First Year Seminar - History and Purpose
What is the First Year Seminar?
These seminars are special courses for first-year students designed to enhance their academic and social integration to college. They are designed to provide students essential strategies and information toincrease the likelihood of their retention and academic/social success.
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What's in a FYS class?
A seminar is what sets this class apart from many other types of classes. FYS brings together an interested group of learners who have done some preparation, including having heard a presentation, having read, thought about and written about a particularly good book, etc..
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A Brief History
As a classroom structure with many specific and varied definitions, the freshman seminar represents a popular curriculum reform which has grown slowly but steadily, generally from the bottom up, with little in the way of accompanying fanfare. Campus by campus, institutions have chosen to employ the freshman seminar as a structured, intentional way to ease the transition into college life. This reform, like others before it, has seen its share of resistance from sincere educators who believe that "there should be some limit as to how much effort an institution should expend on individual students"(p. 101). But in spite of such resistance, many American colleges and universities continue to redefine the limits of their responsibility to first-year students through the implementation of a freshman seminar.
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