East meets West

1. An oral presentation in which you discuss one activity, behavior or art form performed in both the East and the West. You will discuss how the performance of the activity differs between the two cultures.
2. A research paper in which you identify how the differences in performance of the activity reflect differing value(s).

You can (and, for most topics, should) restrict East to some region or country in East Asia, and restrict West to a region or country in Europe or the Americas. Naturally, your audience is other students in our class; in other words, you can assume the audience has had the discussions and the background knowledge of a typical classmate.

Your presentation (and your paper) should be based on solid facts drawn from your own research. Choose the quantity and quality of your sources carefully. If you include too few good sources, you'll be uninformed; if you choose too many, you will be swamped with too many facts.

You will give a 10-20 minute well-practiced PowerPoint presentation to the class and be prepared to field questions. (The presenter should feel free to say, "I don't know," in response to a question; better that than to answer a question with pure speculation.) You should e-mail me the PowerPoint presentation so that I receive it before 8am of the day you are schedule to present. In addition (just in case) be sure a copy of the presentation is in your home directory or bring it to class on a disk or the like.

This oral presentation is worth 10% of your final course grade. I will assess it using the following grading guidelines:

• A grade of F is reserved for a failure to comply with the terms of the assignment.
• The D presentation, in some significant way, fails to address the question asked.
• The C presentation, while it attempts to addresses the question, is sufficiently hard to follow that the audience may not understand how the activity's performance differs in any substantive way in the East and the West. The presentation may be poorly organized, or the presenter may not explain the core differences. Sometimes the C presentation is well prepared, but isn't practiced. As a consequence, the oral portion of the presentation is rushed, choppy, or garbled.
• The B presentation is easy to follow and addresses the question asked. Each slide has enough information to help the presentation, but not so much information that the slide detracts from the presentation. The presentation is comfortably paced, giving the audience time to absorb any material on the slides and time to hear what the presenter is saying. The presentation clearly identifies how the activity is performed differently in two cultures in a way that conveys why we should care. The presenter might be nervous and might have to stop to collect his or her thoughts at times, but the presentation is still clear.
• The A presentation has all the qualities of a B presentation, but in addition it is lively, well paced, and interesting. The sure mark of an A presentation is that those in the audience continue to think (and talk) about the presentation after is over.