The Write Stuff
Muhlenberg’s First-Year Seminars allow faculty to explore interesting topics and help incoming students develop analytical composition skills.
With Muhlenberg’s First-Year Seminar (FYS) program, everyone learns. Entering students learn how to use observation and analysis to support a written claim. Faculty from all disciplines learn how to teach these skills and about the seminar topic of their choosing, which is not always within their realm of expertise. And the returning students who are part of the selective, paid writing assistant program learn how to collaborate with faculty to set first-year students up for success.
It’s a wonderful program for both students and faculty,” says Professor of English Jill Stephen, who co-directs Muhlenberg’s Writing Program and Writing Center with Professor of English David Rosenwasser. “Because we’re devoted to the idea of writing across the curriculum, both for the culture of writing and thinking it encourages and because we think no one should own writing, there’s significant support.”
Professor of Philosophy Ted Schick debuted first-year seminars— writing-intensive courses on specialized topics that were optional at the time—at Muhlenberg in the 1980s. Faculty from the English Department alone taught the mandatory first-year composition course, which placed an enormous strain on a small group of people. Rosenwasser and Stephen came up with a summer seminar designed to expose faculty from all disciplines to a range of approaches to writing instruction with which they might experiment. In 1993, Muhlenberg’s faculty voted to replace mandatory first-year composition with First-Year Seminars.
“They wanted to take on the responsibility of working with first-year writers,” Rosenwasser says, “and to this day, the program must be staffed only by full-time faculty who have volunteered to participate.” At many other institutions, grad students and adjunct faculty are often tasked with this important work. Rosenwasser and Stephen teach the three-day faculty summer seminar every other year. A significant number of faculty have chosen to attend; many take it several times. There are about 40 first-year seminars offered annually, which means 40 faculty members and their departments devote resources to the important task of cultivating analytical thinking, reading and writing ability in first-year students.
“It’s a different kind of pedagogical experience where [a student’s] goal is to achieve certain kinds of skills rather than mastery of a particular body of information,” Rosenwasser says. “One goal is to teach students to have ideas. If [the professor has] already had all the ideas, it’s not going to be the same experience.”
Because the writing process takes precedence over the subject material itself, that means faculty are often learning right alongside their students, especially when they debut a new seminar or introduce new source material into an existing one. Here, some faculty conducting first-year seminars for the Class of 2023 share why they selected the topics they did and something unexpected their students will learn along the way.
People who swear don’t have smaller vocabularies than people who don’t swear.
Very Bad Words (Alexandra Frazer, assistant professor of psychology)
Why this topic?
“Profanity is something I am interested in as a part of my research area of psychology of language, but I was interested in tying it to broader political and cultural ideas—mainly about freedom of speech and the internet/the media.”
The Brothers Grimm did not wander through the small villages and hamlets of Germany collecting their tales from peasants, but heard the tales from their (mostly female) servants in their own house.
Reading Fairy Tales (Grant Scott, professor of English)
Why this topic?
“The topic kept coming up in discussions I had with students, and they said they wished Muhlenberg offered a course on fairy tales. Then, when I was chair of the department, we handed out a questionnaire about the major to all graduating seniors. One question asked them to write down courses that they would like to see offered in the future. Guess what kept coming up? I started thinking seriously about offering a section, since I had some experience with German and had also taken a course in fairy tales in college. I figured it would be a winner. Short readings, great plots, sex and violence, princes and princesses, Freudian psychology—what could be better?”
The standard world map we are all used to, the Mercator projection, was in fact developed for navigational purposes and presents a very warped sense of dimensions. Other projections, such as the Gall-Peters projection, while less useful for navigation, present a better sense of relational size.
The Power of Maps (Sharon Albert, senior lecturer in religion studies)
Why this topic?
“Maps are great for FYS classes because you can take them in so many different directions and show their relevance for all kinds of different disciplines. For instance, in semesters where I’ve had a lot of students interested in the sciences, we’ve talked about ‘gene mapping.’ Also, Trexler Library has the Ray R. Brennen Map Collection, which has been a fantastic resource. We talk about the ways that maps can both shape and are a product of our worldviews, and then the students can actually touch and handle these old maps that present the world in very different ways than we now would.”
Eighty-five percent of the world’s coffee farmers live at or below the poverty level.
Coffee: The Great Soberer (Keri Colabroy, professor of chemistry)
Why this topic?
“Coffee is a personal passion of mine. My husband and I met working in our campus coffee shop. We are coffee enthusiasts and coffee tourists. We brew our coffee scientifically, we try coffee wherever we go and we financially support families that live in the ‘coffee lands’ of the world, where poverty is the rule rather than the exception. And, coffee is a topic that can be approached from multiple perspectives. The three that form the backbone of my course are coffee and the enlightenment, coffee farming and farmers (with a social justice lens, including fair trade and sustainability) and coffeehouse culture.”
The U.S. military hanged around 125 soldiers for sex crimes in the months following the D-Day invasion. The vast majority of these were African American soldiers convicted on weak evidence and often without due process.
World War II in the American Imagination (Brian Mello, associate professor of political science)
Why this topic?
“I like to teach first-year seminars that start with widely held and dominant myths about America and then seek to complicate these myths through various course texts. My current course begins with two myths about World War II: one, that it was fought by the greatest generation, and the other, that it was the good war. I start with these myths, and then we read history texts, watch films and read novels that complicate the assumptions underlying the dominant views of World War II in the American imagination. The goal is not so much to prove the myths false as to develop in students capacities for critically engaging with texts and developing a comfort with more nuanced and complicated ways of thinking about and understanding the world.”
One out of every 1,500 babies is born with disorders of sex development or intersex.
Transgender Peoples and Cultures Around the World (Casey James Miller, assistant professor of anthropology)
Why this topic?
“I chose the topic of transgender peoples and cultures because this is a fascinating topic that is rarely taught at liberal arts colleges. When it is taught, it normally is only covered for a week or two as part of an upper-level class on gender and sexuality. This is the only semester-long course I know of that focuses on the topic of transgender peoples and cultures at a first-year level. However, there is a lot of demand for more courses on queer topics, including among first-year students.”
Google processes an average of more than 40,000 searches every second.
Looking at the Black Mirror: Technology and Business Ethics (Rita Chesterton, director of innovation & entrepreneurship)
Why this topic?
“I teach entrepreneurship, and all too often we focus just on whether or not an innovation or business idea can be profitable. We often fail to look at the potential implications of our business on the lives of the consumers. This is where students of the liberal arts have a tremendous role to play in the world of business. I felt that these particular topics would connect to students personally. The main goal of an FYS is to teach students how to produce quality analytical writing; if students are interested in a topic, it makes learning the mechanics of writing easier.”
Before the eighth century, Chinese people usually drank green tea as a medicinal soup. Tea leaves were boiled with onions or scallions and other ingredients, and it was a green, bitter sludge, not a clear, refreshing liquid.
How Tea Conquered the World (Tineke D’Haeseleer, assistant professor of history)
Why this topic?
“It was in conversation with David Rosenwasser and [former Assistant Director of the Writing Center] Kate O’Donoghue ’17 that I was able to narrow the topic down to tea. It sprang from my curiosity about Chinese material culture. I also lived for 10 years in England and really learned to drink tea there. It is also a drink that is enjoyed across the world now, and it has a long history, so I was sure that every student would be able to find something interesting in the topic.”
According to Philadelphia’s Museum of African Americans, to create Central Park in 1857, New York City bought out—or some say evicted—the residents of Seneca Park. Seneca Park was founded in 1825 by free African Americans. The residents there, mostly African Americans, fought through the courts both the eviction orders and the level of compensation being offered for their land, but they eventually lost.
Reading Museums (Linda Miller, associate professor of English)
Why this topic?
“I am very interested in narratives—how we tell our stories. Museum exhibits have a story line, and I wanted to explore how these museum narratives were made with the students in my seminar.”
At the moment of Japan’s surrender, after the dropping of two atomic bombs, there were other events that were also pressuring them to yield. One was the declaration of war on Japan by the Soviet Union and their invasion of Manchuria. Some have argued that this was a major reason for the Japanese surrender.
Now I Am Become Death: Brains, the Bomb and the Bellicose (Brett Fadem, associate professor of physics)
Why this topic?
“I love teaching topics that involve multiple disciplines: My topic, the creation of the atom bomb, focuses on the fascinating history of the WWII era as well as developments in the preceding half-century. Ethical questions about war are unavoidable, as are discussions about connections between science, technology and society. Originally, the question of the responsibility of scientists for the creations that stem from their discoveries interested me, but that initial question has branched out into an overall interest in things we can learn from science and technology in that era and the history of the era in general.”
Modern witch hunts still happen around the world. In particular, in regions like India, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon region and sub- Saharan Africa, people accused of practicing sorcery have been persecuted as recently as 2018.
Witchcraft/Brujería: Magical Resistance for Social Change (Leticia Robles-Moreno, lecturer in theatre)
Why this topic?
“My FYS topic is witchcraft, understanding it as a reference to people who are seen as dangerous or simply different because they behave or think in a way that doesn’t align with certain cultural expectations. I included the Spanish word ‘brujería’ to open a dialogue with Latinx experiences in the United States. I believe we are living in a time when we all need to be ready to learn that witchcraft is more than a metaphor; it is a call to learning to understand diversity and to embrace our own multiple ways of being in the world.”
