Abstract
This essay describes the Focused Inquiry Program’s pedagogy at University College at Virginia Commonwealth University through one professor’s perspective. The writer first explains the intent and purpose of the two-semester, themed, freshman-level, core courses and his handling of the courses. After describing his earlier merging of his pedagogy and that of the program, the writer (and professor) takes the title seriously and describes in detail a two semester sequence when students focus on two words from their popular definitions to various disciplinary definitions. The professor uses Freire’s teaching style, Jerome Bruner’s ‘spiral curriculum,’ and workshop strategies from Bard College’s Thinking and Writing Institute for a transparent pedagogical foundation to teach Albert Camus’ idea of the absurd and a socio-neurology idea of empathy via Daniel Batson and others. These two concepts in conjunction with a graphic novel, literary fiction, and film bring the class to concepts by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Zizek. Using various teaching methods for reading, thinking, and writing, the writer demonstrates how one might take freshmen from rudimentary understanding of the era in which they live to a more nuanced level that that begins to give students the language for understanding the historical and literary times known as modern and postmodern. The writer contends that the students leave the courses with ‘foot holds’ for later disciplinary reading and writing.
Keywords: Freshman Writing, Liberal Arts
How to Cite:
Murphy, R., (2015) “Focused Inquiry: Freshman Discovering the Modern and Postmodern”, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 6(2).
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