Course Project Overview

Your Popular Culture Project, a portfolio of different assignments, will serve to integrate the main themes of this course:

1. How television both reflects culture, and also manipulates it.
2. The role Hollywood films play in shaping the popular culture.
3. The many aspects of popular culture in everyday life and social history.
4. Social issues and major problems in American Popular Culture.

To achieve this, we will be looking at different eras of recent American History through the lens of television and via mass media. For your course project, you will analyze a film, a popular song, a television series/ show, a magazine or newspaper article, and one website from a particular period in history that we will cover in the course. You will then research the media product itself, and the time in American history when it was created, to see the relationship between the media, popular culture, and American history.

In each media analysis piece, you will discuss the social issues present within both the media you are discussing (film, tv show, article), and the ways in which these social issues were communicated to American audiences through the media piece being analyzed. These social and cultural issues include, but are not limited to: sexism, the feminist movement, civil rights, environmental protection, gangs, terrorism...etc. The point of this final project is to have a completed portfolio at the end of the course, which includes assignments that are all connected through social issues in recent American History.

Your final project is due in Module 06. There will be individual assignments along the way. The module they are due in is noted in the time line below.

Each essay assignment will function as a portion of a portfolio piece, which when completed at the end of the course, will encompass the entire course project. Each essay should be a minimum of 600 words, and a maximum of 800 words. The essays should provide, in your own words, a thoughtful reflection on the assignment topic. APA style is required for all essays in this course. Quotations from other sources are acceptable, and encouraged, but you must also include citations of at least one scholarly reference per essay assignment. This scholarly reference must be separate from the assigned readings for the course, including the textbook. This will serve to enhance your understanding of how to conduct scholarly research, and give you more experience with using the vast electronic resources available to you in the college's online library.