Concerning the formal criteria for the syllabi, and we have drawn up a list below which we urge you to consider.

We previously requested that syllabi presenters send to the PANDM list (pandm@listserv.oit.unc.edu) a draft of the syllabus by the Sunday preceding the presentation, preferably closer to noon than to midnight.

We realize that those who present next week will have syllabi in a more preliminary state than those that follow later; they likewise will have more time to finalize their projects. We hope that the presentations will be mostly an occasion for constructive suggestions and entertainment of the intellectual issues of pedagogy.

The more detail there is in your final syllabus, the more useful it is likely to be to you in the future, as something you can directly use or easily modify as a viable class; it also belongs in the teaching dossier that will go out to prospective employers along with your reference letters, with an explanation of the circumstances of its formulation in this seminar.

Here are the criteria:

Course title (with format and level of difficulty clarified in a note, i.e., intro, upper level, lecture or seminar, etc.). While it is acceptable to have a class that is not strictly introductory, you should consider that prerequisites and assumed background are almost never a factor in most liberal arts colleges, and you should also beware of the tendency to reproduce graduate seminar bibliographies for clueless students.

Course description, including enumeration of educational objectives (as Charlie did so well Tuesday).

Required texts, and additional readings.

Sequence of weeks, with separate titles for each section and also each class. Our standard model is the 14-week semester.

Notation of readings (print or Internet or visual or audio or other); the final draft of the syllabus needs to have exact page numbers, which among other things indicates the weekly reading load.

Basis for evaluation of final grade.

Mix of exams, term papers, response papers, journals, reports, interviews, presentations, and other writing/expression opportunities. This can also include examples of non-graded activities, such as small group in-class discussions of particular questions on a certain date.

Any additional comments you wish to insert into the syllabus will be welcome, either as justifications or explanations of particular items or strategies (e.g., one can add catalog summaries of films to a syllabus to prepare students for what they will be seeing).