In this blog post, various professors of First-Year Foundation Courses (FFCs) will share their insights into their courses and the program overall.
WHAT FFC CAN DO FOR YOU!
The First-year Foundations Course (FFC) provides an opportunity for first-year students to build a community across fields of study. It allows each student to bring their own strengths to the study of a subject that is of interest to each person in the course. While students will spend much of their day in a single department, the FFC allows deep and thoughtful conversations across specializations, backgrounds, and experiences. As an instructor, I have seen friendships and partnerships built in FFC that have lasted through years of study at Chapman.
Drew Chappell
FFC: Fantastic Worlds in the Imagination and Performance: The Social Impact of Fantasy and Science Fiction in Literature, Stage and Film
WHAT CAN YOU COUNT ON IN YOUR FFC CLASS?
As you prepare to make the leap from high school to college, you may be wondering what your First-Year Foundations Course is all about. What is First-Year Foundations in the first place? And how does FFC fit in with all your other courses?
The First-Year Foundations Course (FFC) is intended to be an introduction to the Chapman experience. It is built on the premise that college is a very different experience from high school, one you choose to participate in as a member in a community of learners. And with that new configuration comes a number of perks.
In a community of learners, everyone participates and contributes to the learning. FFC classes typically include project-based learning activities conducted in small groups. Learning isn’t centralized in the instructor. Instead, everyone contributes to exploring, discussing, and critically hashing out complicated propositions. In my class, “The Rhetoric of Popular Culture,” one group may focus on deciding whether Gossip Girl supports or subverts the hegemony of one social class over another. Another group might take up the question of whether Mr. Robot accurately reflects the Occupy Wall Street movement. Still another will consider the ways in which Disney heroines have changed over time. Each task is chosen by the group, given the parameters of the project, and each group uses the tools for critical thinking that rhetorical criticism provides in thinking through these issues.
FFC classes will involve you in a wide range of learning opportunities, from field trips to local sites to small group discussions, reflective writing, and creating and sharing your own blog. For our field trip, my class chooses a feature film they want to see at a local theater. Afterward, everyone shares their thoughts and criticisms of the film in small groups and with the entire class.
All this is intended to immerse you in the Chapman experience, where new insights are shared, not banked, by talking together, hashing out ideas, debating, discussing, and arriving at shared and sometimes divergent conclusions. Your FFC course is an introduction to the Chapman experience, where opportunities to learn and expand the person you want to become are there for the taking. We hope your FFC class will give you a taste of that potential.
Gerry McNenny
FFC: Reading and Rhetoric of Popular Culture
WHAT DO YOU KNOW?
What do you know and how do you know it? How do you know that what you know is accurate and based on fact? Particularly in the world of alternative facts and diametrically opposed opinions, a world in which it appears that people have lost the ability to listen to each other, to work together, to compromise?
The ability to think critically is essential to being a well-informed citizen and a responsible member of a community. First-year Foundations courses are an opportunity to” think about thinking” in a sense. You will be asked to be conscious of how you form opinions, how you analyze problems and issues, how you find relevant and authoritative information to inspire, inform and support your ideas, and how you then use that information to come to a reasonable and justifiable conclusion. It will ask you to examine the difference between an opinion based solely on a “belief” or a “feeling”, and a reasoned conclusion that can be examined and justified. The critical thinking process opens you up to be able to listen to others, to learn new things, to solve problems, and to communicate effectively. It allows you to have opinions that are supported by information and not just by blind faith.
When you think about important issues critically, you demonstrate that you are a reasonable and educated member of your community. Because your conclusion is based on information that is carefully weighed for its authority and its value, your conclusion also has authority and value. And because you know that your conclusion is based on what you have found at this time, you know your conclusion can change because the data, information, and resources that allowed you to form that conclusion can change. This can happen when new information comes to light, when data changes over time, when the circumstances and context in which you arrived at a conclusion are now completely different.
Critical thinking gives a person the ability to change—for good reason. It is that ability to re-assess and re-evaluate that that allows us to grow as individuals, community members and citizens. It makes you a better person for being open, informed and aware and is essential to success—in anything. And it allows you to listen. That is at the foundation of democracy and freedom. It is not what you know, but how you know it that is important. And it is not that you’ve learned, but that you continue to learn that makes you a better person in the long run.
Nina LeNoir
FFC: Drama and Diversity
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
What would you do? You’ve been living in a foreign country for several years as a missionary but your work is mostly building schools and medical facilities. You fear a civil war is about to erupt and you have a pretty good sense that terrible atrocities are about to occur and the people you know – your friends, neighbors, and co-workers – are in grave danger. Both your government and your aid agency have ordered you out of the country in anticipation of the imminent hostilities. Should you stay to continue your important work and protect those in danger, or should you save yourself, follow directions, and do what all other expatriates are doing and leave the country?
What would you do? You are on a focused UN mission to rescue refugees who have survived unspeakable atrocities in a country whose central government is so weak and ineffective that it has little practical control and widespread corruption and criminality are the norm. As you attempt to save the original group of refugees you are authorized to rescue, you find an additional group of women and children atrocity survivors in even greater need. Do you try to rescue them also, placing the original mission in great jeopardy or do you focus only on your original target group, knowing you can save them?
How do we make these tough choices? It is all too common for us to be passive and complicit bystanders in the face of injustice. But we also have the potential for courage and resilience when we face crucible moments if we have carefully considered our beliefs and how they are linked to our willingness to act.
In our FFC, we read accounts, view documentaries, talk face-to-face with the people who are the rescuers who had to make the choices noted above, and then write about and discuss these experiences. The goal is to develop your “voice,” critical awareness, and knowledge of meaningful personal action.
Jim Brown
FFC: Lies You Learn in High School
BALONEY DETECTING
Welcome to Chapman University and the FFC program. Your next four years will be among the most memorable and life-changing of your life. Starting your educational career with an FFC class is unique not only on this campus, but anywhere in the American university system, for the goal of the FFC is to teach you how to think, not what to think. We want to prepare your mind to go out into the world not knowing what you will encounter, ready to evaluate any truth claim or knowledge assertion.
In my FFC class, Skepticism 101, I will teach you how to think like a scientist. This is often called the Scientific Method. Another name for it is the Baloney Detection Kit. You will learn to detect baloney by learning how scientists test hypothesis and assess theories. In short, scientists are skeptics, and so should you be. Why? Because most ideas are wrong, and most of us, most of the time, are wrong. So the default position should be skepticism.
In science this is called the Null Hypothesis: the starting position that someone’s hypothesis is not true until proven otherwise. Before the FDA approves a drug for sale the manufacturers of the drug must prove to the FDA scientists that it works. They cannot simply assert that it works, or provide testimonials from people who tried it and said that it worked; they must actually run clinical trials to prove that it works. All hypotheses should be so treated. You think Big Foot lives, that UFOs are real, or that ESP exists? That’s nice. Prove it. Provide evidence for your beliefs. If you can’t there’s a good chance your belief is baloney.
FFC will teach you to be a good baloney detective.
Michael Shermer
FFC: Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist
A SHORT STORY…..
“She encourages free thinking and treats students like equals, creating mutual respect.”
“The projects were very creative and helped to promote critical thinking.”
These are the words from students from a freshman foundations class who were asked anonymously to answer: What were the most effective aspects of this course in promoting student learning and critical thinking.
Sometimes beginning with the end, as in a good short story, is an intriguing path to that initial engagement and excitement. The playwright (and short story writer) Anton Chekhov once said (through the character of Nina in The Sea Gull): “I love him. I love him even more than before. I love him passionately, desperately–a good subject for a short story.” Well, here is my short story subject for you with maybe a Chekhovian thought or two…..
The subject is about “creating mutual respect” and how committing to a simple act of graciousness can open you to much more. If you are here to learn and gain from the conversations and interchanges between you and me, then from that very first day, what you choose to do (your actions) may influence what may come (your results). What do I mean by that? I mean that, like you, I have hopes that there can be an open and respectful exchange of dialogue between us. Sometimes, I may have to lecture or demonstrate or navigate the various aspects of the course material. Sometimes, I may offer a challenging perspective from yours. But what excites me is to see your engagement and immersion. What will you get out of it? Can you stay the course and remain involved and committed; respectful and gracious? Will the course provide you with new tools and critical thinking skills to help you expand or express, and most important for me, become more confident in articulating your own point of view. My passion for teaching is tied to your passion for this special kind of engagement.
Although Chekhov’s short stories and plays may have surprising and dramatic endings (read The Sea Gull to see what I mean), it is the journey that we inhabit along the way that makes it all worthwhile…
Julie Artman
FFC: American Theatre in Contemporary Culture