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Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.~ Joan Chittister
Shaping a Life is a full-semester academic three-credit course. It offers first-year women students at Douglass College a small-class interdisciplinary experience that is designed to provide them with the critical reading, writing, and research skills necessary for success in a wide range of academic disciplines. The course has evolved every year and has become more and more successful since its inception in 1994. It is a required course that all first-year students at Douglass take. Four times during the semester students attend a lecture by an individual guest speaker or group of speakers. Sections of up to 20 students meet weekly with instructors in a recitation section to discuss the presentation and related readings. Short written assignments based on the readings are aimed at helping students develop analytical reading and writing skills. The written assignments culminate in a biography project that requires students to interview and write about the life of an individual woman.
In the Spring of 2004, we will explore the theme, "Women's Identity Throughout the Life Cycle." We will explore topics such as Body Image, Voice/Self-Expression, Education, Work, Balancing Work and Family, and Activism. Our specific goals are as follows:
- To ask students to examine their own assumptions about identity. To this end we plan to begin the course by asking students to write a three-page autobiography.. At the end of the semester, they will be required to revise or rewrite this autobiography. In their second version they should explore whether their perspective has changed as a result of the readings, plenary sessions, and small group discussions in the course.
- To look at the ways in which women's perspectives on different aspects of identity are affected by age, class, race, and ethnicity.
- To create an interdisciplinary context that introduces first-year students to the idea that different academic disciplines have different assumptions about knowledge and the way that it is produced.
- To instill in students the recognition that although different disciplines have different assumptions about knowledge and different genres of writing, they can find ways to transfer the skills they have learned from one discipline to another and ways to see connections between the work they are doing in different disciplines.
- To provide students with an introduction to library research, with an emphasis on the uses of electronic technologies.
- To encourage students to become active listeners in the plenary sessions, in the classroom, and in their interviews with their biography subjects. To show them how they can use these listening skills to make themselves better readers and interpreters of texts and of people. Our hope is that in becoming more aware of their own assumptions and values, they will become more open to new perspectives and therefore will be less likely to impose them on other people (regardless of whether they change their minds).
- To encourage students to see themselves as agents in their own educational process rather than as passive recipients.
- To give them a sense of the advantages of a women's college in terms of increased leadership skills and a sense of community.
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