The seminar program ideally is in place to provide an open space for all classroom voices to come together and dig into various texts. Of course, these texts are not just randomly chosen, but sometimes it can still be difficult to understand what the purpose behind reading these works could be. Especially because seminar continues to push me outside of my comfort zone and forces me to actively participate every class. Even though I am still necessarily enjoying having to speak up so often, I saw great improvements this semester in comparison to Seminar 102 for transfer students. Having a more evenly engaged class has helped challenge me and ultimately resulted in a better overall seminar experience allowing for more growth.
Critical thinking has easily been the learning outcome that I’ve been noticing become
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I also would read the whole text and then try to come up with a question instead of doing it as I read. Having a consistent professor and two semesters of coming with an interpretive questions for nearly every class has been the biggest force in my improvement. Now that I’m more comfortable knowing how to ask the right type of questions, my confidence has gone up immensely and I was really proud of using my own question for my first essay. In Seminar 102 I know that I relied on my professor to offer strong questions for essay prompts because I wasn’t there yet. When I took this question to class (before the first essay was assigned) I felt like it was actually an interesting question that I genuinely was curious about. I finally had a question that I was enthusiastic to answer. This semester I’ve been able to form questions that I have more interest in and that come up naturally rather than struggle to come up with something after I’ve finished the reading. I feel like I’m actually engaging with the texts rather just reading them. I’ve also been asking more questions like, “why are we reading this?” and “how does this fit in with the other themes from