CMS3012 Communication & Power
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LectureReading tap provides links to:
- Recorded lectures
- Learning Activities
- Online Readings
Learning Activities
These are designed to activate gestalt shifts in understanding of key concepts, and to develop the skills required to complete the assessment.
Language as Power: Gives students practice in creating examples that demonstrate understanding of a concept. This is what they need to do for their journal entries.
Models & Metaphor: Provides a series of mental puzzles designed to induce a gestalt shift from objectivist to metaphoric understanding of language.
Speech as Action: Gives students practice identifying examples of each of Searles five performatives in a newspaper. By applying the concepts they develop understanding, and the task challenges the dominant view of newspapers as primarily transmitters of information.
Reading Clegg (Karey's Tool): Online activity shows students how to use grammatical tools to sort information from a complex and convoluted text into key categories around which text is organised, even without a background in the area.
Once students have sorted all the concepts correctly they are able to print out the table of results.They are then asked to turn the characteristics listed for each category into a coherent metaphor - a single rich image or scenario - which they then use to test and apply the metaphor to new domains.
Arendt on Power: provides a theory of power not discussed by Clegg, hence students can use this text to test and apply his models. This gives students a chance to practice what they will need to do for their essay. Because Arendt's English has the complex grammatical structure of her native German, I also use this activity to get students to analyse complex sentences into their simple component parts before categorising the parts. This is an important analytic tool which gives students the confidence to deal with complex texts.
Disciplinary Practices: provides learning activities that demonstrate through experience that Foucault's disciplinary power shapes the body and desire; the connection between Foucault's tables and the Clegg activity; and a chance for students to identify examples of each of Foucault's four disciplinary instruments of power for the domain they are analysing in their essay.
The remaining activities provide opportunities for applying models of power, and identifying examples from various domains to help students apply both models of power in their essays.
CMS3010 Communication & Environment
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Each block in the matrix includes links to:
- Recorded lectures
- Learning Activities
- Useful Links
Learning Activities
Metaphor: students experience the grip of the 'humans vs nature' paradigm through a concept sorting activity;and attempting to find examples of a range of concepts from media, manufactured goods, through biological species they experience for themselves Harre's point about number of members of a category is proportional to social priorities.
Models & Science: students play with concrete examples to explore causal features of climate models; create a mud map that helps develop ecosystem perspective - applied in final project; and play with online interactive computer models of ecosystems. These activities are designed to make non-science students comfortable thinking about scientific issues.
Economic Models: provide a range of activities that explore the difference between 'economy given priority' and 'ecosystem given priority' which is applied in Newschart section of Journal assignment.
Media Research: Activities to guide students through completing Newscharts.
Economic Discourse: Activities with structured questions to consider in relation to a range of newspaper articles one or two issues, which help students develop their comment section of their Newschart.
Media Manipulation: Uses a role play activity to help students develop their strategic understanding of competing interests at play on specific issues. They need to apply this sort of strategic analysis in their final project.
Global Economy: Uses role play to develop understanding of country specific interests and the media strategies of governments and vested interests in relation to global negotiations on climate change.
Society as Ecosystem: Uses games to explore meaning of permaculture concepts and their relevance for ecological design of human systems. Provides concepts to test current practice against. This is relevant for final question in Project.
Political System: Assessment tests actual environmental decision making practices in a case of conflict, against Habermas's Ideal Speech Situation