First -Year Experience
Syllabus and Other Requirements
Each first-year seminar (INT 299) syllabus must include the
following items:
- Objectives related to all of the above goals, along with a description of how the course and/or learning community will meet and assess these objectives during the course. It is unlikely that all skills and capacities of the above 5th goal will be met in each first-year seminar or learning community. The skills and capacities most appropriate to the first-year seminar and learning community should be selected and addressed. Each learning community can have additional objectives more specific to the content of the learning community and not specific to the above goals.
- All learning communities must include a civic engagement or service learning component. This engagement can happen in the first-year seminar or in one of the other courses, and it must connect to the content and theme of the learning community, otherwise, students will see this task as just that, another task on a checklist that does not have meaning or connection to the purpose or theme of the learning community. This component must be described on the syllabus and be assessed as part of the first-year seminar or one of the other courses in the learning community.
- Also, the course must include a common reading (i.e., book, newspaper, articles, magazine, you name it!) to address students’ need for active reading strategies and to further develop the common theme and interconnections of the learning community; therefore, assignments that involve the reading should be assigned and assessed in each course within the learning community.
- The course must integrate academic resources on campus through at least one meaningful course assignment.