Focal Point Seminars

Focal Point Seminars investigate a significant person, place, text, idea or event through multiple methodological or disciplinary perspectives, learning how educated persons strive to understand topics in increasingly deeper and increasingly less superficial ways. Courses stress “seminar behavior”-active learning, through critical questioning, speaking, listing and discussing; reading and writing extensively about primary sources and original works. Topics vary. First year students take one of these seminars, in either the winter or the spring quarters.

Learning Outcomes and Writing Expectations
Approved by the Liberal Studies Council, Spring 2006

Learning Outcomes:

1. Students will discuss and analyze work from at least three different fields in their written work for the course.
   
2. Students will participate actively in advancing the collective intellectual understanding of the course topic through class discussions.
   
3. Students will be able to distinguish between primary and secondary sources, and to assess varying degrees of mediation and interpretation in specific source materials.
   
4. Students will construct arguments based on evidence and the work and interpretations of other sources.
   
5. Students will revise papers in response to the instructor’s comments.
   
6. Students will produce a project with a central argument, in which all parts of the project support the central argument.

Reading and Writing Expectations:

The Focal Point Seminar is designated a writing intensive course in the Liberal Studies Program; assignments are designed to develop writing skills. A minimum of 12-20 pages of writing is required with at least one piece of formal writing that goes through a revision process based on feedback from the instructor and/or peer review.