"Academic Literacy" Seminars: Helping Students Participate - PDF document

"Academic Literacy" Seminars: Helping Students Participate in the Construction of Knowledge in the Academic Discourse Community Doug Brent, University of Calgary Kenneth Bartlett, University of Toronto Teresa Dawson, University of Toronto Presentation for the Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience Addison, TX February 2004 Draft speaking notes – not a finished paper. Today we would like to explore with you an invisible construct: the first year seminar that focuses on academic content. We call this an “invisible construct” because it is extremely difficult to find discussions of this sort of seminar, identified as such, in the literature – any literature, not just the Journal of the First Year Experience. The category has existed fairly persistently from Murphy’s original taxonomy in 1989, which distinguishes between “Success/Survival/Orientation” seminars, perhaps better known as the “University 101” model, and “Academic Content” seminars. Later National Resource Centre surveys break the latter down into courses with uniform content across sections and courses with variable content, generally chosen by the instructor and closely keyed to his or her research – a distinction which, we will argue in a moment, is more important than it looks. The National Survey reports that this type of seminar (variable academic content) comprises about 12% of seminars reported (Table 1). Table 1: Results from the 2000 National Survey 465 respondents (62.1%) indicated that their campus offers an extended orientation or college survival seminar. These courses offer a blend of topics essential for student success. 125 respondents (16.7%) indicated that their campus offers an academic seminar for which content is fairly uniform across sections. These courses may focus on a single topic such as "The Purpose of Higher Education" or they may be interdisciplinary courses that address a single theme from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. 96 respondents (12.8%) indicated that their campus offers academic seminars for which the content is determined by the instructor and is different for each section. The remaining 63 seminars (8.4%) were categorized as either basic study skills courses, professional seminars (taught within undergraduate professional schools) or "other." 1

One would expect to find more attention to academic-content seminars at universities with a declared research agenda. The Policy Centre on the First Year of College recently conducted a survey that explicitly targeted Doctoral/Research Extensive universities (according to the Carnegie definition). The database resulting from this survey does not break out academic content courses from other strategies, but by inspecting the individual program summaries it can be guessed that about 18 of the 70 responding universities feature academic content seminars as at least part of their FYE program – a bigger presence than in the National Survey but still a minority. The academic content seminar, then, is obviously a “live” category though less common than the U101 model. But at this point the trail goes cold. A very small number of research studies mention that they involve academic content seminars (Maisto & Tammi, 1991, Hyers & Joslin, 1998), but the academic nature of the seminars’ content is treated as incidental. None of these studies gives examples of the academic content, and the seminars are assessed according to exactly the same standards as U101 seminars – retention being foregrounded as the most important outcome, with academic skills, grade point average, and general adjustment following behind. As we were preparing this presentation, it seemed intuitively that this type of seminar is more common in Canada than in the United States. But again, it proves highly evasive as a category. The only good survey of Canadian first year programs was performed in 1998 on a selective sample of Canadian universities, and in that survey, the academic content seminar does not appear as a discrete category (see Table 2) and its goals are not distinguished from those of other types of seminar. Table 2: Categories of FYE Strategies used in From Best Intentions to Best Practices 1. Prior to Admission 2. Orientation 3. Family and Support Networks 4. Equity Access 5. Aboriginal Student Services 6. Race/Ethnic/Cultural Gender 7. Academic Advising Course Placement Skills Assessment 8. Language Development 9. Mathematics Development 10. Learning Skills Centre 11. Short-term Success Seminar 12. Introductory Discipline Course 13. University 101 Term Course 14. Course Cluster Formation 15. Student Cohort Formation 16. Tutoring 17. Career Counseling 18. Personal Counseling 19. Faculty /Teaching Development 2

20. Residence Life This type of seminar is not even glorified by a name that neatly encapsulates its goals and philosophy. Everyone pretty much knows what a “University 101” or “Success” or “Extended Orientation” seminar looks like, though details of course vary from institution to institution. But “academic content” seminar, or, even less nimble on the tongue, “first year seminar with academic content,” does little to identify the seminar in terms of goals or methodology. It simply flags the seminar as being “about” something that is presumably more “academic” than the mixture of social adjustment, college-level skills and career counselling that is usually associated with U101. I submit that what we have here is another example of a familiar phenomenon: if you don’t name something – and, more important, discuss it publicly as if its distinctions matter – it doesn’t exist. It is absent from the institutional agenda and from the research radar screen as something worthy of notice as a discrete unit of attention. What we want to do is to hail the academic content seminar into existence. We want to establish the legitimacy of its name by attaching that name to a discrete cluster of goals, educational values and pedagogical methods. In short, we want to show you what this thing looks like, why it looks like that, and to argue for its importance as a distinct and alternative way of fulfilling the goals of the First Year Experience in a research-based institution. The University of Toronto program (Kenneth Bartlett and Teresa Dawson) The University of Calgary program (Doug Brent) The U of C program is similar to the U of T program in most respects. There are some administrative differences that are probably more important to us than to you, most of which result from its being located in a small interdisciplinary faculty. Rather than get to this level of detail I’d like to talk more about the pedagogical imperatives behind these seminars, and then report some preliminary results of a research project designed to assess some of the unique features of the program. As with the U of T, our seminars are typically taught by practicing researchers: that is, by regular faculty members, often senior ones, not by sessional lecturers and graduate students. Seminars are formed around topics that loosely reflect the instructors’ research agendas, covering subjects ranging from biotechnology to genealogy and urban studies. (See list on handout.) They are not introductory courses in a subject area, for the intention is to go deep rather than broad and to free instructors from the obsession with “coverage” that constrains most disciplinary-based courses (more on that in a moment). They seek to engage students in “live” research (in secondary 3