91¿´Æ¬

The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at 91¿´Æ¬ to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it.

These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives.

Learning Goals of Emily Balch Seminars

1. To teach critical thinking about broad intellectual questions within and/or across disciplines through close reading, re-reading, and interpretation of substantial written, visual and material texts.

2. To give students instruction and practice in writing as a flexible tool of inquiry and interpretation; and to introduce students to college-level writing, moving them beyond the formulaic writing they learn in high school. To teach them:

• to respond thoughtfully in writing to course texts;
• to construct clear, convincing written arguments based on non-obvious claims;
• to develop these arguments through reasoning and evidence; 
• to communicate in clear, readable prose.

3. To make students conscious of writing as a process: to help them develop effective writing habits; to teach them to assess strengths and weaknesses of their writing in the draft stage; to guide them to rethink and revise in response to faculty and peer feedback; and to teach them to copy-edit carefully.

4. To teach students to use sources fairly and effectively; to teach the logic and practice of citation and documentation; and to ensure that students understand how to avoid misusing sources.

5. To model effective discussion strategies and to create a dynamic learning community, teaching students to participate effectively in small-group conversation.

6. To inspire and delight students through intellectual inquiry; to invite students into the academic community; and to affirm their agency as learners and the value of their perspectives in creating knowledge and shaping discourse.

Seminar Features

• Class size is limited to 14 students to promote active participation and allow time for careful response to writing.
• Seminars focus on special topics of interest that can be explored by entering first-year non-majors.
• Faculty hold at least four 20-minute conferences with each student over the semester to discuss writing in progress.
• Students are expected to produce at least 25 pages of writing divided into several assignments over the course of the semester. Long assignments (10+ pages) and research papers are not assigned. Exams are not given.
• Writing assignments include opportunities to practice the writing process. These may include preliminary writing (response writing; informal proposals; mapping; outlining; etc.); draft development; and copyediting. Students are given the opportunity to revise their work in response to feedback and are taught how to do so.
• ESem faculty teach students how writers use, cite, and document source texts.
• Some class time is devoted to a discussion of writing strategies, for example, strategies for addressing audience, generating critical questions and claims, structuring paragraphs, and so forth.