Syllabus: HUM 300 The Arts in Society

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Schedule at a Glance

January	in-class	assignment	due dates
20	intro to course, course web, and wiki
25, 27	the countries and a video about each intercultural sensitivity research for this course how to use the wiki
Feb 1	arts history
February			February
3	demo on Renaissance Europe painting technique
8, 10	critical approaches to the arts comparisons of the countries	test 1 profile	10 10
17	interrelationships between various forms of art	timelines art work approval	17 17
22	formal and thematic elements	glossary - 1st 10	22
24	demo on musical instrument from foreign country	test 2	24
March			March
1, 3, 15, 17, 22	student presentations on literature and art (Spring Break week of March 8 - 12)	art report 1 presentation 1 analysis art work mus instr approval glossary - next 5 essay thesis	1 1-22 3 3 15 22
24, 29, 31 Apr 7, 12	student presentations on music and dance (Easter Break, April 5)	reflective piece 1 art report 2 presentation 2 analysis mus instr	24 24 24 - A 12 29
April			April
14, 19, 21, 26, 28	student presentations on movies and video	reflective piece 2 art report 3 presentation 3 glossary - next 5 essay finished	14 14 14 - 28 19 21
May			May
3	what we learned	reflective piece 3 essay revised	3 3

January 20 - introduction

blank map of the world's landmasses - place the country names and draw the borders

N America - Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico
S America - Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Colombia
Europe - Spain, Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Italy
Africa - Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, S. Africa, Nigeria, Senegal
Asia - Iran, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Afghanistan, China, Japan

Tricia Carlson - Brazil
Bridgette Fagan - Colombia
Jacob Linton - Peru
Ron Malicki - Argentina

Amanda M. Markel - Israel
Thomas Walters - Iran
Tom McGrath - Turkey
Becca Barton - Egypt

Laura Carra - Italy
Kathryn Kacalski - Poland
Stephen Kanutsu - Greece
Jessica Whitford - Spain

changing countries - We still have time in the next week to make some changes. The easiest way is for two of you to trade your countries. The more complicated way might be a market where all the sellers (unhappy with your current country) and the buyers (willing to change countries) can meet each other.

assignments

Expose yourself to music, movies, literature, and videos from your country. Find radio stations online. Find YouTube and Facebook equivalents if possible. Start collecting web pages as bookmarks. There are resources on the wiki to get you started.

Use the Sandbox to practice. Make a change to one of the pages about your country; you are the steward of those pages.

January 25, 27- introduction

Tools

to help you do the research for this course

Use your browser's bookmarks or favorites to harvest and organize your research. I highly recommend that you use Mozilla's Firefox. Your next best bet is Google's Chrome. If you must, use Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

iGoogle (personalized Google home page) has gadgets (AKA widgets) for worldwide media.

With Audacity (how to use | free download and available on the H215, D222, and NMI computers), you can record anything coming out of your computer's speakers, such as radio broadcasts from your county, which you can then edit with Audacity and upload to the wiki.

If you have or will download iTunes, it has a Radio feature in the Library, as you can see on the screeshot on the right. This feature has, on mine, over 400 streams of music from around the world. Explore and discover!

how to use the wiki

How to do the assignments on the wiki, such as how to format text that you have written or pasted in, edit pages, upload images, put text and images into tables, and put messages on the discussion forum:

assignments

Start to immerse yourself in the pop culture of your country, the music, movies, literature, and videos. Start researching names, places, titles, people. Continue collecting and organizing bookmarks. Listen to radio stations online; read the sites of newspapers and magazines. Use Google Translate. Continue looking for YouTube and Facebook equivalents, which may not exist.

Use the sandbox to practice. On your pages, add links and images. Upload images. Introduce yourself at the Forum.

February 1 - arts history

Over the next month, I am going to lecture about art history, art criticism, and art analysis. In addition, we will have two class sessions devoted to arts demonstrations. You will use these ideas for your presentations and for all of your written assignments for this course.

In addition, both tests (February 10 and 24) will draw on information from the lectures and from the off-site pages linked to on this syllabus page.

We're going to start with a galloping overview history of artistic traditions and movements worldwide.

assignments

Continue to immerse yourself in the pop culture of your country, the music, movies, literature, and videos. Start researching names, places, titles, people. Continue collecting and organizing bookmarks. Listen to radio stations online. Read newspapers and magazine. Continue looking for YouTube and Facebook equivalents, which may not exist.

Begin filling in the two rows (one on each table) for your country on the wiki's home page, due February 10. I want to be able to rank order the countries and see some patterns, so the table needs to be complete before class on Wednesday, February 10. The Wikipedia entry for your country has most of the information you need. Links to other sources are below the tables.

Don't worry about messing up the table. We can always roll back to an earlier version.

Use the sandbox to practice your wiki skills. On your country's pages, add links and images. Upload more images. Embed videos and audio.

Near the top of the page, if you click on the ? question mark after your country's name, you will be able to start making the pages, unique to your country, that have your homework assignments and any other information you want to include.

The first test, on next Wednesday, February 10, will depend on your brute memorization of the basic information about the countries that we are studying. See details on the assignments page.

In preparation for the demo on Wednesday, explore this website: Essential Vermeer. Pay special attention to this page, Vermeer's Painting Technique, as well as to the five pages linked to it that explain the stages Vermeer went through to paint every one of his three dozen paintings.

February 3 - European Renaissance painting demonstration

How did Vermeer arrange the things he painted and get those fleshtones to glow? A live demonstration of the European Renaissance oil painting technique that Vermeer used for his paintings.

assignments

Continue to immerse yourself in the pop culture of your country, the music, movies, literature, and videos.

Continue filling in the two rows for your country on the wiki's home page, due February 10. I want to be able to rank order the countries and see some patterns, so the table needs to be complete before class on Wednesday, February 10. The Wikipedia entry for your country has most of the information you need. Links to other sources are below the tables.

Use the sandbox to practice. On your pages, add links and images. Upload more images. Embed videos and audio.

Alternately read first paragraphs from books and show a piece of art from a museum or gallery while we listen to instrumental music. Do at least three paragraphs (in English or English translation) and three pieces of art during your fifteen minutes. They can be classics or contemporary.

February 8, 10 - art criticism

Oumkheyr is a French Muslim woman in her 40s. Of Algerian origin, she is divorced and has a daughter. She tells CNN why she's proud to wear the burqa, also known as the niqab or full veil, and what she thinks of the law proposed by the French government to ban the burqa. A French parliament report has called for a ban on the burqa in schools, hospitals, government offices and public transport.

I wear the burqa for the simple reason that I am a Muslim and the Koran says that I must wear the full veil in order to be modest. I am proud of my Muslim faith and my modesty. I am proud to follow God's law. ...

For those of us who are believers, we just want to do God's will and live by the sacred text, so what any man says has nothing to do with that.

I'm no Koran scholar, but from what I have read, the Koran supports Oumkheyr in only two passages:

Tell the faithful women that they must keep their gaze focused below/on the ground and cover their sexual organs. They must not put their beauty and their jewellery on display. They must hide their breasts behind a purdah. They must not exhibit their beauty to anybody except their husbands, brothers, nephews, womenfolk, servants, eunuch employees and children. They must not move their legs briskly while walking because then much of their bodies can get exposed.

Surah Al Noor 24:31

Oh nabi, please tell your wives and daughters and faithful women to wear a covering dress on their bodies. That would be good. Then nobody can recognise them and harrass them. Allah is merciful and kind.

Surah Al Hijaab 33:59

assignments

Start working on the pages about your country, the glossary, and especially the report for the your first presentation on literature and the visual arts. See assignments page for details.

February 17 - interrelationships between various forms of art

Theory of multiple intelligences - all the arts require intra-personal and interpersonal intelligence. Other arts emphasize one or more of the others: verbal, visual, kinesthetic, musical, spatial, logical-mathematical

February 22 - art analysis

What's going on in the Netherlands? Well, early last Saturday morning, February 20, 2010, the government collapsed.

Dutch political leaders may take months to form a new coalition after the government collapsed for a fifth time since 2002 over troops in Afghanistan, as rising support for an anti-immigrant party limits their options.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s three-party Cabinet was broken up Feb. 20 after Finance Minister Wouter Bos’s Labor Party refused to go along with a NATO request to keep Dutch troops in the Afghan province of Uruzgan beyond this year.

Some context: The British magazine The Economist has published the Democracy Index to rate and rank 167 of the world's countries in five areas: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The countries are grouped into 30 full democracies, 50 flawed democracies, 36 hybrid regimes, and 51 authoritarian regimes. The Netherlands ranks fourth among the full democracies. All of the seventeen countries ranking higher than the U.S., as well as eight of the twelve countries ranking directly below the U.S., are governed by parliaments with no separation of the executive from the legislature.

That is, 25 of the 30 full democracies, as well as most of the countries that we are studying, have parliaments and prime ministers rather than the separation of powers that the U.S. and Latin American countries have with a separate executive branch. In addition, all of the countries that we are studying except Greece, Jamaica, and Japan have multi-party systems, as opposed to the two-party system in those three countries and in the United States.

The Dutch have a multi-party parliamentary democracy and constitional monarchy. That means that Queen Beatrix (above) is the head of state, and Prince Willem-Alexander (below with Maxima and their three daughters last summer; do they look Dutch or what?) is her heir apparent. She is only the sixth monarch since 1815, when the modern monarchy was imposed by Napoleon. The monarch has limited powers, mostly during the formation of a new cabinet and her yearly Speech from the Throne on Prinsjesdag (Princes' Day).

The Dutch hold parliamentary elections every four years unless the government collapses before then. To be more specific, we should say unless the governing coalition collapses. In the U.S. two party-system, one of the parties controls the legislature and often the other party controls the executive branch. Because there are only two, it is easy to put them on one line, next to each other. In the last century, there was quite a bit of overlap. The left-most Republicans were further left than the right-most Democrats. Increasingly, all the Republicans are to the right of all the Democrats. There is no incentive for the parties to agree. The out-party's goal is to win the next election, not to govern, and the in-party's goal is exactly the same. They know the next election is coming on a fixed schedule, and the parties give enormous amounts of money to a few big media companies, some of which are owned by foreign corporations, to help them persuade the electorate to vote for them.

In the Dutch system, similar to the other industrialized nations, twelve parties have representatives in Parliament, and several others have recently held seats or soon may again. With that many parties, it is impossible to put them all on one line, and those who try often have them in a slightly different order. More sophisticated analyses use a second or even a third dimension.

The x-axis might be political and range from favoring rapid change, embracing the future (left) to favoring incremental change, preserving the status quo as much as possible (right).

The y-axis might be economic and range from liberal (no, it's not the opposite of conservative, as the conservatives in this country keep insisting even though many of them are very liberal in the economic sense) to totalitarian.

The z-axis might be the social issues and range from progressive (left) to conservative (right)

Thus, instead of two parties next to each other and in opposition to each other, the Dutch have a dozen parties that are best conceived in a 3-D box. As you can see from this pie chart of the current representation in Parliament, none of the parties has more than 30% support. This pie chart does not try to do more than put the progressive (left) parties on the left and the others on the right. The largest single party is the CDA, the Christian Democratic Appeal. The dark-blue slice to the right of CDA is the liberal party, the VVD, the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie). Its policies are closest to the US Democratic party and most members of the US Republican party. To the right of that are the anti-immigration party (PVV) and the ultra-religious right (yes, the Netherlands has a Bible Belt).

The photo to the right shows Mauritshuis, the lighter colored building, housing the amazing Royal art collection, and the Parliament buildings. The Prime Minister's office is on the second floor of the hexagonal building next to Mauritshuis. The Dutch have two houses of Parliament, the Eerste Kamer, or upper house, and the Tweede Kamer, or second house. When this discussion refers to "Parliament" it means only the Tweede Kamer.

To summarize, Jan Peter Balkenende, the leader of the large center party, the CDA, is to the left of President Obama on every single policy issue. Another way of saying that, from the Dutch point of view: if politics in the Netherlands is operating on a full football field, politics in the U.S. is taking place only on the far right half of that field and is in danger of falling off the right edge. Here's the same thing from the US point of view: the vast majority of the Dutch populace embraces and defends political, social, and economic policies that are far, far to the left of President Obama. To go in that direction in the US is to go off to the far lunatic fringe. After the CDA, the next two largest Dutch parties are the PvdA, the Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid), which is part of the international socialist movement, and the SP, Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij). Together, those two parties, way to the left of President Obama, got almost forty percent of the vote.

Here's how the national elections work. Each party develops a fresh set of positions (standpunten) on the issues and publishes it on their web site. (Standpunten: CDA, PvdA, D66, SP, Groen Links). An election campain lasts about two months, features lots of televised free-for-all debates with a dozen people around a table, and costs a tiny fraction of what US campaigns cost. The members of Parliament spend hardly any time in the fund-raising and lobbyist-pleasing activities that their US counterparts say consumes from a third to a half of their time.

A very popular website in the Netherlands, StemWijzer (Vote Chooser - English-language version), asks a series of questions about current issues and then ranks the parties by how close their positions are to the person answering the questions. Party loyalty is low; people switch all the time. The chart below left compiled by Maurice de Hond's polling organization shows the results over the past year when a sampling of Dutch were asked, if the Parliamentary elections were held today, which party would you vote for?

The voters don't vote for a local representative to Parliament. Instead, each part has a list of people on the ballot. The list is at least as long as the number of seats the party could be expected to win, and often includes local political favorites in an attempt to draw those voters. Each voter votes for one of the names on one of the lists, though most people vote for the first name. In the Netherlands, in excess of 80% of the eligible voters complete a ballot (in the US, it's about 50% but only in presidential election years; in off-years, it's closer to 35-40%, putting the US way down the list of international voter turnout.

The votes are counted. The percentages are distributed among the 150 available seats in Parliament. For example, if the CDA got 33% of the vote, they would get 33% of the seats, that is, 50. The first 50 names on the CDA list will then enter Parliament, though if someone lower down got a lot of votes, he or she may get elevated; it's a good system for rising party stars.

It has been over a century since one party got more than 50% of the votes, so every government is a coalition. After every election, the monarch talks to the leader of each party that has enough votes for at least one seat. She then asks one of them, usually the one with the largest single bloc of votes, to try to form a coalition of more than 50%. This is an intense, messy process that can take months and several tries after an election. It has almost always involved three or four parties, often far apart on the issues, but willing to work together. Thus the zero-sum competition in the US cannot happen in the Netherlands. In the US, there's a Democrat/Republican split on every issue. In the Netherlands, there is always compromise. Otherwise, the government couldn't function. In fact, it "collapses" when it can no longer agree on an issue.

In the US, the party holding the presidency may be different from the party controling Congress. The president's cabinet are his hand-picked and trusted advisors, almost always all from his party. In the Netherlands, the eighteen cabinet seats are divided among the three or four parties in the ruling coalition. They don't all agree by any means, but they put their country first over their party, and not getting along is fatal to the coalition, so there is tremendous incentive to compromise and work it out.

The current coalition has the centrist CDA, with its leader Jan Peter Balkenende as prime minister, the far-left PvdA, with its leader Wouter Bos as the finance minister, and the CU, the Christian Unie, which has only six seats and generally does follows the CDA. The Dutch like to play with the big boys internationally, so when NATO asked member countries to send troops to Afghanistan, the Dutch sent about 2,000 in 2006 for a two-year commitment. In 2008, a former Dutch foreign minister was head of NATO and he persuaded the ruling coalition to sign on for another two years. PvdA was against it, but CDA promised, only two more years, so PvdA agreed that Dutch troops would stay until August 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, NATO formally asked the Dutch to stay yet another two years. The CDA agreed, but the PvdA said, what about our promise to the people in 2008 that we would stay only two more years?

The difference was enough to cause the PvdA to resign from the cabinet, which means that Queen Beatrix will order new elections in May or June and hope to have a new cabinet in place before her Speech from the Throne in September.

The Obama adminstration, to say the least, is not amused by the Dutch withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially after our new McChrystal Doctrine was consciously modeled after the less-aggressive but ultimately successful Dutch strategy.

Although the Dutch endured some sniping from bigger Nato powers about their perceived lack of aggression after they deployed to Uruzgan in 2006, their “population centric” strategy was a precursor of “The McChrystal Doctrine” adopted by British and American forces.

Mr Balkenende faces a general election in May after his main coalition partners, PvdA, the Labour party, walked out rather than break a promise to withdraw the 1,950 Dutch troops this year. Wouter Bos, the Labour leader, said: “A plan was agreed to when our soldiers went to Afghanistan. Our partners in the government did not want to stick to that plan, and on the basis of their refusal we have decided to resign.”

Mr Balkenende’s Christian Democrats and Labour are forecast to lose seats in the 150-member parliament. The two big gainers are forecast to be the ultra-liberals D66 and the right-wing Party of Freedom of the anti-Islamist MP Geert Wilders. Both oppose the Afghan mission.

February 24

live demos of foreign arts

February 24: test on your country's profile (the info you put on the wiki's home page)

March 1, 3, 15, 17, 22

literature and art

March 24, 29, 31, April 7, 12

music and dance

April 14, 19, 21, 26, 28

movies and video

May 3

course assessment

blank map of the world's landmasses - place the country names and draw the borders

The Syllabus

HUM 300 The Arts in Society

Medaille College - Spring 2010

Schedule at a Glance

January 20 - introduction

assignments

January 25, 27- introduction

Tools

to help you do the research for this course

how to use the wiki

assignments

February 1 - arts history

assignments

February 3 - European Renaissance painting demonstration

assignments

February 8, 10 - art criticism

assignments

February 17 - interrelationships between various forms of art

February 22 - art analysis

February 24

live demos of foreign arts

March 1, 3, 15, 17, 22

literature and art

March 24, 29, 31, April 7, 12

music and dance

April 14, 19, 21, 26, 28

movies and video

May 3

course assessment