General Education Annual Course Assessment Form
(due September 1)
Course Number/Title Humanities 128: Perspectives on the Twentieth Century: The West in
Global Context___ GE Area _V____
Results reported for AY _2012-2013_ # of sections 2_ # of instructors__2_(Scaff, Stenmark)_
Course Coordinator: _Susan Scaff________________ email: _sscaff@sbcglobal.net_
Department Chair: __CHRIS JOCHIM___________ College: _______H&A________
Instructions: Each year, the department will prepare a brief (two page maximum) report that
documents the assessment of the course during the year. This report will be electronically submitted by the department chair to the Office of Undergraduate Studies with an electronic copy to
the home college by September 1 of the following academic year.
Part 1
To be completed by the course coordinator:
(1) What SLO(s) were assessed for the course during the AY?
Diversity
(2) What were the results of the assessment of this course? What were the lessons learned
from the assessment?
Course # 1: Lisa Stenmark (her description quoted below):
This course presents a diversity of perspectives, in a diversity of forms, from within a wide
range of cultures.
It includes writers, thinkers and artists from the U.K., Germany, France, Czechoslovakia,
Russia, Japan, Nicaragua, Argentina and Mexico, as well as the United States (AngloAmerican, Jewish American, African American, Mexican-American, Asian American and a
broad mix in between
It also includes a diversity of styles—e.g. essays, poetry, art, literature—and suggests a diversity of perspectives within each culture, including debates about the interpretation of and
meaning colonialism and race in early 20th Century America, the role of art in revolutionary
activity and the responsibility of the artists, the impact of technology and globalization, and
the best method of social transformation (violent and non violent).
The following list of various readings within these various topics suggest this diversity:
Poetry:
U.K. (Kipling, Yeats), Ruben Dario (Nicaragua), Silvia Fernandez (Argentina), Pablo Neruda
(Chile), Langston Hughs, Countee Cullen, etc. (USA, Harlem Renaissance); Li Young-Li,
StaceyAnn Chin, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Martín Espada (USA Contemporary, written and
spoken-word poetry)
Fiction:
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, England), Things Fall Apart (Chuna Acheba, Nigeria),
Black No More (George Schuyler, USA/African American), Maus (Art Spiegelman, USA)
Space Merchants, (Kornbluth and Pohl, USA); Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler,
USA/African American)
Art:
Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism (Europe and Latin America); Mexican Modernism
Grafitti/Street Art
Photography:
Mexican Revolution, U.S. Depression
Film:
Modern Times (U.S., Silent), Gojira (Japan, SF), Battle of Algiers (French/Algerian, Cinema
Veritá), Hearts and Minds, Tank Man (USA, Documentary)
Plays:
Rossum’s Universal Robots (Czech)
Speeches:
Jane Addams (USA), Bukharin (Russia), Gandhi (India)
Memoirs, etc.:
Shooting an Elephant (Orwell, U.K.), Interviews during great Depression (USA)
Essays:
Hannah Arendt (German-Jewish, USA), W.E.B. DuBois, Georg Schuyler, Langston Hughes,
Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King (USA, African-American); Chinua
Achebe (Nigeria), Lenin, Stalin (Russia), Lawrence Langer (Jewish-American), Yuki Tanaka
(Japan); Franz Fanon (Algeria), Gandhi (India), Cesar Chávez/Dorlores Huerta (USA, Mexican American), Juliet Schorr, Benjamin Barber, JK Galbraith, (USA) Aldous Huxley (UK)
Course #2: Susan Scaff:
In my Humanities 128 course we combine a European and Global Studies Curriculum. Here
is the course description on the syllabus: “In-depth look into events and movements in Europe and around the world between 1900 and today. Covers the two world wars, African colonialism, the revolt against colonialism, the rise and fall of totalitarian systems (fascist and
communist), the interrelation of the West (Europe, America) and the East (Eastern Asia, the
Middle East), and more. Interdisciplinary, covering art, history, psychology, and literature.”
Here is a breakdown of the authors and artists / architects studied in each discipline:
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Art: Modernist (early 20th century) and mid-century art and sculpture from Europe
and America, such as Munch (Norwegian), Matisse (French), Picasso (Spanish),
Kirchner (German), Mondrian (Dutch), Boccioni (Italian), Wright (American), Pollock (American), posters from the Cultural Revolution (Chinese), and many others.
History: multiple secondary sources, power point shows, and pieces of literature that
provide a basis for studying events and patterns in the world wars, the Cultural Revolution in China, and trouble spots in the Middle East (variously, Israel, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria).
Other primary and secondary sources on the two primary ideologies of the 20th century, communism and fascism, including Mussolini’s description of fascist ideology.
Psychology: Freud (Austrian), Jung (Swiss), and Skinner (American).
Literature: Excerpts from European modernism (Joyce from Ireland; Proust from
France; Kafka from Germany). Achebe’s Things Fall Apart from Nigeria as entry to
studying European colonialism; Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress from
China as an entry to discussing the Cultural Revolution; Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
as a basis for discussing turmoil in Afghanistan.
(3) What modifications to the course, or its assessment activities or schedule, are planned for
the upcoming year? (If no modifications are planned, the course coordinator should indicate this.)
None. The course is going well in sections taught by both teachers, and I have no specific modifications to suggest in the area of diversity.
Part 2
To be completed by the department chair (with input from course coordinator as appropriate):
(4) Are all sections of the course still aligned with the area Goals, Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), Content, Support, and Assessment? If they are not, what actions are
planned?
YES.