The impact of small seminars for new college students

With only a few months left before the first Tuesday in November, the presidential election looms large across the U.S. And for 15 students in Michele Margolis's first-year seminar, it represents their focus for the semester, a chance to learn about voting behavior and polling, electoral integrity and political strategy. They'll also visit the NBC Decision Desk, where Margolis, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and faculty fellow for Penn's Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES), works as a junior analyst.

"I wanted to make the election exciting for the students," she says. "I thought it would be really nice to teach a course like this in an election year because it allows us extra insight into that world."

The class, called Decision 2024: Following and Understanding the Presidential Election, is the third first-year seminar Margolis has taught and one of 60 similar courses offered this fall through Penn's College of Arts and Sciences. Their aim is to help new Penn undergraduates connect with the University and the College, learn complicated subjects in a comfortable group setting, get to know professors and peers at a deep level, and understand the "hidden curriculum" useful in navigating a large institution like Penn.

"The idea is that they are small seminars, and they're taught by faculty," says Molly McGlone, associate dean and director of Academic Affairs for the College. "From a pedagogical perspective, they're high-impact practice courses, meaning they've been identified as a cornerstone of a liberal arts education. Learning goals include defining what counts as evidence, walking students through how to craft an argument and how to make a case, thinking about how to have a robust debate, and presenting an argument. We want to provide them really durable habits of mind right off the bat."

Taking this concept a step further, 10 of these seminars-in subjects from modern American poetry to the sociology of race and ethnicity-are participating in a pilot program this semester focused on teaching students how to have respectful dialogue around difficult topics.

First-year seminars have been around for decades, by some accounts prompted by the Vietnam War protests-the academic response to a subject that divided the country, McGlone says. "They were created to help students have difficult conversations about things that were contentious in society. We've kind of come back around to that same idea."

Read more at Omnia.