The Bryn Mawr curriculum serves two goals: strong education in particular fields of knowledge, and preparation for thoughtful life in a complex and changing world. The College Seminars contribute to meeting the second of these goals. They are organized around issues and debates that are fundamental to the lives we lead; they raise questions you will need to think about regardless of your elected major, whatever your profession or career may turn out to be. All the seminars involve critical reading of texts, focused classroom discussion of those texts, and cogent idea-driven writing about the issues they raise. Course materials will include books and essays but may also involve films, material objects, social practices, performances, scientific observations and experiments--anything that is sufficiently rich and open-ended to require interpretation and promote discussion and reflection.
Each student must complete a C Sem courses, one in the first semester of her first year. These classes will be small (16 to 18 students), discussion-based, and writing-intensive. You will write approximately 20-25 pages distributed over at least six assignments during the term, and you have a conference with your instructor every other week to talk about your written work.
In your seminar, you will be forming a learning community that can serve as a model for much of your intellectual life at college, both in and out of the classroom. The more you put into C Sem-the more carefully and intelligently you do the reading and the more actively you engage with your student colleagues in discussion, the more you and they will get out of the whole experience. You will be required-and assisted-to work on your writing in this course, since clear, error-free prose is a necessary condition for good interpretive essays. Since writing assignments will be frequent and will be keyed to the reading you do for class, it makes sense to think about your writing as you do the reading-and to think of your papers as carrying on a dialogue or conversation, both with other readers and with the texts you are reading together.
