Foundation Seminars -- Pedagogy
CLA Document
The pedagogy in each seminar will be designed to promote active learning and responsibility on the part of the students. Thus, the class format and assignments in each seminar will encourage students to become accountable for their own learning. Instructors will emphasize collaborative learning as a dialogical social enterprise and a communal effort, requiring respectful consideration of multiple viewpoints. In many seminars, instructors will be able to incorporate creative problem-solving, i.e., posing problems/questions and assisting students in working toward solutions. The seminars also will stress responsibility for one's behavior, in general and in an academic context.
Each seminar will have as a goal the intellectual development of first-year students through reading, speaking, listening, and writing. Offering these seminars as W-1 courses is an excellent way to meet this goal, and faculty are encouraged to do so. Intellectual development implies improving students' ability to analyze and interpret materials they encounter (texts, performances, works of art, the phenomena of society and nature), to synthesize and communicate the results of their studies, and to create works of their own. The Foundation Seminar should aim to increase the first-year student's capacity for critical (or higher-order) thinking, characterized by analysis, reflection, and judgment, and complement it by the creative dimensions of imagination and insight. Through exposure to different perspectives, whether complementary or conflicting, students come to realize the limitations of a single viewpoint. Students develop the capacity to evaluate alternative perspectives as they come to understand the nature and uses of evidence and practice well- reasoned and persuasive argumentation. Assignments will integrate each of these intellectual goals into the course.
Each seminar will begin to develop skills necessary for intellectual endeavors. Specifically, information-retrieval skills will be integrated through library instruction, and assignments addressing computer literacy (e.g., word processing, simulations, use of a database, or analysis of data) will be included.
In effect, Foundation Seminars will initiate an educational process that will expand and deepen as students pursue their disciplinary breadth and depth requirements. Foundation Seminars do not stand alone but as a launching point for a student's Bucknell educational experience.
Foundation Seminars serve important pedagogical purposes and it would be difficult to adapt these seminars to serve both those purposes and the goals of other components of the Common Learning Agenda. However, in some cases, the instructor could choose to designate the Foundation Seminar as also fulfilling a distribution requirement, either a Disciplinary Breadth requirement or a Broadened Perspectives requirement (but not both). For instance, it is possible that some English Department courses would be taught as Foundation Seminars (e.g., EN 109), and would double-count as a Foundation Seminar and as a Humanities course for the Disciplinary Breadth requirement. This would assist students enrolled in some of the more highly structured programs that require an English course during the first year. Such a course or a Foundation Seminar that is designed as an introduction to a division, such as Humanities 98, should be permitted to count toward the Disciplinary Breadth requirement if the course addresses the Pedagogical Goals for Disciplinary Breadth courses and the division's specific criteria (see Section IV.A.) in addition to the pedagogical goals for the Foundation Seminars. Finally, Foundation Seminars might meet the Broadened Perspectives requirement, if they are sufficiently focused on the relevant topics.
