How many different ways can you think of to look at chocolate?  or baseball?  or tattoos?  or rock and roll?   

Through a course called Perspectives, the first year seminar program at Brevard College addresses these very questions.  Each Perspectives instructor chooses a topic of distinctive personal interest to help students practice skills of critical analysis and effective communication while cultivating the type of insight that comes from exploring a single issue through multiple “ways of seeing.”  Learning is highly interactive and collaborative.  In one seminar, for example, students engage in group projects to find out not only how different kinds of chocolate taste, but also how child labor is exploited in the manufacture and sale of chocolate, and how such abuses can be prevented through practices of “fair trade.”  In another seminar, groups research tattoos as a form of cultural expression around the world, study practices of tattoo safety, and create a display of tattoo art featuring members of the local community.  Topics and types of projects are limited only by the combined creativity of Brevard College faculty and students—which is to say, the sky’s the limit! 

Perspectives classes are intentionally small (15-18 participants) and designed to assist first-year students in making a successful transition to college.  Often, an upper-level student serves as a teaching assistant and peer mentor.  Skills and dispositions developed in BCE 111 seminars provide a firm foundation for the college experience, and in particular for future courses in the college’s interdisciplinary core (linked learning communities, Environmental Perspectives, and the Senior Leadership Institute).

Topics identified by the faculty for the fall 2007 semester include the following: 

Addicted to Jazz
Art Meets Nature
Batter Up? – Baseball as a Common Thread in American Life
Born into Brothels: the Kids with Cameras Project
Chaos in Learning, Literature, and Life
Food Fight:  The Ecology of Food
Geek or Granola:  Constructing and Deconstructing Stereotypes
Horror à la King
Life through Musicals
Never Satisfied:  Food and Body Image
Peace and War
Puzzles and Problem-Solving
Rock and Roll
The Taboo of Tattoos
What’s Class Got to Do with It?
Where’s the Beef? – TV Commercials