The Basic Course: Fresh, Sexy Foundations

Freshman foundation courses tend to be a bland lot owing to the nature of their inherent purpose, to bring a diverse populace with dissimilar academic understanding to a common plane of knowledge. In this paper I will illustrate a different approach to a freshman foundations course, The Basic Course. It is a new direction for diverse learners with a variety of academic experiences, especially in terms of technology and fundamental research skills. The Basic is a successful and sexier solution to the dilemma of how to provide student centered learning, cross-curricular involvement and zest to initial and essential pedagogy.

In this constantly morphing course the classroom becomes a salad of collaboration where the integration of traditional skills such as memorizing, studying, organizing, as well as experimentation, discussion, public speaking, presentation technologies and new media culminate in a final collaborative research project. Because the course teaches numerous skills it also functions as a link between departments, teachers and students across curriculum.

The Basic is a new process for both teachers and students to learn, analyze and engage to think critically, creatively and pluralistically.