Unit rationale, description and aim
Scholars in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences need to understand the significance of the social and cultural changes that have taken place since the Second World War. This unit examines the various ways in which key issues and events in the long 1960s have been understood across a range of disciplines. This honours-level unit requires students to extend their studies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences by exploring related disciplinary understandings of the controversial events, thinkers and cultural producers that shaped the key cultural movements and their legacies in the late twentieth century. The aim of the unit is to deepen students' understanding of their own discipline area and broaden their contextual knowledge through connecting their own disciplinary perspectives to other approaches, methodologies and conceptual frameworks in the Arts, Humanities and Social Science disciplines.
This unit is available to Honours students in a range of disciplines in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Learning outcomes
To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.
Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.
Explore the graduate capabilities.
Articulate and apply advanced theoretical knowledg...
Learning Outcome 01
Critically analyse and evaluate complex debates an...
Learning Outcome 02
Relate advanced discipline-specific skills to tran...
Learning Outcome 03
Content
Topics may include:
- Postmodernity as theoretical and cultural practice
- Radical and reactionary politics of the 1960s and 1970s
- Postwar global economic order and theories of late capitalism
- Decolonisation and the global pan-Indigenous movement
- The rise of new social movements, including civil rights, second-wave feminism and gay liberation
- Awareness of and responses to the global environmental crisis
- Class and selfhood in the era of mass consumption
- New age spiritualities and countercultural currents in established religions
- Countercultural subcultures
- Cultural and artistic movements of the counterculture (rock and roll, folk, beat poetry, postmodern art, the psychedelic movement etc)
- Innovation, technology and new media in the information age.
Assessment strategy and rationale
A range of assessment procedures will be used to meet the unit Learning Outcomes and develop Graduate Attributes consistent with University assessment requirements. The assessment tasks and their weighting for this unit are designed to demonstrate achievement of each Learning Outcome. In order to pass this unit, students are required to submit and participate in all assessment tasks.
The first assessment task develops a broad understanding of the range of disciplinary perspectives and approaches to the significant changes that took place from the 1960s. This requires students to synthesise and critically engage with unit content through collaborative reflection on key texts, as well as through independent exploration of relevant digital repositories. This task will develop advanced online skills and will enhance students’ digital literacy.
The second assessment task requires students to analyse a countercultural source from the long 1960s and to use their own disciplinary knowledge to communicate findings to their peers in an online forum and for all students to engage with and respond to the perspectives of others. This task requires students to formulate an understanding of the approaches of their own discipline and to explore how this can be extended and enriched through engagement with ideas from other disciplines.
The third assessment task invites students to explore in-depth a particular aspect of the long 1960s through the lens of their own discipline.
Overview of assessments
Assessment Task 1: Online tasks During the unit, ...
Assessment Task 1: Online tasks
During the unit, students will complete activities that demonstrate understanding of unit content and explore key texts collaboratively with their peers. The purpose of these tasks is to actively engage students in peer discussion and debate in multidisciplinary contexts and to build skills in digital literacy, problem solving and creativity.
30%
Assessment Task 2: Seminar Paper or multimodal pr...
Assessment Task 2: Seminar Paper or multimodal presentation
Students will present their analysis of a countercultural source from the long 1960s to the class and critically engage with the presentations of their fellow students. The purpose of this assignment is to develop students’ ability to use their home discipline to analyse sources and to extend their analysis through multidisciplinary conversation.
20%
Assessment Task 3: Written Essay Students will pr...
Assessment Task 3: Written Essay
Students will prepare a research essay which examines the long 1960s through their home disciplinary lens. The purpose of this assignment is to develop students’ understandings of the distinctive nature of their home discipline and the relationship between their home discipline and the social and cultural changes that have taken place during and since the long 1960s.
50%
Learning and teaching strategy and rationale
Multi-mode: Workshops, web consultation, online seminars, online collaborative forums, computer workshops, online research tasks, and online seminar presentations.
This multidisciplinary unit at the honours-level enables students to deepen their knowledge and understanding of their own discipline and provides them with broader disciplinary perspectives on the production of scholarship. Through engagement and dialogue between disciplines, this unit promotes an important self-reflexivity in relation to their own discipline. Through this approach, students will come to understand the value of interdisciplinary approaches to the production of knowledge in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The unit embraces active learning involving online activities through which students will:
1) Gain a deep understanding of the content covered in the unit.
The activities in this unit include reading, writing, discussion and online debates aimed at promoting analysis and synthesis of class content. Students will examine a range of perspectives in order to understand the complex relationships between disciplinary approaches to the key events and issues that shaped the long 1960s.
2) Acquire, develop and hone skills fundamental to their discipline.
This will include the sharpening of skills relevant to their discipline including the ability to understand disciplinary methodologies, and how they intersect with methodologies in other disciplines, identify high-quality secondary sources and incorporate them into their own research and analysis. Students will acquire the ability to take a position within debates and to communicate their findings in a scholarly manner.
150 hours in total with a normal expectation of 24 hours of directed study and the total contact hours should not exceed 24 hours. The directed study may include online lectures, tutorials, webinars, discussion boards, advanced library and database challenges, podcasts etc. The balance of the hours then become private study to complete readings, research, prepare seminar presentations or assessment tasks for the unit.