: As might be expected in a class taught by a prominent music critic, journalist, and lecturer in Columbia’s English Department, students will do some writing for every class, producing a 250-word personal reaction/reading to a musical or media text, including a solid thesis backed up by context, evidence, and insight, as will be explained during the first class session. Indeed, the writing will be our primary tool for judging students’ learning. That having been said, these written pieces will be assessed and graded not on the mechanics of the writing—we will leave that to other classes and instructors to come—so much as on the student’s efforts in deeply engaging with the text and sharing their own personal insights given their particular backgrounds, experiences, and passions or fields of expertise. The weekly written assignments will be graded by the teaching assistants based upon the instructor’s rubric, which follows in this syllabus, in a process that will be supervised by the instructor.