Drawing from our experiences facilitating an FYE faculty development program, we highlight how we have practiced elements of trauma-informed pedagogy to work with first-year students and faculty. We discuss how both students and faculty can benefit from a more complex process of cultivating relationships through mindfulness. Practices of…

The authors report on a pilot project designed to integrate habits of mind into a skills-based first-year seminar. This project featured the development of a curriculum map outlining the primary learning objectives for seven habits of mind--curiosity, perseverance, introspection, courage, humility, empathy, and civility--and this study shares that…

This study brings together insights from the Science Education Initiative with a new course, "Spy Novel Diplomacy: Propaganda and International Relations," which has been taught as a General Education Seminar for first year students. The class will continue on an annual basis from the spring semester of 2020 onward. Thus what follows is…

This chapter presents mindfulness relaxation activities used in a first-year seminar, discusses Eastern ancient meditation methods as alternative Western contemplative inquiry, and suggests teaching practices in adult and higher education for holistic education and well-being.

A defining feature of honors education is meaningful engagement within and across disciplines, yet significant challenges for creating and sustaining meaningful transdisciplinary research remain. One such challenge involves a nuanced understanding of a discipline, or what educational researchers call "disciplinary literacy." This article…

In 2012, Randy Bass challenged educators to "disrupt" themselves expanding the notion of teaching to include multiple high-impact practices (HIP). First-year seminars are a HIP that, when done successfully, encourages retention and persistence in students. On our campus they function similarly, but they also create opportunities for…

Podcast assignments in higher education foster students' deep engagement in course content, knowledge construction, technical skills, and problem-solving abilities. We designed a podcast assignment in a First Year Seminar course based on student-led interviews comparing theoretical concepts to lived experiences of the interviewees. Students were…

The success of the first-year experience (FYE) course hangs on the effectiveness of the individual faculty members who are given the task of educating first-year students in a particularly important developmental period. This article applies a flipped classroom strategy for kickstarting meaningful classroom discussion in Mathematics Education to…

Academic advisors see it all the time--skills successfully applied by underclassman in high school are not working in college. This article describes how advisors can help struggling students in self-monitoring and self-regulating their study experiences using metacognitive development as an intervention. Metacognition development includes…

In this article, the author explains a high-impact role-playing pedagogy developed at Barnard College called "Reacting to the Past," which she uses to introduce first-year and general education students to feminist history, current feminist issues, and feminist pedagogy.

This article offers strategies for administrators who struggle to contextualize their writing programs in institutional climates increasingly focused on recruitment and retention, rather than discipline and discovery. As composition scholars negotiate disciplinary and institutional values, there are productive juxtapositions of university mission…

First year college students are challenged both socially and academically in their transition to college life. The literature suggests that social and emotional competence skills can help with this transition. This article describes the course content for a University freshman seminar that teaches skills in social and emotional competence in order…

This article introduces the guiding principles of integrated multicultural instructional design (IMID), a new pedagogical model created to promote retention by addressing multicultural perspectives and social justice issues across the curriculum. To illustrate the model, specific strategies for implementing IMID in a content-based,…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

Increased focus on assessment of student learning, within college classrooms, has lead many professors to routinely employ classroom assessment techniques as a means to make adjustments in teaching during the instructional process. This article describes a technique, Talking Drawings, which was developed by a high school teacher as a teaching…