Session Book

Experience, read, reflect

As you know, this class has two streams:

• Practice (mostly on Monday, usually making reference to the ideas)
• Ideas (mostly on Wednesday, often with a nod to practice)

There will be readings for both, and sometimes a small field assignment. As a result of your engagement with all of this, we are asking you to produce a “Session Book” as a final deliverable for the class.

The session book serves two purposes:

• give you a place to capture your learning and reflections from class sessions and the readings.
• Help us see that you are learning and growing.

MAKING YOUR SESSION BOOK

1. Make a weekly date with yourself where you take the time to write notes on what you have been learning in this class.

2. Your notes can include sketches, and can be written by hand or typed on a computer.

3. We don’t care what format you keep the notes in (some prefer paper, some a word processor or slides, and we’ve seen some people use medium.com for this purpose). But the required deliverable is a printed version of your Session Book.

4. We would like to see a good balance between your engagement with the material (tell us what you are learning from it) and your own reflection (why it matters to you, what it makes you think, connections you’re making).

GRADING CRITERIA
We encourage you to make this part of your habit of reflection for the next few weeks, so the burden is light at the end of the term. But we know many things compete for your attention, and it might be helpful for you to know what lens we will use when we evaluate your results. These are the main ingredients.

Completeness
Please include notes and reflections for each of our sessions and readings. If your process means there are topical summaries or longer-term reflections rather than week-by-week, blow-by-blow, that’s acceptable. But please make it easy for us to see the completeness of your Session Book.

Engagement
Rote capture or copy-and-paste of slides might be useful for later reference, but neither of those indicate engagement with the material. The notes you make while listening and readings are better indicators, and if you take a little time to massage them they will be more useful to you as well. We also request some kind of reflection for at least each of the weeks of class. Freewriting, a short essay, an annotated sketch, whatever is most valuable for you.

Due date
Monday, May 8th