For your course final, I’d like you to write a ~1200-word description of YOUR LEARNING EXPERIENCE for the course as a whole. I want you reflect critically over what you’ve read about, heard in class, and thought about over the last 8 weeks. Most importantly: what did you learn? Also: Which topics or ideas will stick with you? Which were not worth the trouble? What did you get interested in that we should have done more with? Which topics didn’t seem to fit? You don’t need to answer these explicitly, but you get the idea.
These are highly subjective essays, and that’s precisely the point—I want to know about YOUR learning experience, not what you think the Standard Learning Experience should have been. Please DO NOT provide a recitation of course topics and themes—I already know what we covered—I want to know what the course was like for you and what you did or did not get out of the course.
Make sure that your description of your learning experience shows me what you’ve learned in the course! One easy way to do that is to try to make connections between readings, topics, ideas, people, and so on.
These are to be submitted to me via email (fwgibbs@unm.edu) no later than May 16.
This assignment serves three purposes:
I want a better understanding of what you’re taking away from the course outside of what you’ve said in class or your campus history project—and to help boost your grade accordingly (see grading section below).
There is real educational value in thinking back through an entire course and articulating your experience with it.
I’m well aware that some topics/readings/assignments/discussions worked reasonably well and others not so much. Explaining WHY certain aspects of the course did did or did not work for YOU is great way of doing well on this last reflection. But please be sure you’re being as specific as possible, and not just saying you liked or didn’t like something (since that doesn’t suggest what kind of changes to the course might be useful, nor that you actually learned anything).
This final reflection, however you decide to write it, is a significant part of your grade. Even though there is obviously no right answer, I’m looking for thoughtful reflection on the course topics and discussions, not a superficial summary of the syllabus. You are being graded primarily on your perceived effort to do the assignment (ie reflect on what we did in the course), not on whether you mention certain topics or ideas from the course.