Course Details

Course offered Autumn 2012

Honors 205 A: What We Know and How We Know It (C)

Honors 205 A: What We Know and How We Know It (C)

SLN 14901 (View UW registration info »)

Frances McCue (English)
Email: frances@francesmccue.com

Credits: 5
Limit: 22 students

Honors Credit Type

Incoming freshmen only.

This course satisfies BOTH Honors Interdisciplinary AND UW's Composition requirements.

For freshmen only, this course is an introduction to college-level methods of inquiry. Throughout your academic life at the university, you will be called upon to write, read and converse in order to absorb knowledge and test out ideas. Since academic disciplines are bound by their respective ways of knowing, and because other ways of knowing are empirical and creative, this course will present different ways of coming to knowledge. We’ll engage in reading, lectures, dialogue, persuasive writing, journalistic writing, writing for academic papers as well as in creative writing-poems, short stories and vignettes. Expect a lively forum for testing out ideas and a venue to enhance your writing repertoire.

Expectations for students include: attending all classes with the (substantial) assigned readings completed; contributing to small group presentations; considering one’s own belief systems and the belief systems in a respectful and curious manner; being willing to experiment in writing styles and genres. In the end, students should be active questioning learners and show evidence of this engagement.

Goals for the course include: learning how to negotiate and navigate with different ways of knowing; developing empathic and creative imagination; enhancing student writing; creating models for civic dialogue; and articulating individual learning.

The course will connect often-separated worlds of research and practice, university and “real world” expertise, and writing and dialogic education.

This course is the introduction to a year-long sequence-in the winter quarter, the course topic will be “Teaching What We Know” and in the spring, the class will culminate in internships throughout the area. Enrollment in all three terms is not required.