Objectives: (1) Students understand the behavior of individuals, differences and similarities in social and cultural contexts of human existence, and the processes by which groups function. (2) Students comprehend and assess individual and group values and their importance in
social problem solving and policymaking.

Overview:
Please choose a traditionally marginalized group of people (e.g. women, Black Americans, Muslims, LGBTQ+, etc…) and discuss how they were portrayed in communication (e.g. TV, movies, sitcoms, radio, etc…) historically (any time period you’d like) and compare it to today. Be sure to provide evidence to support your claims as this is not intended to be an opinion piece. You are also welcome to get quite specific if you find something that interests you. For example, a friend of mine does research on television portrayals of international doctors.

Guidelines:

Please respond in one APA style page (either APA 6th or 7th edition is fine, double spaced, 1 margins) and upload your response in a .doc or .docx  or pdf document.

Points will be deducted if your response is longer than one page.  Cover pages and reference pages do not count against your limit. Please provide a succinct but thorough response.  Learning to write within a word limit is a valuable skill.

Be sure to include references.  References and title pages do not count against your page limit.  You should start with a title page, then have your one-page response, then have a reference page.

General Grading Criteria

The following is a general guideline regarding the 5 different categories on the rubrics.  Please see comments in Carmen for more details when you get your grade back, but this is a general note:

Exceptional responses briefly but succinctly combine information from lecture and outside sources.  The response is extremely well written and organized. There is little to no room for improvement. Exceptional responses demonstrate that you can reiterate information from the lecture and other course materials, find and integrate additional relevant information on your own from sources outside of the course materials, and incorporate your own original analysis.

Above Average responses briefly but succinctly answer the questions, combining information from the class as well as information from outside class.  There is some additional information that may improve the response but overall it is above average.

Average responses meet the minimum requirements of the assignment.  However, information needs to be clarified or there is information that is incorrect.  Improvements could be made in organizing information from different sources.

Needs Improvement means there was some key information missing or inaccurate/irrelevant information included.

Not Addressed generally means that the information was missing or inaccurate.