revisiting the first year experience

[freixenet]

My university is currently revamping its curriculum, moving away from the course credit system toward the course unit system instead. (The difference, to oversimplify, is that rather than working for say 36 hours in the major, the students work for 11 or 12 courses instead, with the advantage of being therefore limited to taking four courses a

Comments

[drenilop]

I think it might be to your advantage to get someone from the hard sciences and from the social sciences in on the project with you. My first thought, as a social scientist who teaches mainly first year students, was that a handbook that describes inquiry only in the terms that humanities people use/know would be doing my students a disservice by making them think that's the *only* way inquiry can be conducted. Perhaps a brief chapter or section on how disciplinary norms differ?

Also, I think it might be worth your time to find two papers on the same assignment, one at beginning/developed levels of comptence and one at excellent levels, so that the students can see the difference. Showing is a lot better than telling. Perhaps too, if this is an online project where page count isn't quite as constrained, get a faculty member or two to read a brief piece of text and annotate it/comment on it -- let us inside the mind of an 'expert' so that we can see what we're supposed to be doing ourselves when we're reading. (Again, perhaps a humanities piece, a social sciences piece, a natural sciences piece?)

--- thinking broadly, most schools organize their general education curriculum around the HU/NS/SS distinction -- explicitly including examples of inquiry in all three could help you frame the gen ed program and get students to understand why that distinction matters/is useful and what it actually means.

[freixenet]

I'd thought about including a section (dragged out of my non-liberal arts colleagues) about what they expect from their students' writing--thanks for confirming that. And yes, modeling the writing expectations, with relevant comments and grades from a range of professors, is in the plans. Thanks for the feedback--good to know my current thinking is making sense!