Suzanne Scanlon

This class will read texts that explore civil disobedience, protest, the role of the individual in society; the role of government in the lives of individuals; and the intersection of community, government and individuals. We will read from different historical periods, and explore how individual participation is essential for a functioning democracy. Readings will discuss different forms that participation takes, with special attention paid to various types of civil disobedience (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and others). Students in FYS I should expect to write 15 to 20 pages of formal, revisable writing (i.e. two essays and one in-depth revision) in addition to homework exercises and in-class writing.

This course invites students to explore the relationship between walking and writing-two practices that open space for reflection, discovery, and transformation. Writers and artists have long turned to walking as a way of seeing differently, of mapping inner and outer landscapes, of lingering, wandering, or breaking free. In this first-year writing seminar, we will read and write with walking in mind, considering how movement through city streets, rural paths, and unfamiliar places shapes identity, knowledge, escape, and transcendence. Our texts will treat walking as both subject and structure. Authors and artists may include Virginia Woolf, Frank O¿Hara, Agnès Varda, Rebecca Solnit, Harryette Mullen, Garnette Cadogan, Sheila Heti, T Clutch Fleischmann, and Carmen Maria Machado. Together, we will ask how movement shapes thought, memory, perception, and creativity, and what it means for writing to carry the rhythm of a walk. Students will develop their own writing practices in dialogue with these works, producing essays that experiment with form as well as argument. Over the semester, they will complete 20¿25 pages of formal, revisable writing, culminating in a final research project that considers walking as a method for making meaning.

The Foundations Writing Workshop is a process-based writing course that serves as students' initiation to the foundations of academic writing in a school of art and design. Students engage in the writing process, learn strategies for exploring topics, and develop their knowledge of the concepts and terminology of art and design through the practice of various kinds of written compositions. Analysis of essays and active participation in writing-critiques are integral components of the Workshop.