(one unit to be taken in the first year)
Learning Objectives
As one of two foundational seminars in the Sound Connections Curriculum, the Critical Conversations Seminar addresses student abilities to compose, contextualize and collaborate through speaking and writing.
Composing
- Students practice purposefully contributing to a broader critical conversation by developing questions, listening to and learning from others, and sharing ideas and information, through a variety of written and spoken communicative media.
- Students learn to compose and speak flexibly and with integrity to address diverse audiences within and outside an academic context.
- Students engage in a substantive revision process with multiple drafts, demonstrating considered attention to feedback from others, and
- Students reflect on communicative resources (information, ideas, stylistic options, experiences, community-based knowledge) and how they might be used to achieve the goals for a particular project.
Contextualizing
- Students identify and appreciate how ways of knowing and creating meaning differ across multiple contexts, communities, and disciplines.
- Students recognize that communicators in different contexts use words, images, and sounds differently, and reflect on how to transfer skills from one context to another effectively.
- Students develop and amplify reading, listening, and research skills that help in finding, analyzing, and responding to varied sources (textual, visual, sonic, multimedia) and arguments thoughtfully and with integrity.
- Students engage with issues of authority, positionality, and bias when exploring sources, arguments, and ways of discovering, and consider the practical, political, and ethical implications of different approaches to communication.
Collaborating
- Students develop the ability to engage actively, collegially, and critically in a learning community through discussion, collaboration, peer feedback activities, and/or one-on-one conferences with the professor.
- Students develop the ability to give and receive constructive criticism, and articulate how this feedback contributes to learning and growth as a scholar and communicator.
Guidelines
Composing
- Assign the equivalent of ca. 15-20 pages during the semester (including revisions); writing should take various forms
- Assign two scaffolded oral presentations of at least 5 minutes each (one group and one individual presentation)
- Discuss with students the Puget Sound Academic Integrity Policy and give students the opportunity to discuss implications and to ask questions without judgment about what is and is not considered acceptable practice.
- Assign a final portfolio that asks students to include selections of revised work from throughout the semester and reflect on their composing process
Contextualizing
- Include information literacy activities that introduce students to different kinds of sources.
- Include information literacy activities that require students to consider how we discover information and sources, and how we evaluate those sources for appropriateness for different purposes.
- Ask students to use a citation to locate the original source.
- Examine one or more examples demonstrating social construction of a scholarly field.
- Assign a weekly average of 60 pages or less of reading, and acknowledge that different kinds of reading require different levels of attention.
Collaborating
- Assign a group presentation of at least 5 minutes with 2 or more students.
- Include at least one class workshop with a CWL Writing/Speech Liaison.
- Include a structured Peer Review process.
CCS courses may not fulfill major/minor/emphasis requirements, Divisional requirements, nor other core requirements.