I just checked out the Choice Project Progress googlesheet and realized that more than half of the class has decided to Attend a CAM healing session for the first assignment.
While I’m excited that you’re all open to experiencing new forms of healing and will get the opportunity to integrate course theory with lived experience, I did notice a problem I did not anticipate when I originally constructed the assignment.
Lots of you are planning to attend a healing session (such as yoga and meditation), but the first submission date (Sunday, March 22) is well before we will have covered those topics in the course.
An important objective of this course is to give you the social and historical contexts of these different healing modalities — having you attend a healing session without having background knowledge of it both defeats the purpose of the assignment, but also limits you in your ability to integrate course concepts into your reflection and analysis.
Therefore, I’m asking that you postpone attendance of a healing session until we’ve covered the material in the course.
If you’re planning on attending an Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese healing session or Chiropractic, you’re still good to go, although the turn around on analysis will be very short — again, assuming that you wait to schedule the session until after we’ve covered the material.
Finally, a few of you have indicated that you want to attend a healing session of a modality we do not cover in the course material. For these instances, I’ve indicated in the assignment instructions that you need to first complete the “Curate Course Content” assignment on that specific modality so that you have socio-historical context before attending a session.
To wrap up, if you’re one of the students that indicated you wanted to attend a healing session, please put that project on hold and pivot to your second project choice. You can still come back to the attend a healing session later in the semester. Also make sure that you update the Project Progress googlesheet, as well as your project pages on your EduBlogs.
