Assignment: Do and share your research on a Francophone country, due Sep 2.

Assignment: Do and share your research on a Francophone country, due Sep 2.

Summary: Everyone will be doing a little bit of research and producing an **introductory** powerpoint to a Francophone country with an important Muslim population. This is not a high-stakes assignment; it will be worth 30 points in the “Individual Research” category, so about 3% of your overall grade.

Purpose: Students will individually or in pairs prepare a recorded presentation with some basic information about a Francophone country of their choice, which all students will view to get a general idea of the breadth of the Francophone world, the varying degrees to which Islam is present in these countries, and some current events that relate to this course. By sharing the presentations with each other, the class effectively crowdsources the research, and they can refer back to these presentations later in the semester.

What resources can I use/ how must I document them: This is not a presentation requiring deep research; it is more informal, and I am not insisting on strict footnoting for this assignment. You can use Wikipedia, the CIA Factbook, and other basic internet searches for the general information required (1-2 below). (Note: some professors do not allow the use of Wikipedia as an authoritative research site; do not assume from this assignment that you can use it in other classes — always make sure you understand what each professor’s standards are!)

You will also be searching for newspaper articles, as detailed below (3). You may use any information you find on the sites you consult, and it is understood for this assignment that your factual content will come from the collection of sites you will include on the last slide of your Powerpoint; you do not need to separately footnote each point in your presentation as long as all sites are included in your Works Consulted list at the end.

However, as is always the case, you should neither cut-and-paste text from a website without quotation marks, nor make a presentation consisting entirely of quoted material, nor minimally paraphrase a sentence (see example at end of these instructions for what I mean by that). You may use statistics, tables, images from the sites you consult, but as far as any text on your slides or spoken as you narrate, it should be phrased in your own words unless directly quoted (and direct quotes should be minimal.)

How to submit: [I will prepare detailed instructions on how to record your presentation by Friday Aug 28: I wanted to share this much now so you had an idea and could start your research.]

CONTENT:

Your presentation will probably be 7-12 minutes (depending somewhat on the country you chose), and MUST include the 5 segments listed below. This is an introduction; do not make your presentation longer than 15 minutes, because your classmates have to watch these!!! Comprehensive but succinct is better! (If two people are working together, since you each need a news story, yours will be on the longer side but should still not exceed 15 minutes.)

(1) a map clearly showing the location of your country on its continent, and designating its capital and possibly other major cities.

(2) Demographics and other important information about the country: (a) total population, (b) official languages, (c) ethnic breakdown (if available), (d) % immigrants (only if relevant), (e) linguistic and religious demographics, and whether country has an official religion, is officially secular, etc., (f) general age breakdown of population, (g) a BRIEF indication of historical or current links with France/French (explaining why it’s a Francophone country, if it was a colony, when it got its independence, and any other thing you think is relevant here: (g) could take 2-3 minutes).

Notes: do not include so much data as to overwhelm your classmates. If there are 20 ethnic groups or languages in the country, you can list the top 3-4. When I ask for the age breakdown of the population, I don’t want you to read off the entire “0-15: 20%; 15-25: 15% etc.” Just say something like, “70% of the population is under 50.” Also: it really annoys me when students give population figures down to the ones digit. Populations change all the time. Please round the figure you find to the nearest million or hundred thousand and mark it as “estimated [date].” The data given on the sign-in sheet is about 2 years old now and will have changed quite a bit for many of these countries. That was only to give you an idea; find an updated figure. Population estimates also vary a great deal on different sites, so check several different sources to make sure they are in the same ballpark. Do indicate on that slide your specific source for the population estimate you end up with, so I can verify it.

Since some people are not that great with numbers, it is nice, but not required, to include some comparisons (e.g. “their total population is the same as California’s” or “this country is about the size of Texas.”).

(3) Information about ONE relevant event (each: if two people are working on the same presentation, you must find two) to our course topic that has happened in the past six or twelve months. You should search for a REPUTABLE news story on your country. Relevant events can include: (a) laws or other government decrees pertaining to the practice of Islam or the practice of other religions in this country; (b) military events that took place in the country (wars, peacekeeping missions, etc.); (c) internal religious conflicts (lawsuits, riots, demonstrations, etc.); (d) stories on the changing demographics of the country, educational initiatives, youth movements, “general interest” stories connected to Islam in the country (often these will be about gender roles or laws, as the American press is interested in such things); (e) terrorist attacks. (Hints for finding articles: (a) go to a specific newspaper site like nytimes.com or theguardian.com and search for the name of your country and some key terms you want to try; (b) use Google’s advanced settings to search in News, limiting your search by date; (c) use the Library’s newspaper databases. I’ll post another page with suggestions for good international newspapers and instructions on how to search the library databases.

(4) On your second-to-last slide, ask 4 questions of important main points that you want your classmates to be able to answer after watching your presentation. These should be answerable in a few words or 1-2 sentences.

(5) On your last slide, include links to all the websites you consulted. Since this is informal, I will not require you to use MLA bibliographical format; I just want to be able to click on them to verify your info/ check for plagiariasm.

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Example of “minimal paraphrasing” to avoid:

Actual citation from Wikipedia article on Islam in Canada ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Canada (Links to an external site.) ):

” Most Canadian Muslims are people who were raised Muslim.[ citation needed (Links to an external site.) ] As with immigrants in general, Muslim immigrants have come to Canada for a variety of reasons. These include higher education, security, employment, and family reunification. Others have come for religious and political freedom, and safety and security, leaving behind civil wars, persecution, and other forms of civil and ethnic strife. In the 1980s, Canada became an important place of refuge for those fleeing the Lebanese Civil War (Links to an external site.).”

Academically dishonest minimal paraphrasing, substituting synonyms or rearranging pieces of the original text without altering the gist of the sentences. Note how the student simply went through the above section sentence by sentence, changing or eliminating some words or moving pieces around, but this is really just a paraphrase of the above text.

The majority of Muslims in Canada were raised Muslim. Muslim immigrants came to Canada for different reasons: higher education, employment, family reunification, religious and political freedom. Many left behind civil wars, persecution, and other ethnic or civil strife. For example, in the 1980s, many fleeing the Lebanese Civil War came to Canada.

Acceptable incorporation of above content into your own words, supplementing with additional information from other parts of the article or other sources (hint: take notes by hand without copying sentences, then look at your notes and try to put them together yourself into coherent sentences):

Muslims in Canada include both immigrants and native-born Canadians; the majority were raised in the Islamic faith rather than being adult converts. The Canadian Muslim population has quintupled in the past 30 years, in large part due to immigration. Muslim immigrants to Canada were motivated by reasons ranging from economic or academic opportunity to the desire to escape strife in their homeland. Most settled in large cities such as Montreal or Toronto