Assignments Page

WOMEN AND HEALTH

ASSIGNMENTS PAGE

Organization of the course

This course consists of five units on different aspects of women and health. Each will take about three weeks to complete. Each unit will have the following parts:

Two readings a week
A set of four questions on each reading. These need to be answered and emailed to the instructor. Their purpose is to get you thinking about the readings, and are meant to be easy. You get half-credit just for making it clear you did the reading, and full credit if you understood it.
A discussion question, so you can talk about the readings with your classmates and the instructor. You need to post to the discussion once a week. (Except the first week, when we'll just focus on making sure everyone can get the readings, use their computer successfully, and get and use an email account).
The second and third unit will also include written papers based on readings and discussions. They will be two pages long.
For your final project, you will design a web site on women and community health.

Grading

30 points: Questions from readings (emailed to instructor)
30 points: Participate in online discussion
10 points: First 2 page paper
10 points: Second 2 page paper
20 points: Web site
________
100 points

Grades will be assigned in the usual way:
90-100 points: A
80-89 points: B
70-79 points: C
60-69 points: D
below 60 points: E

Readings

Readings are available online. You will need to download Adobe Acrobat (it's free) to read them. If you are using a phone line (rather than DSL or cable) to connect to the internet, this may take a while. If you are using a public access computer (like at a library) it probably already has Acrobat on it. If it doesn't, ask the person in charge how you can read "PDF" files.

Online discussion:

Each week that you do not have another assignment, you'll be expected to complete a listserv response. This means answering ALL of the following questions on the listserv:
1. What's the reading about?
2. What's the author's argument (what does he or she what you to believe?)
3. What kind of evidence does s/he give for that position?
3. Is s/he persuasive (do you agree? why or why not?)

Papers

A paper makes an argument, just like the kinds of readings you've been analyzing. It offers a perspective and evidence, and tries to persuade the reader of its position. If you're having trouble imagining how something like that reads, go to the editorial page of a newspaper. All of the opinion and editorial pieces on that page are little argumentative essays.
Critical writing
Tips for writing papers
Some student papers

Web Page

For the purposes of this assignment, we want you to use Netscape composer. You can download it for free.

In this assignment, you will design a web page about a political movement or a health issue that affects women (you're right, that doesn't leave out much!). You'll be getting more information via the course listserv as we go along. Basically, you'll be expected to use printed sources AND web sources to develop information and opinions about a health issue, then say what you would want others to know about it. We'll be putting up "live" web sites on the server, so what you say will really affect what real people think.

Here are some ideas for things you might want to do a web site on:
Women's Health Movement
AIDS Activism
Disability Rights Movement
Patients Rights
Health Care for All

You might want to check out an example of such a web page at:
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lillithsrealm/myhomepage/Sterilization/BrokenTreaties.htm

An idea for a printed source and how you could use it on your web site:
contrast different editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves (especially Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas)