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Four scholars with disabilities excel
in areas once off limits to them
University
Affairs
Affaires
universitaires
What are you reading?
Ten profs choose their favourites from
the books they read last year
Que lisez-vous?
Dix professeurs discutent des livres
qu’ils ont préférés cette année
PM40064644 R09831
La réussite spectaculaire de quatre
universitaires malgré un handicap
IMMERSIVE
EFFECTIVE
REWARDING
SPECIALIZED
INTEGRATED
SMALL
IN-DEPTH
INTERACTIVE
RIGOROUS
INTIMATE
FOCUSED
OPPORTUNE
ENGAGING
INTENSIVE
INTERDISCIPLINARY
PRACTICAL
CHALLENGING
THOUGHTFUL
FOUNDATIONAL
SELECTIVE
GET THAT
SMALL SEMINARARR
EXPERIENCE
A growing number of universities are offering
first-year students the opportunity to explore issues
from all angles in a small-group environment
by Zane
Schwartz
www.affairesuniversitaires.ca / janvier 2015 / 29
T
he first class i attended at university back in 2011 had
1,300 students – more than my entire high school. My second
class had 25.
The small class was part of the Margaret MacMillan Trinity
One program at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College.
The program has five separate streams, each providing firstyear students the opportunity to explore issues in-depth in a
small-group environment. My acceptance into Trinity One
meant that two of my five classes were small and were taught
by award-winning professors and guest lecturers like philosopher Mark Kingwell and journalist Graeme Smith. The contrast between
those two classes and my class of 1,300 was, to put it mildly, significant.
The University of Toronto is one of a growing number of universities
that offer small, interdisciplinary programs – also called foundational programs – for first-year students. U of T now has 10 such programs, branded
as “One” programs, at its various colleges and campuses, up from two in
2010. The basic idea, says Paul Gooch, president of Victoria University,
federated with U of T, is to match “excellent students with senior scholars in
small seminars, with a curriculum more related to issues than disciplines.”
Dr. Gooch founded Vic One at U of T’s Victoria College in 2003 and
over the past decade he’s built an entire learning experience around the
program. Out of U of T’s first-year cohort of about 16,000 students, a
maximum of 200 are accepted into Vic One, in one of eight streams limited to 25 students each. The students may live in a special residence and
each is matched with a third- or fourth-year student who acts as a mentor.
The set-up is similar at the many other small, first-year programs
available across the country. They seek to offer students rigorous training
in scholarly research and improve their critical abilities through extensive
writing and in-class discussion. Often the goal is to give students the experience of a small liberal-arts college with the advantages of a large, urban,
research-oriented university.
“Vic One made my first year so much more interesting … and I actually
got to know my professors really well,” says Emma Hansen, now a secondyear student at U of T. She participated last year in the Arthur Schawlow
stream, which combines philosophy with physics and math.
Some foundational programs are even more specialized. St. Thomas
University, for example, offers “Great Books” programs for those interested in human rights and journalism, as well as a more general great books
stream. On the other side of the country, Vancouver Island University
offers a multidisciplinary Arts One-First Nations program for students
30 / www.universityaffairs.ca / January 2015
interested in “the intersection and interaction between First Nations and
Western cultures.”
While many of these programs are relatively recent – and new ones
keep getting added – the two that started it all in Canada have been around
for more than 40 years. In 1972, University of King’s College launched its
Foundation Year Programme to give students grounding in Western philosophical, literary and historical works. That program came on the heels
of the University of British Columbia’s Arts One foundational program,
begun in 1967.
Arts One has slightly larger classes than U of T’s “One” programs, with
two streams, each capped at 100 students, says Arts One program chair
Robert Crawford. The program makes up for this with twice-a-week seminars for 20 students, and one weekly tutorial of four students, where they
take turns critiquing each other’s essays. Arts One students take 18 of 30
first-year credits within the program.
The foundation year at King’s in Halifax is more immersive. Students
take four of their five courses in the program, which accepts some 300
students, representing almost the entire first-year class at King’s. The curriculum is highly coordinated, moving through six historical periods, and
taught through a combination of lectures and small discussion groups.
“It’s this big, wonderful community of nerds!” says Laura GallagherDoucette, a graduate of the program now in her fourth year. This fall, she
directed “Classics in the Quad,” an annual performance to welcome new
students to the foundation year program. Her idea to produce a play in
Sanskrit, instead of the more traditional Latin or Greek, was immediately supported, she says. “As soon as I mentioned it, the university started
talking about supplementary lectures. They got really excited about it.”
Daniel Brandes, director of the King’s foundation year, says parents
sometimes ask about the practical application of spending a year reading
great books – those works said to constitute an essential foundation of
Western culture. It’s an understandable concern, he says, but in his view
the value is “incalculable. … We are unabashedly trying to open young
people’s minds.”
These programs are sometimes criticized for being trapped within the
Western oeuvre or, as UBC’s Dr. Crawford puts it, “worshipping at the altar
of old dead white guys.” But there have been attempts to keep the content
current. One case is UBC, which includes modern criticisms of the classics –
for example, students who study the Odyssey will also examine The Penelopiad,
Margaret Atwood’s contemporary rewriting of the Homeric epic.
At King’s, faculty meet with a student representative from each of the
Other first-year foundational programs
St. Francis Xavier University’s Humanities Colloquium (2008): An immersive
program for students interested in
English, history and philosophy.
Université Laval’s Certificat sur
les oeuvres marquantes de la culture
occidentale (2008): A French-language
program offered at both the university’s
Montreal and Quebec City campuses.
King’s University College at
Western University’s Foundations in
Western Thought and Civilization: An
immersive first-year program based
on great books and ideas from the
perspective of literature, history
and philosophy.
Three- and four-year programs:
Western University’s School for
Advanced Studies in the Arts and
Humanities (2013): Billed as the
flagship of the faculty of arts and
humanities, this four-year program
offers immersive interdisciplinary
tutorials at year-end to discuss what worked and what could be improved.
“They’re really open to listening to students’ concerns,” says Jacob Stanescu,
who graduated from the program in 2011. “There’s a reason the curriculum
has stayed the same for so many years, though: it works.”
Many professors say they enjoy teaching in foundational programs
because of the engaged students and challenging content. Several programs
encourage professors to sit in on the lectures given by other teachers in the
program, to help keep the lessons integrated with each other.
“Teaching to such engaged students is really rewarding, but it’s also
challenging – especially when there are other professors in the room,” says
Chris Addison, a chemistry instructor who teaches in Science One, an immersive science program at UBC.
For the students, listening to faculty critique each other is a way to learn
how to engage in intellectual debate. It can set a standard for students trying
to formulate their own thoughtful questions and it can make professors
seem less intimidating, to realize that even their ideas may be challenged.
Faculty asking questions of their colleagues also helps to drive up the
quality of the instruction. “I’ll always remember my first lecture when I
was quite junior and the other professors were just grilling me. It really
kept me on my toes,” says Dr. Crawford, who’s taught in UBC’s Arts One
program since 1995.
While the emphasis of foundational programs is on student engagement and learning, the programs also serve as a recruitment tool. For large
institutions, they may be a way to woo top students away from the smaller, more intimate, mainly undergraduate universities. When Dr. Gooch
joined Victoria University in 2001, he found that “prospective students
regarded U of T as an excellent research university but a large, impersonal
institution.” He designed Vic One, he says, as a small community within
a big institution.
Many foundation programs point to individual student success as evidence of their effectiveness. Several universities boast on their websites
that students who complete small first-year programs tend, disproportionately, to assume leadership roles in university clubs, have higher grades,
win scholarships and go on to prestigious graduate schools. Several program
directors spoke proudly of the number of students they’ve sent to the Ivy
League or to Oxford or Cambridge, or who have won major scholarships.
However, since the foundational programs are often open to only the
best entering students, it may be hard to credit the program itself with all
this success. Admission is generally based on high-school grades, a writing
sample and often a special application with a series of probing questions.
studies for select students.
Carleton University’s Bachelor
of Journalism and Humanities (2014):
Seven students are enrolled for the
inaugural year of the program, which
complements the nearly 20-year-old
traditional four-year great books program.
Concordia University’s Liberal Arts
College (1978): A three-year great books
program that includes art, science and
music, as well as philosophy and history.
It also offers an honours program.
Some argue that small classes and intensive engagement with faculty
would also be of benefit to entering students with average grades. This argument was likely a factor in establishing small first-year seminars that
give students a taste of the intimate class experience without the immersive
experience. Two early adopters were Carleton University and University of
Guelph, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Now more than a dozen schools
are offering these seminar courses.
For U of Guelph, an advantage of such a program is that it is just one
course, so the option can be offered to many more first-year students than
can foundational programs.
A popular seminar at U of Guelph is called Sleep. The course studies
sleep from a scientific, historical and philosophical viewpoint. Students
go to a sleep clinic, wear sleep bands that track their brainwaves and use
that data throughout the rest of the course.
“All our seminars are interdisciplinary, intriguing, and have an immediacy about them that is designed to get students excited about learning,”
says Jacqueline Murray, director of first-year seminars at U of Guelph.
University Affairs reported on a similarly structured course at Nipissing
University (“The subject was dirt,” April 2014).
Dr. Murray, who has advised other universities on creating programs
similar to those at U of Guelph, says she is often asked how a university can
afford to offer small first-year classes. “How can you not afford it?” is her
response. “You have to think about the benefits to the students.”
The foundation-year programs also appeal to prospective donors.
Nearly all of the more established programs have chairs funded by generous
alumni. Many of the newer programs are heavily promoted in university
fundraising appeals and are beginning to raise significant amounts of money
as well. U of T’s Trinity One program, for example, launched two new science streams this fall, part of a $1.5-million donation and $4-million trust
from writer and artist Anne Steacy.
“Part of what makes it so easy to fundraise,” says Anne Urbancic, who
teaches in two Vic One streams, “is the amazing things our graduates go
on to do.” She herself received a named chair, the Mary Rowell Jackman
Professorship in the Humanities, this past July.
Brandon Bailey, one of Dr. Urbancic’s early students in Vic One, is now
enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he credits his academic success to his
first-year experience: “I wouldn’t be where I am today without Vic One. It
taught me how to think.”
Zane Schwartz is a fourth-year arts student at the University of Toronto.
www.affairesuniversitaires.ca / janvier 2015 / 31