Attendance

My courses adhere to PSU’s Excused Absence Policy.

Furthermore, due to what we’ve all learned about health and work during the COVID-19 pandemic and to my own commitment to universal design for learning, there is no formal attendance policy for my classes. This means that absences will not be penalized in any way and that success in the course is determined by your investment in the readings and assignments, not by your physical presence. My courses are designed to be accessible for both remote and asynchronous learning.

That said, we’ve also been reminded in recent years just how important community is to human beings: community focuses our attention, helps us share our enthusiasm, and keeps us accountable to one another. Or as John Donne put it in 1624, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” My expectation is that we’ll all be attending class in person – and completing the reading and the assignments – as much as we can, because that’s how we can best support one another to learn, to explore, and to question: as a community.

But our bodyminds are only human: we all get sick, get weary, or get too sad from time to time. And our classrooms (like all our communities) need to give us the freedom to be human. As such, if you won’t be able to attend in person or to complete assignments for a time, please contact me to let me know. I will direct you to the Teams room for the day’s class session or to the video recording thereof (both available on Canvas), and we can discuss a timeline (or alternatives) for how you can complete the assignments.

Above all, I want to make sure we all stay in contact throughout the semester. If you reach a total of three absences without being in contact with me, I’ll be sure to reach out to you to check in!

Recordings

Lectures or other class meetings for this course may be regularly recorded using USNH media platforms such as Teams. (The may is dependent on available and working technology in our classroom. If we record class, you can find these videos on Teams). Such recordings may be available for educational use by other students enrolled in the class (including both for instruction and as a review tool), by myself, and by other university officials who support course instruction (such as Prof. Scott Coykendall, leader of our Humanities, Cultures, and Communication academic unit). Your voice or image may be captured on the recordings, and by enrolling in this course you are consenting to such recording for these purposes.

If you’d like to not be recorded during segments of our synchronous sessions where such recording occurs, you’re free to turn off you microphone and camera during these sessions. Videos are preserved on USNH servers for a matter of weeks and then deleted to conserve space. If you have additional privacy concerns, please let me know.