Core 1: Introduction to Thinking & Writing

A GUIDE TO CORE 1: INTRODUCTION TO THINKING AND WRITING (IDST 1000 & IDST 1050)

THE PURPOSE OF IDST 1000

Mission Statement: As the introduction to our college’s liberal arts abilities, IDST 1000 employs a variety of themes drawn from the range of disciplines that comprise a liberal arts education at Millsaps. The shared experience of being introduced to the four abilities by faculty drawn from the humanities, the sciences, and business, provides Millsaps students with a unifying seminar in their crucial first year along with the skills they will need during their undergraduate days and beyond. The goals of the course are to introduce students to our liberal arts abilities of Reasoning, Communication, Historical Consciousness, and Social & Cultural Awareness; to teach particular skills in writing, namely, analysis, organization, revision, and documentation; and to instill an appreciation for an interdisciplinary view of lifelong learning and development.

YOU AND THE CORE CURRICULUM

How is this course going to help you? IDST 1000 is the first piece of a carefully designed, two-year introduction to a liberal education known as the Core Curriculum. Throughout a series of nine courses to be completed by the end of sophomore year and a tenth in senior year, students acquire key intellectual skills and perspectives—our “liberal arts abilities”—within an interdisciplinary context. In the humanities, Core 2, 3, 4, and 5 take a chronological approach that explores a particular historical epoch and may be fulfilled in one of two ways: either via the theme-based IDST Topics sequence during your first four semesters, or else over the course of a single year in a double-credit program called The Heritage of the West in World Perspective. Taken as a whole, either option enables a student to “focus” on particular fields of knowledge: fine arts, history, religion, literature, and philosophy. By contrast, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 are drawn from the areas of social and natural sciences as well as business; they may be fulfilled in any order. Core 6-9 courses introduce students to the scientific method, and each contains an element of writing appropriate to its discipline. Like all other Core courses, these courses pursue the liberal arts abilities as far as possible, within the context of mathematics, laboratory sciences, social sciences, business, and computer science. As a final step in your undergraduate education in the liberal arts, Core 10, “Reflections on Thinking & Writing,” may be part of your own major’s senior seminar. Core 10 asks every Millsaps student to reflect in a careful essay upon an education that enables you to take charge of your own learning and to examine the relationship between your chosen field of study and our college’s liberal arts curriculum. Millsaps believes that the liberal arts abilities you acquire in the Core Curriculum form the life-long basis of every educated adult’s most useful tools.

In your Core 1 seminar, you will encounter a variety of interesting, important, and controversial issues—scientific, artistic, ethical, economic, and so forth—within the context of your instructor’s chosen theme. You will be challenged to think for yourself in ways that draw upon your personal experience, the experiences of those in your class, and the evidence you read, produce, or observe. There is a strong emphasis on writing and revising your writing in this course because the process of revision is important for clarifying your thinking.

Because Core 1 is conducted as a seminar, the pedagogy is interactive, with students taking an active role in every class. Each section’s readings are drawn from a number of disciplines, and artwork and films are often viewed and analyzed. These materials are not taught as introductions to the disciplines, but as ways to help you discover how to answer your own human questions. No faculty member is a full expert on the multi-disciplinary content of the course. Rather, the role of the Core 1 instructor is to help you in learning how to learn and how to reason.

For these reasons, this class introduces you to a different kind of educational process that at the beginning may seem strange to you. Rather than being a class in which you learn information passively from an expert, this class will encourage you to become responsible for your own thinking and learning. As you progress in the course and in your undergraduate education at Millsaps, you will increasingly become your own teacher.

LIBERAL ARTS ABILITIES

The word “liberal” in liberal arts and liberal education means "free." First of all, a liberal education is the education of a free man or woman, of a citizen, an education that gives you the knowledge and, above all, the competencies of thinking and judging necessary to carry out the responsibilities of an adult citizen in an era of change. Secondly, a liberal education is traditionally understood as a process that frees or liberates those who undertake it. What does it free you from? The limiting chains of ignorance, incompetence, false opinions, illusion, prejudice. What does it free you for? Knowledge and the development of your powers of reflection, judgment, discovery, and vision—powers which allow you to be competent and fully aware in your thinking and acting. Thus, a liberal education not only gives you knowledge but transforms your powers as a person and contributes to your whole life.

In order to acquire a liberal education, you must begin to master a set of basic abilities. IDST 1000 introduces you to these abilities and the remainder of your Core courses will give you further opportunities to advance in them.

• Reasoning – the ability to analyze and synthesize arguments, to question assumptions, to evaluate evidence, to argue positions, to draw conclusions, and to raise new questions; varieties of reasoning include quantitative, scientific, ethical, and aesthetic:
  • Quantitative – the ability to use mathematical reasoning as a tool of analysis and as a means of conveying information
  • Scientific – the ability to understand and to use the scientific method
  • Ethical – the ability to analyze the principles and assumptions of moral claims and to make informed and reasoned moral arguments
  • Aesthetic – the ability to analyze visual, performing, or literary art
• Communication – the ability to express ideas, arguments, and information coherently and persuasively orally and in writing
• Historical Consciousness – the ability to understand the achievements, problems, and perspectives of the past and to recognize their influence upon the course of events
• Social & Cultural Awareness – the ability to engage perspectives other than one’s own

Deceptively simple, these four definitions cover a remarkable range of human inquiry. The liberal arts abilities and the fields of study that teach them are not independent but interconnected; they work together to enable us to reach a truer grasp of experience in all its complexity.

REQUIREMENTS FOR WRITING IN CORE 1

IDST 1000, like all Core courses, emphasizes the development of writing skills. Each section of Core 1 requires its students:

• to concentrate on the writing pyramid to concentrate on the writing pyramid’
• to produce at least four formal writing assignments; of these, at least two undergo revision and at least one is a timed, in-class assignment.
• to begin their writing proficiency portfolio with a minimum of three pieces of writing from IDST 1000, including the two revised essays, and a timed piece; at least one of the above must make use of documentation.