Course Director: Philip MacEwen (pmacewen@yorku.ca)

Office hours:

In-person and virtual office hours will be held immediately after class each Monday and Wednesday.

In-person office hours will be held in R S203.

Organization of the course

MODR 1730 6.0C is 1) an introduction to critical thinking 2) with a focus on a range of social issues. The critical skills include logical analysis, conceptual analysis, fallacy analysis, language analysis, and writing analysis. Using these critical skills, the social issues we will study include climate change, environmental degradation and pollution, inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, speciesism, the threat of nuclear war, and many others.

Technical requirements for taking the course:

MODR 1730 6.0C, Reasoning about Social Issues, is an in-class course.

To maximize flexibility, all in-class lectures and tutorials will be recorded via Zoom and posted on the course website.

The complete written text of the in-class lectures will also be posted on the course website.

If students want to take all/some of the course on-line, they will need a computer and/or smart device with stable, high-speed Internet connection and Zoom access.

Here are some useful links for student computing information, resources and help:

Student Guide to Moodle

Zoom@YorkU Best Practices 

Zoom@YorkU User Reference Guide

Computing for Students Website

Student Guide to eLearning at York University

To determine Internet connection and speed, there are online tests, such as Speedtest, that can be run.]

There are no hard-copy tests/readings for MODR 1730 6.0C.

All the required course text/readings will be posted on the course website.

Any optional readings will be on-line resources with URL’s posted on the course website.

The Course Outline will also be posted on the course website.

There will be five short, small-group writing assignments, each worth 20% of the final grade (5 x 20%=100%).

Submitted assignments will be assessed according to the following criteria, each worth 33.33% of the grade: 1) content, i.e., what the submissions say; 2) organization, i.e., where the submissions say what they say, and style, i.e., how the submissions say what they say.

No grade will be assigned for “attendance” or “participation.” However, students are encouraged to interact with course materials through in-class discussion and tutorials and/or discussion forums, chat rooms, and other venues.

Time and locations:

MODR 1730 6.0C will meet twice each week.

It will meet in-class on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30-5:30 pm in R S203 (Room 203, Ross Building, South Wing).

The course will meet remotely via Zoom at the same time.

If students are not able to attend in-class or meet remotely via Zoom at this time, the lectures can be accessed on the course website at any time after they have been downloaded from the iCloud.

The learning objectives of MODR 1730 6.0C are twofold: 1) to gain facility with a variety of critical skills students will need to be successful in any academic or professional career and 2) to use these skills in studying a variety of topics which are, or ought to be, of broad public concern.

Course policies:

The written lectures and tutorials for MODR 1730 6.0C, as well as the topics and matrices for the five short small-group writing assignments, will be posted on the course website before the course begins.

That way, students will be able to work ahead in the course, should they wish to do so.

They will also know in advance what the five writing assignments are with detailed instructions on how to write them.

During the first week of the course, each student will be assigned to a small writing group (2-5 members) and provided with contact information for the other members of that group.

Please reach out to the members of your small writing group and get to know how they can contribute to the five required assignments.

Assignments should be submitted to the Course Director no later than the deadlines indicated in the Course Outline.

Each participating member of each writing group will receive the same grade for the same assignment.

Participating members are those whose names and student numbers appear on the cover page of each assignment as submitted to the Course Director by the writing group to which they belong.

All assignments submitted to the Course Director must be copied at the time of submission to the participating members of your writing group. That way, participating members will know if and when assignments have been sent to the Course Director.

Assignments which are not copied to the participating members of your group will be returned to the sender without comments and without a grade.

Members of writing groups who do not participate in any or all of the five short writing assignments for the course will receive a grade of “0” for the relevant assignment/s.