First-Year Program
Philosophy and Goals Statement 2006-07

A residentially-based interdisciplinary first-year program is an ideal environment for beginning the four-year process of fostering the complex intellectual and social skills that are at the heart of a liberal education and the habits of considered values and engaged citizenship that such an education should produce and that are central to the university’s aims and objectives. The First-Year Program (FYP) is comprised of a residentially-based, team-taught course (the FYP College) in the fall and a single instructor, research skills-oriented First-Year Seminar (FYS) in the spring.

This Philosophy and Goals statement serves as the guiding principles for the assessment of both fall FYP College and spring FYS syllabi to ensure that courses are meeting the agreed upon learning goals of the program. Not every course must attempt to address each and every goal below with the same depth. However, as part of the syllabus review process, each FYP and FYS course must identify which of the learning goals of the program their course will emphasize and how the syllabus and assignments address the rhetoric and communication skills goals of the program. FYS courses must demonstrate how the course speaks to the critical inquiry/research learning goals. Finally, although we do not mandate a minimum number of communication skills assignments, it is expected that students will be given multiple and varied opportunities to achieve the writing, speaking, and research learning goals, and that assignments are designed to both integrate the various modes of communication and offer students the opportunity to engage in drafts/rehearsals and revise their work with peer, mentor, and/or faculty feedback.

General philosophy and goals

With its commitment to collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching and its integrated sets of academic assignments, residential community-building and co-curricular activities, and the cultivation of student intentionality in academic planning over the whole first year, the FYP seeks to foster an intellectual community of literate, thoughtful, rhetorically sensitive and ethically responsible individuals who become increasingly able to:

The FYP is built on six philosophical foundations that serve as the basis for our programmatic learning goals:

First, a liberal education requires an advanced degree of literacy and competency in a variety of communication skills. Reading (broadly understood) remains central to all forms of inquiry; however, today’s world also demands complex forms of rhetorical sensitivity and an ability to integrate multiple communications skills. “Rhetorical sensitivity” means that students should be able to assess the requirements of a particular task and make intentional decisions about which mode or modes of communication and inquiry (e.g., writing, speaking, performance, etc.) to use in addressing them. Doing so requires that students develop specific writing, speaking, research and other competencies and literacies. Through both in-class and out-of-class assignments and activities, the FYP provides students with an intensive and extensive opportunity to develop these competencies and to explore how critical reading informs and enhances the practices of writing, speaking, listening, performing, viewing, and conducting research, and how all of these practices are ways of learning and knowing as well as ways of communicating. More information on these rhetoric and communication learning goals can be found in the FYP’s “Rhetoric and Communication in the FYP: A Guide to Pedagogy and Learning Goals” document.

Second, a living-learning approach is essential if students are to become ethical and empathetic learners. Ours is a world is marked by moral complexity, widespread inequality, diversity of all sorts, and the interaction (sometimes violent) of radically differing worldviews. The fall semester FYP College’s residential component provides students with an opportunity to create communities that are governed not by unethical manipulation, coercion, and violence (both rhetorical and physical), but rather by an active sense of the multiple ways in which their lives are interconnected, a respect for difference, and a commitment to responsible representation of ideas and beliefs in conversation in all of its forms. This philosophy is reflected in FYP classroom pedagogy, which fosters learning experiences that are collaborative, cumulative, self-reflective, and dependent upon regular feedback from instructors, peers, mentors, and other tutors. In creating and maintaining this sort of environment, we view the FYP College as rooted in an approach to residential education that is humane, rigorous, and liberatory.

Third, an interdisciplinary, intercultural approach to learning benefits all students and faculty regardless of their chosen field of study. One defining political feature of our time is the increasing integration of the globe at greater and greater speeds, a process that has immense consequences for human communities and the natural environment. A defining intellectual feature of our time is the breaking down of traditional disciplinary boundaries in the face of challenges from new paradigms (e.g., postmodernism), new fields of study (e.g., gender studies) and the voices of groups (e.g., people of color) who have long been systematically suppressed, as well as the pressing need for collaboration between scientists and non-scientists on many of the central issues of the day. Engaging in interdisciplinary and intercultural learning is consistent with the traditional liberal arts injunction to seek a broad, integrated education and to do so with an open mind. The FYP reflects this through its emphasis on cross-departmental team-teaching in the FYP College and interdisciplinary subject matter in the FYS and its determination to offer a curriculum that reflects emerging global realities. In so doing, the FYP hopes to ignite students’ passions about topics of study and introduce them to the variety of approaches one can take to those topics.

Fourth, students must learn to assume responsibility for their own academic planning in consultation with a faculty advisor. As FYP faculty are also academic advisors for first-year students, they have a unique opportunity to help students become more reflective not only about intellectual work and living in a residential community, but also about the course of their education over the full four years. With the privilege of getting the kind of education a liberal-arts college provides comes the corresponding responsibility on the part of students to take their time here seriously. The FYP’s approach to academic advising focuses on creating student agency in the construction of a flexible plan for the project(s) they will pursue both in and out of the classroom over their four years. As such, the faculty’s role as advisors is to be a partner in the development of those plans and projects. In this way, advising is an extension of teaching in that advisors attempt to create the conditions for students to take charge of their own learning.

Fifth, a responsible approach to education recognizes the fundamentally social nature of knowledge production and promotes social awareness in all participants. A liberal education does not take place in a social vacuum, but is immersed in the same set of complex social and environmental structures and relationships that make up the wider social and natural worlds. Small-town liberal arts colleges, however, are too often viewed as “bubbles” that protect their students from these realities. The FYP is in a unique position to help transcend such parochial tendencies by making the perceptual, intellectual and experiential boundaries between the university and “the world,” both social and natural, more permeable. To this end, the FYP intentionally awakens and cultivates in students an understanding that intellectual work matters because it allows us to participate in the ongoing pursuit of leaving the world a better place than we found it. This emphasis on social and environmental awareness helps lay the groundwork for future off-campus study experiences, informed social action and community service, more engaged local, national, and global citizenship, and a range of career paths.

Sixth, a pedagogy that seeks to advance the goals above must be critically reflective in all aspects of its practice. As a program committed to the development of critical pedagogies, the FYP offers faculty the space to reflect critically on their own positions in the creation of knowledge for their students. The ways in which knowledge is framed in syllabi, assignments and classroom pedagogy all imply particular assumptions about the location of the professor within those creations. By supporting faculty who choose to engage in dynamic, interdisciplinary work, the FYP fosters an ongoing critical engagement with these kind of assumptions about the relationships among the faculty, the students, and the subject matter of the course. By extension, the program provides an intellectual atmosphere within which students can begin to see themselves as active participants in the educational process while reflecting on the assumptions they bring with them to this process.

Ethical reflection and responsible representation

The work of the FYP asks students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of the choices they make, both in the classroom and out. Ethical concerns are most obvious in the case of doing academically honest work, where the choice of whether or not to uphold the standards of academic integrity needs to be understood as a matter of values and ethics, but students should also learn to develop an “ethic of responsible representation.” Relying on discredited sources, cherry-picking data, falsifying experimental results, making ad hominem attacks, or just doing lazy or sloppy work are all examples of choices with a clear ethical dimension to them. Writers, speakers, and performers have an obligation to represent their ideas, the ideas of others, and the other people with whom they interact in ethically responsible ways. Attention to the ethical dimensions of communication should also inculcate in students a commitment to listening carefully and sympathetically to other speakers, reading authors as charitably as possible, and engaging in intellectual interactions, whether with written or visual texts or in conversation with others, with the assumption that their interlocutors share their own good faith commitment to the pursuit of knowledge.

Residential living

The same processes that inform the communication and interaction that students undertake in the classroom can and should inform their relationships outside of it.. A classroom pedagogy focused on rhetorical awareness can foster meaningful dialogue among all members of a residential community by helping students become conscious of their positions as speakers and listeners. Situating these communication skills in the context of ethically responsible representation reinforces the fact that communication always involves other people and thus the need to be reflective about the impact words and actions can have. We hope to foster in students the ability to engage in intercultural communication, where “intercultural” is understood to include the dimensions of diversity (e.g., demographic, political, religious) present in a residential learning community and a pluralistic society. Residential programming that fosters and helps to cultivate skills in rhetoric and communication, and makes clear the centrality of their ethical dimensions in a living/learning community, is crucial to making the connections between living and learning to which the fall FYP College aspires. The residential component of the FYP College thus begins the process by which students: