Arts foundation: Power

[vceendpls]

Hey guys,
Doing BA at Melb uni and currently doing the subject Power which is an Arts foundation subject. Just want to get some peoples experiences with this subject because currently, I am very confused about this subject and it feels very convoluted and just difficult to grasp what we're actually learning. The lectures have been extremely difficult to keep up with because the lecturer uses heavy language as if he just expects us all to perfectly understand what he's trying to say. Also, the readings are so weird and also very difficult to grasp. People who have done this subject before, were you also confused at the start? does it get better? Also, are the readings crucial to this subject? Also, how does the assessment work? they're all essays and are the closely linked to the lecture slides? or is there more leeway to the assessments?

Sorry for all these questions lol, if a past student could share their experience then that would be awesome.

Thanks

[literally lauren]

Hi there!

I didn't do Power ('Reason' was my Foundation subject) but most of my other Arts friends did, so unless  someone else with more experience jumps in, I'm happy to help.

Re: understanding lectures, trust me, I know what it's like to get frustrated with academics who babble on with their verbose jargon to seem important. It's even worse when you do understand what they're saying and you realise it's often totally meaningless A couple of things I'd recommend:
- if you're attending lectures, keep a running tally of the words/phrases you don't understand, and look them up yourself later
- just focus on the general gist of what's being said in the lecture, then go home, watch the recording, and 'translate' the academic lingo
- talk to your tutor about any unfamiliar concepts - you can even bring this up as a tute discussion point if possible. Just say 'hey, I was wondering if we could talk about this whole 'hegemony' thing since I didn't really get it on Wednesday - any ideas?'

Re: readings... I'm tempted to tell you to just skip the ones you don't get since it's not crucial to understand all of them, but if you're not understanding >50% of them, then it's worth breaking them down. Same process as above - isolate the bits you can't grasp and either look them up, or ask your tutor. If there are PASS classes for Power, they might be worth sussing out too since you'll be able to ask a high scoring student from the 2015 cohort about some of this stuff.

Re: assessment: if it's like Reason, I believe you'll have an 'annotated bibliography' as your first task, and then two essays later in the semester? Or is it one essay and one 'take home exam' (which is basically just an essay in a shorter time span)? You'll likely get a choice of a bunch of topics that will allow you to just focus on the bits of the course you understood and found most interessting. From memory, Reason had the bibliography thing (~10%), then one major essay (~50%) on the broadest possible prompt (eg. 'Reason is kinda complicated. Discuss.') followed by the take home exam (~40%) where we got 48 hours to respond to one of three prompts... or something like that.

I'd definitely talk to your tutor about assessments though, since their primary role in Foundation subjects is to help you understand how that whole process works.

Let me know if that doesn't make sense - sorry I can't offer more specific advice; there aren't many Arts-ish people on the forums

[vceendpls]

Hi there!

I didn't do Power ('Reason' was my Foundation subject) but most of my other Arts friends did, so unless  someone else with more experience jumps in, I'm happy to help.

Thanks for that Lauren! Just regarding the assessment, our first one is this (quote from LMS):

'500 word bibliographic exercise (15%)

This first piece of assessment will familiarise you with some essential academic skills that are essential for producing quality written work in Arts subjects: developing a research strategy, evaluating the relevance, currency and authority of information sources, and as part of this learning to identify and distinguish academic sources from non-academic sources. You will also learn the importance of fully and correctly citing sources used in your work.'

Was this similar to yours? and is it particularly difficult?

Thanks

[literally lauren]

Thanks for that Lauren! Just regarding the assessment, our first one is this (quote from LMS):

'500 word bibliographic exercise (15%)

This first piece of assessment will familiarise you with some essential academic skills that are essential for producing quality written work in Arts subjects: developing a research strategy, evaluating the relevance, currency and authority of information sources, and as part of this learning to identify and distinguish academic sources from non-academic sources. You will also learn the importance of fully and correctly citing sources used in your work.'

Was this similar to yours? and is it particularly difficult?

Thanks

Aaaaaahhhh I remember now. Yeah, for Reason, we got some nonsense exercise where we had to write a 500 word summary for a 2000 word article that had no real point, then do a reference list/ bibliography entry for the article. But for some dumb reason, they chose an article with no author, no page numbers, and very few publication details so no one knew how to actually document the thing I think they ended up just telling us in a lecture which details to include. Hopefully they've got a more sensible first assignment in that subject by now because ours was so counter-intuitive 

So your assignment might be something like that, but I believe most of the other Foundation subjects (incl. Power back in my year) had an 'annotated bibliography,' which is something you only ever do in Foundation subjects... meaning that it's not actually preparing you for later academia. Your tutor should explain the details of this, and you may also have a Workshop on it in Week 4 or 6 or whenever those things start. Just use re:cite and you'll be totally fine.

In general, it's not difficult, but the small penalties for small mistakes can make a difference in the end, so it's worth quadruple checking your work to make sure all the punctuation in the bibliography is right just in case

Good luck!

Also - and I know it's super early in the semester & I'll pester people to do this after exams anyway - but it'd be great if you could beef up our Subject Reviews once you've finished your units since the Science kids are currently trumping us threefold, and it's a great help to future students who also have to reckon with vague LMS entries and limited channels of communication with staff

Let me know if you have any questions