Spring 2002

A SMART Start

by Joel Hoekstra

In the days following September 11, University freshman Andy Olson and his classmates found themselves-- like many Americans-- searching for answers to difficult questions.

But while other citizens found solace in reconnecting with family and friends or with their home communities, Olson and many of his classmates were living away from home for the first time in their lives. Parents, in many cases, were far away; friends had scattered to distant locales. These students were, in a sense, experiencing a kind of alienation in their new surroundings.

One of Olson's teachers, psychology professor Richard Lee, had a special understanding of his students' plight. Lee's seminar, "Aliens and the Alienated," was exploring the concept of alienation from a variety of angles, including the experience of social outcasts and illegal immigrants in mainstream society and, coincidentally, the formation of terrorist groups. So the September 11 discussion was not only cathartic and supportive but also apropos.

"It wasn't as if we were talking about these issues in a calculus class," says Olson. "We had been talking alienation and terrorists and how terrorist groups form."

Lee's ability to engage his students' hearts and minds in learning owed as much to setting, perhaps, as to substance. Classes such as his provide first-year students with an uncommonly intimate educational experience. Dozens of freshman seminars each semester--with class sizes of about 12 to 18--allow students to sample broadly the fruits of the liberal arts curriculum and to study provocative subjects ranging from the Crusades to postmodern art, from Machiavelli to Minnesota history.

Negotiating a life transition

Since their launch in 1998, the courses have given more than 4,000 students a solid foundation in academic and life skills--critical thinking, discussion and argument, research strategies, problem solving, and writing. They also have helped students navigate their new social world.

The one-on-one interaction with professors and classmates that has proved attractive to skittish campus newcomers like My-Linh Pham, a first year architecture student. "The University was very intimidating," she says, adding that her freshman seminar helped her adjust: it was, she says, was "a good way to meet other freshmen."

Sophomore Andrew Wamugi, who took "Inside Broadcasting--WCCO" with journalism professor Dan Sullivan, agrees. "This class allowed me to get to know other students. Even now, when I pass them on campus, we know each other's names--it's not just 'Hey, what's-your-name!'"

Meeting academic challenges

Freshmen Erin Olson and Joel Brygger found the workload heftier than they expected. Yet their instructor was always there for them, they say. Christopher Gregory, who took "Beyond the Orient" from Asian languages and literature professor Michael Molasky, notes that difficult material is much easier to learn when the professor is just on the other side of the table.

Pham coped by plunging right in and learning how to use the library her first week on campus. She also hunkered down and endured in-class writing practice--which, she confesses, turned out to be "a good thing." But the highlight was her class project. "I felt pressure to produce something that had substance rather than just fulfilled the requirements," she says.

"I was pretty nervous during my presentation--I hardly remember what I said--but when it was over, I felt like all the research and work was worth it.

"I put more effort into my project because I knew there was someone on the other end who really cared about the quality of my work and wanted me to succeed."

Learning across disciplines

Whatever the challenges, the benefits are manifold. For starters, there's the chance to tackle topics from a multidisciplinary perspective. Offerings have included courses on jazz, race, the Constitution, AIDS, poetry, language development, the Middle East, and happiness--viewed through the multiple lenses of political science, economics, philosophy, psychology, literature, the arts, and cultural studies.

History you can use

Pham, Olson, and Brygger spent a semester learning about the culture, history, and topography of urban environments--including the University's own back yard--in an honors seminar, "A Sense of Where You Are: Story and Landscape in the Twin Cities," taught by visiting historian Patrick Nunnally.

From their classroom in the Weisman Art Museum (overlooking what used to be Bohemian Flats on the West Bank of the Mississippi River), and especially through their field research, they learned to see in new ways an urban landscape they had taken for granted.

Pham's final project--a proposal to commemorate St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood--revived in her imagination a community that was destroyed in the 1960s to make way for Interstate 94. She proposed a bridge that would "span the interstate and act as a physical and symbolic linking of the neighborhood, [incorporating] aspects of Rondo's history through an artistic representation of the community as well as interpretive markers."

Brygger, an architecture major whose project on St. Paul's Italian community and the Upper Levee earned kudos from visiting state officials, appreciated the seminar's blend of sociology, history, design, and writing. "It's not just dates and names," he says. "It's the history of the places that surround you, history you can use."

Learning in small groups

Whatever their subject matter, freshman seminars have at least one thing in common: small-group intimacy. Unlike more lecture-oriented classes, freshman seminars foster--indeed, require--lively interaction, both with professors and among classmates. In larger classes, says Olson, students often give one-sentence responses to questions. Not so in freshman seminars, which are far more interactive.

Seminar professors can take students not only deep into academic subjects but also deep into their own belief systems, says Lee, who engaged his students in an intense, probing, sometimes very personal dialogue about their attitudes and about the realities of immigrants' lives in America. Honest discussion might have been difficult in a less intimate setting, he says, but his students developed trust early on. One student admitted to his classmates that since September 11 he is much more inclined toward racial profiling. It was a revelation, Lee posits, that probably would have never occurred in a larger class.

Philosophy professor Valerie Tiberius--who has taught a seminar titled "Happiness"--recalls a respectful discussion of stoicism elicited by a student's revelations about the deaths of her mother and sister. "Smaller group of students tend to be more sensitive to each other," she says, adding that one of her roles as teacher is to steer the conversation from feelings to ideas and principles--to help students turn their emotional truths into intellectual insights.

Rethinking pedagogy

For senior professors, who spend much of their time teaching more advanced students, freshman seminars can be a refreshing change. Nearly everything about the college experience is new to freshmen, and that poses both opportunities and challenges.

Says Ed Foster, chair of the economics department, who teaches a seminar on government: "I hadn't taught freshmen for a good many years up until this last year. But the last time I did it--probably 25 years ago--I thought it was fun. By the time undergraduates get to be juniors and seniors, you can stand up on a table and do somersaults and they'll sometimes just sit there looking bored. But freshmen seem to be a pretty lively and interesting bunch."

Says professor Carol Urness of her freshman seminar on maps and mapmaking: "The students didn't have as much background as I expected. I wasn't accustomed to students who had never used a compass or didn't know what latitude we live in. But I enjoyed working with them because they were so eager to learn."

Lee was so interested in teaching first-year students that he negotiated such assignments as part of his faculty appointment. "I saw it as an opportunity to have a small class, get to know students, and also be able to teach a specialty topic that fit with my own research interests," he says. "You can't really do that when you teach larger courses, because you have to cover a broader domain." His course on alienation gibed with his longstanding personal and scholarly interest in cultural socialization. Next year, he plans to teach a course on "The Asian-American Experience"--also a keen interest.

Tiberius found that teaching the seminar kept her on her toes. More accustomed to a standard lecture-discussion format, she had to moderate freeform conversation, directing students toward important points but also adapting to the flow and speed of her students' own discoveries and observations. Happily, she also encountered unexpected depth and wisdom in her students' reflections: "My initial assumption that [these students] didn't know anything about struggle and suffering proved false on more than one occasion," she says.

"Sometimes class discussions were very lively indeed! If they weren't, it was usually because I had a preconceived notion of how things ought to go that I was intent on imposing."

Professors welcome the opportunity to incorporate materials and projects that might not fit into a standard survey course. Lee has his students watch Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing." In his class on government, Foster assigns readings from "Eat the Rich," by humorist P.J. O'Rourke.

Political science professor James Druckman, who will teach a fall seminar centered on the 2002 congressional campaigns, plans to have his students conduct an exit poll on election day. "We will closely follow the campaigns," he says. "Students will explore something in-depth and also get a better sense of what political science is about. They will engage with the topic rather than passively learn."

Last fall, Nunnally asked his class to develop proposals for historic Twin Cities landmarks, then invited government officials to evaluate the students' work. A consultant who has worked on many such projects, Nunnally encouraged his students to think about their projects as business proposals, requiring not only writing and drawings but also a class presentation.

"I could have had them do a report," he says, "but that didn't give them much context as writers and speakers with important material to convey."

In fact, it's those sorts of skills--how to make a presentation, how to form an argument, how to write a clear sentence--that freshman-seminar instructors are most keen to impress upon their students. Facts and figures, concepts and rules, even subject matter--all are secondary to inspiring lifelong curiosity and a thirst for learning.

"I don't care about content," Foster says of his aims in teaching freshman seminars. "I care about students being able to think analytically about the problems of society.

"They might go away from my course thinking economics is awful or economics is neat, but what I'm really interested in is their coming away with the idea that important issues about society aren't just things we respond to emotionally. They're things we respond to through analysis. That's what I care about."

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