Table 3: Authoring Success: A New Curricular Model for Cultivating Community and Common Learning

This roundtable invites the audience to participate in signature features of our new first-year curriculum. This curriculum uses common writing projects to build community belonging and civic literacies and address urgent needs of higher education and democracy. Our literacy-centered program represents a shift from traditional goals of general education curricula.

Our curriculum is grounded in two principles and two practices. First, we cannot prepare students for a future that does not welcome their authority to intervene and reshape it. Second, we cannot anchor them in a present or future if we do not grant them confidence as authors of the ideas that guide that present and future. That is why every first-year student at our college will now participate in two common, collaborative writing projects.

Participants will be challenged to consider our response to current crises in light of their college’s approach to fostering belonging and democratic principles and practices.