Laura Eramian, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

In fall 2013, with five other instructors, I was part of the team that offered new First Year Seminar (FYS) courses in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This Academic Innovation initiative was aimed primarily at student academic success and building information literacy. Here, I reflect on the process of designing the course and my experiences with the FYS pilot project as I begin teaching one of the seminars again this fall.

The course I teach deals with how personal relationships, like kinship, friendship, or neighbourliness are not merely private, but have a broader political significance in the world. Whenever I design a new course, I consider the same question: given that most of my students will not go on to graduate study, and even fewer will go on to professionalize as anthropologists, what is the value of a brief encounter with my discipline of social anthropology? In light of these objectives and the overall goals of the FYS program, I aim to give first year students a taste of what it’s like to do qualitative research. Throughout the term, each student is involved in a group project on one of our course themes that has them learning how to do interviews and/or public observation. In so doing, I aim to develop their understanding of what it means to collect and use information in ways consistent with university research ethics, and I work to build their understanding of the connections between what we talk about inside the classroom and the world beyond it.

What often strikes me about incoming university students is how disoriented many of them say they feel and how so much of what the university is built on remains mysterious to them as they settle into their roles as students. Conversations with my first year (and sometimes upper year) students reveal that the research side of the university is what they understand the least. What also strikes me is how curious they are about that side of things. Since I began teaching at Dal in 2011, no small number of undergraduate students have asked if I could tell them more about how research works – most of them know it’s something all of their instructors do when we’re not planning and delivering course material, but that’s about all most of them know. Part of what I aimed to do with the first year seminar was to give students some insight into that part of university life that they get to see less of, but that is fundamental for understanding the culture and practices of the university and what kind of place it is.

Conversations with the other four instructors who taught seminars in fall 2013 revealed a lot of useful “lessons learned.” For me, working closely with a small group brought home the importance of meeting students at their level and then building their understanding from there. This is always important in undergraduate teaching, but it’s especially so in a discussion-based first year seminar when they don’t yet have a great deal of background in the subject matter. I had the students bring in weekly discussion questions based on points they thought were particularly interesting, important, or confusing in the readings and that they wanted to discuss further as a group. This not only gave us a starting point for in-class discussions of the material, but also gave me a really useful gauge for what level(s) the students were engaging at. It let me meet them where they were and then bring them along with me to the arguments, concepts, and ideas I wanted them to know by the end of each week.

My experience of the FYS project points to some ongoing challenges and key successes.

Main successes:

• Many students reported feeling more able to participate in the small group setting, which helped them build their confidence to speak in front of others. It was gratifying to see some of the quieter students open up and join the conversation as the term progressed.

• Toward the end of the term, I invited a guest panel of my colleagues from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology to help the students work through the challenges they were coming up against in their group research projects. For example, what does one do to get a quiet interviewee talking? How do you approach strangers to do short, on-site interviews? The guest panel was one of the highlights of the course, because the students were surprised and delighted that many of the challenges they were facing as beginners were the same ones seasoned researchers face. The panelists provided practical suggestions to the students on how to deal with these challenges, and it gave the students the opportunity to meet other Dal faculty members at the same time.

• Having students generate their own research data gave them the confidence to weigh in on issues that otherwise they might not have felt “authorized” to intervene in. It gave them an opportunity to think, “Hey, I know something about this, and I have something to add based on my own findings.” The students all found useful ways to link their findings back to the literature on their topic. Moreover, doing research got them excited about a part of university life that they usually don’t get to experience until upper year courses or in some cases, graduate level study.

Ongoing Challenges:

• Working with small groups of new university students does come with its challenges. The basic difficulties one might face in any introductory course become intensified in a small group setting that requires a lot of participation.

• Students tend to enter university with varying levels of comfort in their student roles, and small seminars that continually demand high levels of energy from both students and instructors tend to make those dynamics all the more apparent.