Overview of Faculty Expectations FIRST YEAR SEMINAR 2017

First Year Seminar (FYS) courses, satisfy part of NAU’s first year students Liberal Studies requirements. The classes are small (25-student limit), familiar and fun and are designed to bring students and the best faculty, teachers, and scholars on campus together to explore rich and engaging topics based on student interest and current issues. They also serve to build community and relationships with faculty and peers that endure throughout their university experience.

Our goals are to foster a culture of inquiry and experiential learning for NAU’s students, raise the visibility, quality, and prestige of engaged learning on the NAU campus, contribute to a more inclusive and diverse campus, and sustain strong and mutually beneficial partnerships with community groups.

Each First Year Seminar course examines a unique topic from multiple perspectives. First Year Seminar students and faculty engage in a shared process of inquiry around a broad, interdisciplinary topic or question of relevance to diverse interests/audiences.

One of the main hallmarks of the program are an academically rigorous small classroom experiences in which students can interact in a meaningful way with their faculty member, ask questions and build community among their peers.

COMMON EXPECTATIONS OF THE FIRST YEAR SEMINAR

What are the benefits of the FYS for students?

  • Small, interactive classes (25 students or less)
  • Student mentorship and community building from peer facilitators and highly-engaged faculty
  • Explore meaningful, exciting topics that promote critical thinking
  • Find support from their academic community
  • Fulfill Liberal Studies Degree Requirements

FACULTY EXPECTATIONS

Each First Year Seminar course examines a unique topic from multiple perspectives. First Year Seminar students and faculty engage in a shared process of inquiry around a broad, interdisciplinary topic or question of relevance to diverse interests/audiences.

Faculty should use a varietyof engaging pedagogies to help students make the transition to academic life at NAU by helping students to develop critical thinking abilities, cultivate effective communication skills, and by providing students the opportunity to make connections with faculty and other students to become part of the university and local community.

The First Year Seminar offers a wide array of topics taught by faculty from various disciplines. In order to provide a measure of consistency all classes should:

  1. Provide small, high touch, inquiry based engaged curriculum
  2. Actively engage students in learning experiences
  3. Create assignments and projects that are creative, experiential, theory and skill based
  4. Provide opportunities to engage with faculty to help establish a strong sense of academic and community belonging.
  5. Promote social interactions and community building among students
  6. Effectively utilize co-curricular learning experiences, with learning happening outside of the classroom, on campus and with the local community

A SHARED PROCESS OF INQUIRY

We ask all faculty to create an environment of critical reflection, analysis and reasoning and to involve students in a shared process of inquiry.

  1. Use engaging pedagogies and involve students in a shared process of inquiry
  2. Create a sense of inquiry characterized by the exploration of issues, ideas, perspectives and events
  3. Introduce questions and problems that are intellectually challenging as well as interesting and understandable to diversefirst-year students
  4. Take into account diverse student backgroundsand approach issues from a number of perspectives, methods and points of view
  5. Acknowledge student current perceptions and misperceptions of topics
  6. Create the opportunity for students to discuss and pursue their own questions in relation to the course themes.

CREATING A CULTURE OF CRITICAL INQUIRY, ANALYSIS AND REASONING

  1. Create assignments that encourage students to critically examine the value and content of inquiry through synthesizing, evaluating, and comparing different points of view and drawing on several sources in constructing an argument.
  2. Incorporate the larger socio-historical context of an issue so as not be too narrowly focused on promoting a specific movement, ideological plan, or agenda
  3. Invite students to challenge their own assumptions and incorporate aspects of complexity to see how different perspectives can yield substantially different interpretations and viewpoints particularly beyond the binary of “right and wrong”
  4. Provide students opportunities to seek, engage and be informed by multiple perspectives
  5. Create an expectation of identifying, locating and evaluating multiple sources of evidence and information in pursuit of an informed viewpoint

STUDENT SUCCESS AND RETENTION

While the First Year Seminar is distinct from NAU’s designated academic skills and transition program it recognizes that it serves as an academic entry point to entering NAU students and does play an important role in first-year student success and retention. It actively integrates FYLI principals and student success approaches such as small classroom size, early and often feedback, low stakes assessment, with close faculty relationships with student check-ins, community building and a highly engaged learning environment based upon compelling student centered topics. Additionally, many faculty braid a foundation of resource utilization, success strategies, and adjustment and reflection into the curriculum so as to better serve first year student needs

All First Year Seminar sections are asked to do this check in process. The check-in process is an opportunity prior to mid-terms to take the "pulse" of the class and to check in with the students to see how they are doing in the class, what is working and what is not working and to create a plan for working towards continued student success.