This page contains a description of the student research project for J. B. Owens's spring 1998 upper-division and graduate level course Constituting Modern Spain, 1808-1982. Questions and comments may be sent to me at my e-mail address (owenjack@isu.edu), or if you prefer, you may send me a message now by selecting this button: Mail Now. If you select the latter option, please be sure to include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
This is project is designed to promote the goals of the programs for HISTORY MAJORS at Idaho State University. The required courses for the History Major are not tasks to check off until one finally graduates. Instead, they are part of a process intended to enhance both students' knowledge and understanding and their cognitive and expressive skills. The process is thesis-driven in that it culminates in History 491, "Seminar," in which each student must undertake a significant piece of creative research and present the results in writing. To do well in the seminar work, History Majors should have already well developed the abilities to raise important historical questions, to draw from primary and secondary sources the information necessary to answer such questions, to formulate hypotheses and use the acquired information to defend these, and to present both the final thesis and its defense in a coherent written form. This course should help you further develop these abilities.
Great Teams: Most significant creative, innovative work now is done by GREAT GROUPS or TEAMS rather than by people working individually. In the work of the INSTITUTE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, you will be dealing with problems of great complexity. Together you are smarter than any one of you, and in order to form the great group you will need to find solutions to these problems, you will have to COLLABORATE. You must learn to cooperate, to interact in ways that are mutually supportive, to encourage the active participation of other group members, and to provide descriptive feedback about others' contributions which permits them to make the adjustments necessary to improve performance. I will coach you to become a great team by establishing the necessary interaction norms and encouraging each of you to practice the necessary skills expected of History Majors. The COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATIONS TECHNIQUES we will use in this course lend themselves to the rapid development of such skills. I will try to provide you with regular, individual feedback about your contributions, and you should ask for such feedback whenever you think it necessary. But in the end, each of you will have to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for establishing the sort of emotional climate which will permit all to contribute their gifts and talents and for making this a satisfying class.
You will receive copies of the constitutions drafted by other team leaders, and you must read these over to prepare questions and comments for the FINAL PRESENTATION session. On THURSDAY, 14 MAY, from 4:30 to 7:00 p.m., we will meet to discuss the draft constitutions produced for the class. You will do a brief presentation of your draft constitution and then respond to the questions and comments of ICR members. You will be expected to ask questions and make comments about the draft constitutions of presented by other ICR team leaders.
Since only one student will be allowed to be team leader for work on a particular location, we will have a lottery on THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY to determine the order of selection. Come to that class with a list of several possibilities, selected from the project locations list, about which you would like to do research. You will need to begin your research immediately because I will begin, soon after you select the country (or other entity) on which you will work, to request regular reports from you as team leader for the on-line class discussion about your analysis of its particular problems and about the measures you would include in a draft constitution to deal with them. You will need to involve the members of your team in the development of an understanding of the location and the constitutional features necessary to produce a functioning polity there.
In order to facilitate this work on your chosen location, you are to post to the course discussion list (in ASCII "plain text") by 3:00 p.m. on THURSDAY, 29 JANUARY, a PRELIMINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY of materials about the HISTORY and CURRENT CONDITIONS of that location. In addition to appropriate books in the collections of ISU and other libraries, this bibliography MUST include at least FIVE (5) ARTICLES from scholarly journals like Current History and Foreign Affairs and FIVE (5) ITEMS from the REFERENCE and/or GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS collections of the ISU library.
Since you must begin your research immediately after you have selected your location, we will also discuss the work of the INSTITUTE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH in class on 22 JANUARY. Prior to this class, therefore, you MUST have read this page. Moreover, since you will be using books, journal articles, published documents, and Internet resources in the defense of the provisions in your draft constitution, you must also have read prior to the 22 JANUARY class the pages on bibliography and citation style and on plagiarism.
For this course, there are strict standards, explained on these pages, for the style of bibliography entries and notes and for the citation of any words or ideas that are not your own. Since failure to observe these standards precisely will lower significantly your grade on your ICR project, make sure you come to the 22 January class prepared to seek clarification of anything on these three pages which you do not understand.
Throughout the course, your research and the constitutional solutions to the problems you discover should be frequent topics of our electronic discussions. You MUST answer promptly (WITHIN 72 HOURS) any questions you get from me or from other ICR members on these matters.
I am in the process of developing a Course Bibliography, to which I will add items once the locations for ICR research have been picked.
Revisions to the Draft Constitutions
The computer is a major tool for dialogue. I can insert my responses to what
you have written within your electronic text; you can respond to these by
revising what you have done; I can examine together on my screen both your
original text (with my responses) and your revised text, and I can insert
further queries and comments.
If it is submitted sufficiently before the 23 April due date in electronic form, I will be happy to raise queries in the text of your draft constitution and supporting defense. You may then rewrite your project to respond to these queries (as well as dealing with flaws of style and content), improving the quality of what you have written. You should clarify with me the meaning of my queries before you begin your revisions. There will be no limit to the number of times you can rewrite your constitution and defense. To solicit my comments, you will need to submit your draft constitution as an ASCII ("plain text"; "DOS text") e-mail message.
All contents copyright © 1996, 1998. J. B. Owens All rights reserved.Revised: 10 January 1998
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/conmodsp/project.html