Goals of the First-Year Seminar:

1. To reflect on significant questions about yourself, your community, and your world.
2. To develop the capacity to read and think critically.
3. To develop the capacity to write clear and persuasive expository and argumentative essays with an emphasis on thesis formation and development.
4. To gain an understanding of basic principles of oral communication as they apply to classroom discussion.
5. To understand the liberal arts as a vital and evolving tradition and to see yourself as agents within that tradition.
6. To develop capacities for careful and open reflection on questions of values and norms.
7. To develop the ability to carry out research for the purpose of inquiry and to support claims.

Faculty and students in FYS are guided by the following learning objectives:

1. Listen and read critically–texts, speech, media and other cultural productions–in order to examine, challenge and reshape themselves and the world in which they live.

2. Express themselves clearly and persuasively in exposition and in argument, in both written and oral forms.

3. Carry out research for the purpose of supplying evidence and support for claims made in exposition and argument.

In order to meet the learning objectives, FYS students are provided with opportunities to: 

1. Gain confidence in themselves as college students: to understand the liberal arts as a vital and evolving tradition and to see themselves as agents within that tradition.  The FYS is a student’s introduction to life in an intellectual community, at the college level.

2. Develop a broad range of capacities including critical aalysis, retrospection, imagination, moral reasoning and personal ethos.

3. Recognize, use, examine and expand their background experiences, their current discourse practices as well as their current reading and writing practices, habits, affinities and skills.

4.  See demonstrations of and study sophisticated models of writing, research, speech and other forms of expression.

5. See and own their learning so that it becomes a point of reflection and a resource for later use, i.e. what processes do I have command of and how can I use them at Butler?

6. Develop a common set of initial academic skills and processes as well as an awareness of how those skills and processes are necessary for engaging in college life and the life of the mind.

7. Develop stamina in critically engaging ideas, expressing and articulating ideas in a range of spoken and written genres, and reading and responding to a wide variety of texts.

8. Develop authority and voice in articulating their own, original ideas in writing and speaking in the service of personal development as well as civic and social responsibility.

9. Embrace ambiguity and uncertainty and to see the role of artistic expression, political action, as well as reading, writing, speaking and research in ways to manage the discomfort of such ambiguity in socially responsible ways.