ATS2628: Power and Poverty: International Development in a Globalised World

Firstly, I have to mention that the lecture isn't always two hours. For the first three weeks it was close to two hours, but then for the rest it was closer to an hour and ten, an hour and twenty minutes. Further, I had a three hour break after the lecture and before the tutorial (if the lecture went for two hours, so it was normally a four hour break). Like, the lecture was meant to finish at 2pm, usually finished just after 1pm, and my tute was at 5pm. I had the option to change tutorials and I didn't take it. Why? My tute was fucking amazing. I had Tom (Thomas) as my tutor and he is probably the equal best tutor I've ever had if not the outright best. He's a pretty top bloke in general - nice guy etc - but he has an insanely good 'feel' for the mood of the tutorial and modifies the way he goes about things accordingly. He's insanely genuine and straightforward (to the point that, when he made us go around the room saying our names, no one even complained, because he explained it was a necessary evil). I could literally break down this guy's style over the course of an essay, but I'm not going to bother. Safe to say, I noticed particular ways he goes about things and I'll definitely be integrating them in the way I teach my own VCE students. He's just fucking fantastic, so you'd be pretty comprehensively stupid not to get into one of his tute groups. (Also, just by chance, the 5pm tute had a bunch of really good students. Tom said he had other, shitty tutes, so the tutes weren't awesome JUST because of Tom - we just had a great bunch of people).

Lectures were really enlightening. I found them really hard in terms of focussing because this isn't a philosophy unit and I've basically only listened to philosophy lectures for the last two years and this is really empirical in nature. But it's crazy enlightening just as far as, like, "holy shit I had no idea about that". Poverty in parts of the world, misconceptions about poverty in others, economic actions taken by big countries that have failed and sort of succeeded. Just really interesting, crazy bits of information. There's also some pretty fucked parts that make you lose hope in humanity. I'm not sure if that's just me (got wrecked hard by the poverty week in Human Rights 1) but yeah, there are definitely some bits of this unit that should make you really angry and challenge you emotionally.

As far as material goes, if you're politically conservative you're probably going to have a shit time. The name of this unit was so long that I never read it, and thus never really knew what the unit was called, so in my head, I thought of the unit as "How America and neoliberalism fucked the world". As you might now know, how America and neoliberalism fucked the world is one of the main themes of the unit . It's quite leftist in that sense - it really challenges the international status quo, which has traditionally/historically been American conservatism. This was also crazy enlightening though. "Free trade" is really great theoretically, but not really when there's a big power imbalance. In that case, it ends up more "Basically trade that's free for America and comes at a great cost to developing countries". (See what I did there?)

The material covers a few different themes, beginning with economics (although this runs throughout the unit), touching on gender, climate change, education, sanitation/structure, etc and how all of these impact upon development. Really, a huge theme throughout all of these topics is, what is development? Wtf is that? Where does the word come from? "Getting better, moving forward?"... Well, forward to what? Industrialisation? Neoliberalism? The Western conception of development? It's a pretty tricky question, and whilst we all took the idea that "developing nations need to develop" for granted at the beginning of the unit, you'll begin to see the way that 'development' has sort of been used by political bodies with agendas and starts to take on many different meanings to the point that it starts to become an empty concept. Prepare to let go of your conception of development .

Assessment wise, the unit was kinda weird. Like, you do the readings, then write 4 questions on the readings, then give those questions to everyone else, they do the quiz in 15 minute of class, then give them back to you and your partner, then you grade the quizzes and give them back to the tutor. You do that for one week, and you get marked out of 15 for it. I did mine in the very first week (which I would recommend because it makes the rest of your semester easier. I have no idea why everyone else hesitated to take the first week - it basically meant that this unit had NO in-semester assessment). On top of that quiz, every single week you write your answers to everyone else's quiz, and they grade you out of 4 (with translates to 1.5% for each quiz). It's pretty easy to get full marks, because you either get 0, .5, or 1 for any given answer you write, and people are pretty hesitant to give you a 0 if it seems like you're on track. Some weeks I didn't do the readings (was getting crazy pumped) and still managed 3.5s etc from writing my answers as confidently as possible. It's kind've annoying to think you're getting assessed by other students, but really, it's just a method to motivate you to do the readings, and for the most part it works and you should comfortable get an 80% average for the quizzes if you can read and write well.

Tutorial participation is probably a big thing from what I can see. It doesn't mean "attendance". It really does mean participation. That's my guess anyway. From what I know of Tom, if you didn't participate, he's not going to give you a 10/10 for participation. If you only attended and never spoke, chances are you'll cop a 5/10 or something. Just do your best to speak up twice or so in every tute and you should score really comfortably if not 10/10.

The IRO is the biggest "wtf". What's an IRO? Good question, I'm not really sure. Basically, they said "pick something to research, research it, and present it to us. You can do this in a power point, in a YouTube video, on a poster, or in whichever way you want. You need 10+ references. By the way, we look more favourably upon these things than essays". And that's basically that. You pick a topic, ANY topic, and do it. That doesn't even mean "research gender in development!". It could be like, one page's worth of information in the textbook within the chapter of gender in development, then you research it. For me, I researched the practice of giving loans/aid to developing countries and argues that loans/aid are inherently self-interested and detrimental to developing countries because of power structures. I made a Camtasia YouTube video (shows a power point slide but also your face... look at the videos on vtextbook.com for an example - because that's where I learnt about the software). They liked this format - Tom sent me an email saying it was a good choice, so I'm glad I didn't go for an essay. The IRO caused a lot of angst amongst the student body because it was a bit ambiguous, but really, all it does is just force you to be independent and think about something rather than just responding to a question/prompt in an essay.

The take home exam - we had like 3 weeks to do it, we picked two questions out of like ten, and wrote 500-1000 word answers for each question. It was relatively easy, due on the first day of the exam period.

Really interesting unit, very valuable, glad I did it. Challenged me a little bit, not being philosophical in any sense of the word, but it was very rewarding.

Take home exam.

4 out of 5

Get the textbook they prescribe. You'd probably be a bit screwed without it. You could take a gamble by not doing the weekly readings and trying to 'bullshit' your answers to the quizzes, and just borrow the textbook from the library when you have to make your quiz, but you'd be playing with fire a bit, really. I gambled on like 3 or 4 of the quizzes and it went okay (but they were later in the semester so I'd already grasped the type of things the textbook would have said), but I definitely scored lower on those quizzes.

TBA