Abstract
The First Year Seminar (FYS) at most colleges is an introduction to the college experience, emphasizing the skills necessary for academic success. A main goal of the seminar is to familiarize students with the academic and social norms of college and to support them as they learn to navigate. Additionally, the seminar aims to establish a foundation of civic knowledge to help students to engage in a more informed way with their community. To that end, the FYS exposes students to enduring questions concerning identity, diversity, inequality, citizenship, democracy, privilege, social responsibility, and ethical action. Spurred on by COVID-19 and the desire to create an experience that more closely reflects the mission of St. Thomas Aquinas- a small, liberal arts college- the structure of the seminar drastically changed in the last year. Instead of teaching individual sections focused on an overarching theme, each week, one of the twelve FYS faculty members delivers a lecture on a particular Big Idea that they feel is essential to academic success. Students have the opportunity to work directly with their assigned faculty member and also indirectly with the eleven other professors that teach in other disciplines at the college. At the same time, students also work to produce a podcast that is a mash-up, reflective response to two or more of the Big Ideas. The inclusion of this creative project provides a platform for students, working collaboratively, to demonstrate how they connected with and synthesized the multi-disciplinary material.
Presenters
Nina BellisioProfessor, Visual Communications, St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Interdisciplinary, Project Learning, Podcast, Team-taught
