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Themes:
African American Religion and Food
African American Religion and Women
African American Religion and Gender
African American Religion and the Human Body
African American Religion and Protest
African American Religion and Education
African American Religion and Health and Medicine
African American Persons of Faith and Multi-cultural Places of Worship
African American Religion and Popular Culture
This is your written argument about the contemporary role of African American Religion, including whether it has relevance to the current moment. One approach the assignment is to critically thinking through a theme you have discovered or expanded in your understanding of African American religious experience. What did you learn about it in the history of that theme? How does that theme resonate in the 21st century? Does it not resonate? The question is important in that there is much discussion in social scientific studies about the waning effects of religion. Yet when the African American community is studied, these effects are present, but often less. Use this major Pew Research Download Pew Researchstudy for your reference. Do not skip the video at the end of the module.
To think about what we’re calling the big question. This question is, is your opportunity to synthesize or to bring together everything that you’ve learned in the course and to apply it to today. We have learned the history and the structure of African-American religion, including from its beginnings before Africans arrived in America. So you know, the structure, for example, of what African-American traditional religion looked like before it went through evolutions based on Africans experienced here in British North America. Through the term. Then you saw how it developed and the role that it played in African-American communities as well as in the United States more broadly. And then lastly, you’ve had an opportunity to give some thought to some contemporary issues and how African-American religion is responding or not. Including the ways that African American religion has responded across certain, certain traditions. Not only the monotheistic traditions, but also the possibility of new religious movements as we saw in the last module. So in this brief video, I simply wanted to go over some of the items that you want to be thinking about as you’re developing your big question. Uh, use a very similar rubric to the one that I use to score your Detroit studies classes, your district studies paper. But I want to give additional attention based on some of the things that I saw in those assignments. When I have you give some additional attention to items here. So let me share my screen. On this. This is the rubric that I’ve used. And yes, oftentimes a rubric is filled in so that you know exactly what each point hits. But here, so in this sense, this rubric is still a bit subjective, which they all are. But I’ll be spending my time going through the left side of the screen. So as I’ve mentioned previously, generally speaking, I grade on technical issues, about 70, about technical issues add up to about 25% of a written assignment and content is about 75%. So that’s why it’s important that you give good attention to each aspect of the rubric. Your clarity of thought. Here you want to be thinking about things such as, have I used a clear thesis statement? Have I use clear supporting, supporting points to approve my thesis statement? You also want to be thinking about things like transitional sentences that help the reader move. The reader yeses me. But you want to think about how do I best proved my point? I want to move from point to point. And at the end of a paragraph that I sort of want to foreshadow the next paragraph by offering a transitional statement. I’m sure you’ve learned this before. So this is a reminder, but it’s a reminder that helps to read your paper very quickly and efficiently and for you to get your point across effectively, the organization of your essay. One of the things that you can do to improve the organization of your essay is yes, use those traditional or transitional statements upwards. You also can use things like subheadings that give the reader an idea. Hey, that say, I’m switching topics here. So I wanna give you a sense of how to read this next portion. Then. It is excellent scholarship. To cite your sources. In scholarship, what we’re doing is moving from the writers understanding of a topic to having the reader be able to replicate the argument that you have given, or even to go to your sources too. Say, Well, I disagree with how you’ve used this source, but at least I understand how you’ve gotten there. In order for that to happen, you must give adequate citation. Whether that is in text, citation, that is parenthetical at the end of a sentence that includes a thought that is not your own. Or whether that’s. When you might use footnotes or endnotes, numbered footnotes, or endnotes in order to again give the source from which you receive that information. Then here you also see that 5% of your paper is based on accurate citation. That is that you took the time to go to MLA or APA or Chicago or Chicago or Turabian in order to understand not just which elements of citation need to be included, but how they’re to be formatted, whether it’s a book title that needs to be formatted in italics, or journal article that’s formatted within quotation marks. You want to give attention to all of those things and the content. The biggest portion of your paper is that you give a clear response to what is the contemporary role of African-American religion based on what you have learned. So you want to give a very clear thesis, statement and supporting points. This is not just the clarity of thought that you get your points across, but that you make it clear that you have a vision for what it is that you’re laying out. For those of you who like to be creative, this is your opportunity to take all that you’ve learned and to ask yourself, what do we think is going to happen with religion in the future, with African-American religion in the future. Again, this is going to be 25% of the score in the next portion. And the next two items, really, this is your opportunity to use what you’ve learned. In the first one. You want to show that, of course, the future is often based on the past. So you want to hear Using issues or themes that you’ve seen in African-American religion across the 400 years that we have discussed in the course for 100 years is a lot of time. So you want to be very specific about the items that you’ve seen out of African-American, african-american men have been many. There has been the role of music, does the role of preaching. There’s the role of the preacher himself, the messenger, right? There’s the items that African American, African Americans have been interested in. This. All themes that have arisen from the course. Here in this item, you want to be sure that you’re centering African-American religion in you’re answering the question, you’re answering the big question. This one, you also want to show that you have, you have mastered the terms and concepts of African American religion. Isn’t just that you, that you identify themes, but rather that you demonstrate your ability to use course concepts and terms or, or, or issues that you’ve learned across the course. So this, these issues are different from the issues in the previous, previous one. These are issues within African American religion. These are issues within religious studies is a way that you want to think about these. We’ve talked about things like politics of respectability or African-American agency. That you’ve learned these different terms about slave Bible and literacy in and of itself. So all of these, all of these can be used in this area. And you’ll notice again that between the themes or issues and the appropriate use of concepts and terms, that is another twenty-five percent of your score here, and they’re critically using sources and evidence. This is separate from the signing and that you want to be, you want to show that you are in fact appealing to ideas from the sources and the evidence. So you want to be clear yes to site, but you also want to show that these sources are important. Here is where some of you will want to have done some additional research. It is not required. But some of you will, in order to prove your point about where you think African-American religion is and where it’s going. You want to do some additional research. And again, it’s not required, but you in fact may do so if you choose. Here on this last item, is how well that you bring all of this together. What is the overall effectiveness of the things that you have engaged in this, in this paper. Please do your best in order to show that you’ve learned the course. Appeal to the course learning objectives. You want to show that you’ve learned some, some of the items that were intended for you to learn. So take the time to, before you begin your big assignment, makes sure that your big question assignment makes sure that you’ve taken a look at what it is that the course was designed to teach you and ask yourself, what did I learn and how might I put it to use in order to be a predictor of future Teller about what African-American religion might accomplish or might not, because it is your opinion, but it’s your informed opinion. All right. Thanks.
