Required Text

Gioia, Dana and R.S. Gwynn. The Art of the Short Story: 52 Great Authors, Their Best Short Fiction, and Their Insights on Writing. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. ISBN: 0-321-36363-9.

The text for this course costs approximately $20 (new) or $15 (used) and available at the Polytechnic Campus bookstore. If you would like to get your book from one of the other campus bookstores, you may request that it be delivered to that campus (allow 24-48 hours). Please call customer service at 480-965-4170 or visit http://bookstore.asu.edu/ASU/StoreHours.aspx

Course Description, Goals, and Benefits

In this course you will explore the short story as it developed in the past 200 years within specific historical and cultural contexts. You will also develop your ability to interpret the meaning of a short story from many critical approaches, beginning with close readings of the elements of a short story: plot, setting, characterization, point of view, theme, and style. Our discussions and assignments will focus on how short stories both reflect and interrogate human behaviors, motivations, attitudes, and relations across time and cultures. The course will place special emphasis on interrogating notions of violence, peace, gender, race, and class as depicted in the texts we read. Please be aware that some of the content you encounter in this course may be considered sensitive.

The success of the course will depend on your individual commitment to keep up with each week's reading, research, and writing; to ask good questions; and to engage with me and other class members about the texts. You should be moderately computer literate, use Microsoft Word (.doc) or save all files in rich text format (.rtf), and, preferably, have a speedy Internet connection. Please identify free computing sites on any ASU campus that you can use regularly if you don't have reliable Internet speed or access.

You should benefit from taking this course in at least several ways:

Reading short stories is enjoyable: While you may not like ALL the stories we'll read, you should find enough to satisfy and even expand your particular tastes. Besides, you can always read stories that haven't been assigned!

The best short stories are compressed, unified texts about human experience: Good literature illustrates the best and worst that life has to offer. This is an opportunity to explore your own and other people's humanity (or inhumanity) in brief reading time frames. The texts you will encounter all have the ability to delight, horrify, anger, perplex, move, motivate, inspire and teach you how to live better with yourself and other people. Through reading and re-reading (no short story should ever be read just once!), you'll have the opportunity to experience multiple lives from a relatively safe distance. In addition, as you discover and shape aspects of your own identity, studying these short stories can provide you the opportunity to process your own past, present, and future responses to the joys and dilemmas of life.

You get to talk about your responses, ideas, and questions with other people: Rather than interpret the stories on your own, this course gives you the opportunity to process a story's possible meanings with other readers. Discussing your responses, ideas, and questions with class members online has the potential to create synergistic power to solve problems and meet your own as well as other people's needs in ways you may not have imagined.

My Teaching Philosophy

Expert Reader/Writer and Facilitator Role: I've studied a lot of research about how people learn. And guess what? You won't learn much by merely listening to or reading long lectures from me. Granted, some lecturers can be very entertaining and hold your attention for a good long time (especially if they're funny), but research shows that even medical students (presumably some of the most intelligent people alive--right?) cannot, after about 15 to 20 minutes, sustain the same level of attention during a long lecture. Instead, I view my role as an expert reader/writer and a key facilitator of meaningful conversation that will lead us to greater understanding of the texts we study. Through that study, we should all be led to greater understanding about ourselves and each other.

Active, Engaged, and Cooperative Learning: Knowing this, I design courses in ways that require active, engaged, and cooperative learning. That's what I appreciate about teaching hybrid or online courses because learning experiences such as online discussions, when done well, encourage everyone's participation. That's also why I require students to ask questions, discuss ideas, and write a lot. Such assignments are meant to make your thinking visible to yourself and to others. Any assignments I make are meant to help you learn--not to punish you with busy work!

Recognition and Accountability: Another thing I know about effective teaching and learning is that students should be recognized, rewarded, and held accountable for their learning in order for it to actually "stick." This is why I make regular, brief assignments that ask you to reflect on what you're studying and that ensure your active participation.

Timely Feedback: Finally, I know just from taking years of tennis lessons myself, that you'll learn best if I give you immediate feedback and timely assessments of your efforts. Regular feedback of your work will help you come to understand what you're missing and where you need to make improvements. Ultimately, my primary goal is to help you hone your critical reading and writing skills so that you feel confident you can interpret short stories on your own and then benefit from what literature has to offer throughout your academic, professional, and personal lives.

Questions and Answers (Q & A Forum)

If you have questions you'd like to discuss in private, please email or call me in my office at work (480-727-1850) or at home (480-755-8989), drop by during my office hours (Wed 9:30 a.m. - noon, Bell Hall M6), or make an appointment for a different time. I'm happy to speak with you about your individual work in the course. However, many questions that students ask are administrative. Therefore, I'd prefer you ask such questions in the public Q & A Forum of our myASU Blackboard course since other students will benefit, and I won't have to keep repeating myself by email. Email messages may also get stuck in my spam filter, so it's more reliable to post your questions to the Q & A Forum. I will check the Q & A Forum throughout the day and usually get back to you within 3-6 hours or sooner. As students in the course, I'd invite you to answer one another's questions in this Q & A Forum as well.

Email Protocol and Forwarding ASU Email

If you DO send me an ocassional email (L.Bush@asu.edu), please put Eng 352 in the subject line of your message. This will automatically sort your message into a special folder in my Outlook account. Also make sure you sign your full name to each message, especially if I won't know who you are from your email address. If you send me an email mesage from an off-campus email address (or even sometimes from an ASU address), it may get caught in my spam filter, so I might not receive it immediately. Using the Q & A Forum of our web site is often the best way to get my attention.

Email messages sent from myASU Blackboard web sites automatically go to everyone's ASU email account. This means to be enrolled in this course, you MUST check your ASU email OR you MUST IMMEDIATELY have your ASU email redirected to the actual email account you use (e.g. cox, hotmail, google, yahoo, etc.). For a tutorial explaining how to redirect your ASU email, visit http://asuonline.asu.edu/StudentSupport/Tutorials6/RedirectEmail.cfm

Learning Objectives

After successfully completing this course, you should be able to do the following:

1. Identify six key elements of a short story and show how those elements work together to create a unified piece of short fiction with coherent meaning(s).
2. Write a persuasive interpretation of a text with a clear controlling idea and well chosen, well organized evidence to support your argument.
3. Seek out additional knowledge about a literary work, its author, its content, and its interpretation.
4. Relate texts to one another and synthesize ideas about them that emerge from your own thinking and the interactions you have with your peers and other authors' texts or literary criticism.
5. Work with other students to hone your critical reading and writing skills through meaningful conversations and peer groups online.

Assignments and Grading (subject to change with notice)

I will post the week's cycle of work to begin on Mondays by noon. Course assignments are intended to assist you as you work to achieve the learning objectives outlined above. I will be assessing the assignments, online activities, and course schedule as we go. If I discover a need to make adjustments along the way, I will. Before making an adjustment, I will provide an explanation for the change and fair notice to students, but you are responsible for staying in close contact by checking the course announcements and schedule at least four times a week or more. Our course web site may be down at times, either for regular campus maintenance or occasional technical snafus. Take care not to put off turning in your assignments at the last minute, since computer problems are generally not good reasons for missing a deadline. The following table provides an approximate breakdown of expected assignments and grading.

POINTS

MAIN ASSIGNMENTS - specific assignment info available within myASU course