Course Description Part II

Welcome to our class. You read that right: our class. We will use this classroom to learn together. Each of you has experiences and backgrounds that you bring with you, and in order to make this class an active learning environment, I encourage you to share what you know and how you think. But don't stop there. I want you to consider the perspectives your colleagues bring to class as well. Think about new ideas and perspectives, and even how these ideas come to us. I am not safe from this inquiry. I am your colleague just as you are mine. Let's participate with respect for our colleagues and attempt to participate in the context of an academic classroom, and see if we can translate that to participation in our larger world.

In this class, we will learn methods for purposeful reading and writing in an effort to imagine ourselves as academic readers and writers in the context of our world. Together, we will explore the world around us and incorporate multiple perspectives into our inquiry in order to understand the social contexts of reading, writing, and the knowledge we gain and create from these processes. The class will center around you, the student, and your colleagues as you reflect on what you learn and what is meaningful to you in the larger contexts of the classroom and the world, that you may participate and make meaningful choices about how you interact with the questions and problems you encounter here and beyond the classroom.