Why a two-semester sequence for the First Year Seminar?

In May, we had a final pedagogy seminar that featured Becky Ries, Paul Valliere, James McGrath, and Chris Bungard speaking about their year-long Faith, Doubt and Reason/Heroic Temper classes.  I just ran across my notes and thought I’d jot them down here.  In both courses the two semester sequence allowed for variations on a theme or a shift in focus (from Greece to Rome in the case of the Heroic Temper) as well as a deepening of skills.   It also allowed for a considered scaffolding for writing, reading, and speaking assignments, all leading to a final researched assignment in the spring. Everyone focused on being intentional about how one assignment leads to the next.  The first semester introduces concepts and skills that are deepened in the second.

What would be lost if FYS were only one semester?  What is gained when it is two?  The consensus was depth, a message about how open-ended intellectual inquiry is, how rich the questions are as well as the answers and how the the individual student participates in and adds to the knowledge.

The advice for new instructors is to keep it fresh.  Paul Valliere has his first semester students make class resolutions for the second semester: directions for inquiry or specific assignments. Sometimes students have asked for a debate, sometimes more trips to the IMA. Sometimes they’d like to write more personal essays.  While students bring knowledge from the first semester to bear on the issues of the second, the second semester should never feel like the first semester over again.  Every topic leads, eventually,   to history and anthropology and literature and philosophy and religion and science and mathematics, from the present to the past and to the future, and serves as an introduction to the liberal arts.

Best of luck preparing for the new semester!