FYS Students attend Petra Cliffs, an indoor and outdoor climbing and recreation center each Fall Semester. Petra Cliffs founder, Chip Schlegel, is a Champlain College alumnus. Petra Cliffs on the Web
Oh the difficulty in adjusting from high school to college! Champlain College offers a program of support for students that has been in place for the past 15 years. This program is now simply known as FYS or First Year Seminar. Originator and Director of this program, Shelli Goldsweig, wanted to assist students with both academics and the socialization process during those first key semesters in an entirely new environment. The program offers wonderful support to students and encourages campus exploration and critical thinking.
The syllabus that is being used for the Honors section puts an emphasis on students becoming aware of their personal learning styles, in addition to focusing on what exactly is college life about. Academic rigor is showcased through such assignments as creation of an annotated bibliography to preemptively be ready for that final paper and the creation of a portfolio that will encompass artifacts and reflection papers chronicling the rigors of the freshman year for honors students.
This semester the Honors Section has been concentrating on course work in Sociology taught by Professor Alan Stracke.
One of my favorite pair of courses to teach is the series of CREW 1 to CREW 2 at Champlain College. This particular course series concentrates on critical reading and expository writing and essentially covers a wide variety of thematic topics spanning the gamut from gender issues (woman as the other as discussed in the works of Simone de Beauvoir); the appeals that modern information society puts on us daily to behave and buy certain products and services; the ethical issues contained in the considerable decision making necessary for surviving hour by hour in modern western culture. As these themes are explored, students are able to engage in classroom discussion and to revisit their belief systems through expository essays, PowerPoint projects, team presentations, and advertising analysis.
In CREW 1 I tend to use a writing methodology written by Dr. John Lannon of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth with whom I had the pleasure of taking several writing courses with in the nineties. His writing tips tend to concentrate on giving students many options for kick starting and refining their writing processes. These are invaluable tools to possess for students needing to navigate multiple writing projects within one semester.