First Year Seminar Prospectus Form

1. Connect with a faculty member early in the educational process.
2. Learn intensively among a small cohort of students.
3. Produce knowledge through self-directed inquiry and active learning.
4. Apply methods for how scholars pose problems, discover solutions, resolve controversies, and evaluate knowledge.

Creative Expression, Practice, and Production

Students engage in individual and collaborative creative expression, exploration, or production, such as in performance, visual art, composition, design, or technology. They engage with tools, techniques, methods, design processes, technologies, and materials for creating works that express, innovate, or create solutions to problems.

1. Compose, design, build, present, or perform a work that is the result of immersion in a creative process using appropriate media, tools, and techniques.
2. Explain the roles and influences of creativity, technologies, materials, and design processes in the creation of knowledge, expression, and effective solutions.
3. Evaluate their own and others’ creative work to demonstrate how critique creates value in creative domains.

Engagement with the Human Past

Students develop the ability to analyze literature and/or artistic works, to understand how they relate to the historical circumstances of their creation, and to think critically about the past, present, and future contributions of these works to a shared world.

1. Develop knowledge of different spatiotemporal scales, patterns, ideas, figures, and events from the past.
2. Evaluate primary source material and/or other historical evidence of past conditions (e.g., behaviors, events, and social, cultural, economic, and/or political structures); assess divergent or complementary methods, materials, and/or methodologies in interpreting the human past.
3. Assess conflicting historical narratives based on evidence and methodologies.
4. Generate and evaluate arguments based the analysis of primary and scholarly sources.
5. Apply historical methods and knowledge to make informed judgments about the past and the present.

Ethical and Civic Values

Students develop their capacity to think carefully and critically about how to make and justify private and public decisions.

1. Explain the contexts in which questions of justification arise.
2. Assess ethical values in terms of reasons offered.
3. Recognize different ethical perspectives and the distinctive approaches these perspectives bring to questions of value, evaluating ethical justifications for different ways of organizing civic and political communities.
4. Analyze the differences between personal ethical decisions and those bearing on the public and civic spheres.

Global Understanding and Engagement

Students study and engage with global processes shaping the world and its peoples, including those beyond the North Atlantic region (United States, Canada, and Western Europe). They develop deep knowledge of historic or contemporary roles and differential effects of human organizations and actions on global systems.

1. Classify and analyze diverse historical, social, and political exchanges that shape nations, regions, and cultural traditions of the world.
2. Translate among contrasting civic cultures, social values, and moral commitments that characterize differences among peoples and societies, including those beyond the North Atlantic region.
3. Assess ways that political and economic institutions shape contemporary global relations.
4. Explain human and environmental challenges that transcend national borders.

Natural Scientific Investigation

Students learn how to make and interpret scientific descriptions and explanations of the natural world, practice the skills of scientific inquiry, and evaluate scientific evidence within the contexts of both scientific communities and society.

1. Demonstrate the ability to use scientific knowledge, logic, and imagination to construct and justify scientific claims about naturally occurring phenomena, including validation through rigorous empirical testing.
2. Analyze and apply processes of scientific inquiry as dictated by the phenomena and questions at hand. These include generating and testing hypotheses or theories pertaining to the natural world; using logic and creativity to design investigations to test these hypotheses; collecting and interpreting data about the natural world; making inferences that respect measurement error; building and justifying arguments and explanations; communicating and defending conclusions; revising arguments and conclusions based on new evidence and/or feedback from peers; and synthesizing new knowledge into broader scientific understanding.
3. Evaluate science-related claims and information from popular and/or peer-reviewed sources by examining the relationship between the evidence, arguments, and conclusions presented and by assessing consistency with existing knowledge from valid and reliable scientific sources.
4. Identify, assess, and make informed decisions about ethical issues at the intersections of the natural sciences and society.

Power, Difference, and Inequality

Students engage with the histories, perspectives, politics, intellectual traditions, and/or expressive cultures of populations and communities that have historically been disempowered, and the structural and historical processes by which that disempowerment has endured and changed.

1. Recognize the relationship between inequality and social, economic, and political power.
2. Analyze configurations of power and the forms of inequality and bias they produce.
3. Evaluate dynamics of social, economic, and political inequality in relation to specific historical contexts.
4. Interrogate the systemic processes by which forms of inequality are sustained and how these processes have been and are resisted and transformed.

Quantitative Reasoning

Students learn to comprehend and apply mathematical concepts in authentic contexts, developing tools for reasoning with data, logic, and quantitative methods.

1. Summarize, interpret, and present quantitative data in mathematical forms, such as graphs, diagrams, tables, or mathematical text.
2. Develop or compute representations of data using mathematical forms or equations as models, and use statistical methods to assess their validity.
3. Make and evaluate important assumptions in the estimation, modeling, and analysis of data, and recognize the limitations of the results.
4. Apply mathematical concepts, data, procedures, and solutions to make judgments and draw conclusions.
5. Synthesize and present quantitative data to others to explain findings or to provide quantitative evidence in support of a position.

Ways of Knowing

Students develop intellectual humility, learning to question assumptions, categories, and norms that structure their worldviews and to understand the sources and effects of biases. They learn, use, and distinguish strengths and weaknesses of one or more approach(es) to knowledge of the unfamiliar, such as: aesthetically, philosophically, linguistically, historically, or culturally remote forms of knowledge and worldmaking, or formal logic, scientific practice, and similar formalized approaches to countering bias and creating knowledge.

1. Recognize and use one or more approach(es) to developing and validating knowledge of the unfamiliar world.
2. Evaluate ways that temporal, spatial, scientific, and philosophical categories structure knowledge.
3. Interrogate assumptions that underlie our own perceptions of the world.
4. Employ strategies to mitigate or adjust for preconceptions and biases.
5. Apply critical insights to understand patterns of experience and belief.

1. Pose problems and questions that require systematic thinking about evidence, argument and uncertainty.
2. Consider its content in the context of human difference between and within societies; the full range of legitimate debate in its field; and/or change over time.
3. Require writing totaling at least 10 pages in length, or the intellectual equivalent.
4. Require presenting material to the class, small groups, or the public through oral presentations, webpages, or other means that enable corroboration of fact and argument.
5. Require collaborating in pairs or groups to learn, design, solve, create, build, research or similar. Use the space below to describe how you plan to meet the 4 student learning outcomes in your FYS.

High-Impact: Performance

Students enrich and expand their academic study by engaging in compelling creative experiences that transform their learning.

1. Explain the connections between academic studies and outside-the-classroom experiences and observations.
2. Apply knowledge in complex or ambiguous situations.
3. Develop questions from experiences and observations to deepen and extend academic inquiry.

High-Impact: Service Learning

Students enrich and expand their academic study by engaging in compelling public service experiences that transform their learning.

1. Explain the connections between academic studies and outside-the-classroom experiences and observations.
2. Apply knowledge in complex or ambiguous situations.
3. Develop questions from experiences and observations to deepen and extend academic inquiry.