Navigating the First-Year Program: Exploring New Waters in a Faculty Learning Community

A new first-year seminar at a large research-intensive university provided the context for a topic-based faculty learning community (FLC) in which the first faculty to teach in the program worked together to identify the most effective ways of conducting the seminar. Membership in the FLC consisted of faculty from diverse disciplines and with varying degrees of experience with first-year students. Content analysis of an oral interview protocol reveals a heightened faculty focus regarding their goals and preparedness for teaching freshmen. Specifically, participants whose initial motivation for teaching the course was to interact with entering students became, through the course of the semester, more focused on defining pedagogical strategies that would lead to greater student engagement in the course. Results suggest that future faculty support for the new program could be structured around the principal emerging themes from this analysis. First-year seminars can play a large part in the academic and personal success of college students. Considered a high-impact practice (Kuh, 2008), first-year seminars have been shown to correlate with higher first-to-second year retention and persistenc