Seminars for U-M-D freshmen enhance undergraduate instruction

Updated 1:00 PM May 19, 2003

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Seminars for U-M-D freshmen enhance undergraduate instruction

By Terry Gallagher
U-M-Dearborn Public Relations

Three new courses for first-year students will be launched this fall at U-M-Dearborn as part of a much larger effort to enhance undergraduate education on campus. The pilot includes a math course titled "Infinity and Beyond," a history course that leads to a student-run academic conference, and a course called "Car Culture" designed to introduce students to the multidisciplinary field of science and technology studies.

"These courses were developed to introduce new students to the life of the mind and the culture of academic life, while integrating them into the campus community," says Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, professor of anthropology and associate dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters (CASL). "They also offer faculty members another route to intellectually stimulating engagement with students."

Developing special courses for first-year students was one of the recommendations of a task force on undergraduate education that worked on a number of issues over the last year and a half. The task force grew out Chancellor Daniel Little's efforts to focus attention on revitalizing U-M-D's long-standing commitment to undergraduate instruction. The project to develop the first-year seminars was supported by funding from the provost's office.

The pilot courses were selected from a number of proposals submitted by faculty members and have several common features, Anderson-Levitt says. "We said that they could be on any subject, interdisciplinary or discipline-specific, and must feature intense classroom interaction, engagement with college-level reading and writing, and concentrated use of the University library or online resources," she says.

In the math course, Professor Michael Lachance plans to explore the emergence and evolution of concepts surrounding zero, infinity and dimension. "A photon with zero mass, an infinitely dense black hole, and the four dimensions of the space-time continuum are physics concepts employing the notions of zero, infinity and dimension in subtle and important ways," Lachance says. "In this course, we'll introduce the mathematical topics in a historical context as the by-products of human enterprise."

For example, students will explore topics such as how Roman society managed without a concept of a zero. "The purpose of these investigations is to establish an intuition about abstract but real concepts, and to develop visualization skills, creating a tangible experience with abstract mathematical objects and concepts," Lachance says.

History Professor Camron Amin will teach a course called "The World in a Grain of Sand" that examines the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

"From that single artifact, students will learn to build an understanding of an entire culture in a given historical moment," Amin says. "By analyzing the constitution, and then by building a larger context in which to interpret its significance, we also hope to build an academic community in the class." Among other activities, he plans to have the students organize their own academic conference to share their research and insights.

"Car Culture," the interdisciplinary course developed by Professor Jonathan Smith, will investigate the automobile's role in American society and imagination.

"We will examine the human and cultural factors involved in inventing, designing, making, selling, driving and regulating cars," Smith says. The course will incorporate some famous local landmarks and institutions, such as Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, and the Henry Ford Estate, he says.

"The creativity and dedication of these faculty members and others who submitted proposals is genuinely inspiring," U-M-Dearborn Provost Robert Simpson says. "This is a very ambitious start to our efforts to extend and strengthen undergraduate education, and I'm confident that we will see major benefits in the engagement of our first-year students in the academic life of the campus."

Seminars for U-M-D freshmen enhance undergraduate instruction

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