This fall, Associate Professor Andrés Castro Samayoa, who typically teaches graduate-level courses on data literacy and higher education policy and practice, is offering an undergraduate first-year seminar on creativity inspired by his own recent experience taking up pottery. Through close examination of texts and visits to the arts scene in Greater Boston, Castro Samayoa and his students are working together to examine diverse creative practices and the ideas that shape them.
This yearlong course is part of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development’s newly redesigned first-year seminar program, in which faculty members step outside their core academic disciplines to explore one of their passions alongside students. Informed by the Jesuit tradition of formative education, the program helps all first-year students understand and improve their own learning processes while amplifying the sense of belonging on campus.
For first-year college students, a sense of belonging is essential, not just to their personal well-being but also to their academic success.
In this session of the course Serious Science of Play: Keeping Joy in Learning, the day’s topic was "What is play?," to get students thinking about (and experiencing firsthand) the defining characteristics of play. (Photo: Matthew Healy)
Ana Martínez-Alemán, (Photo: Caitlin Cunningham)
That’s why Ana Martínez-Alemán, professor and Golden Eagle Foundation Faculty Research Fellow, and Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean Stanton Wortham have redeveloped the first-year seminar program for all students entering Boston College’s Lynch School. Small classes in which students explore the big humanistic questions in close conversation with an attentive professor are one of the most reliable ways to successfully integrate them into the campus community. Martínez-Alemán explains that research shows first-year seminar programs boost student performance across a range of metrics, including long-term retention rates and grade-point averages. “There’s a causal mechanism here,” she says.
For the seminars to produce these beneficial effects, Martínez-Alemán says they must be small enough—ideally eight to 15 students—to allow students to form personal bonds with faculty. And the intellectual concerns explored in class discussions must be brought to life through formative experiences outside the classroom, for example, going to a concert as part of a course about the meaning of music.
The primary goal of the seminar program is to help students evaluate and strengthen how they think and how they learn.
“All of these courses are designed to be intellectually rigorous,” says Castro Samayoa, who worked with Martínez-Alemán on the revamped program. “At the same time, the courses are rooted in an appreciation of the students as full people, navigating what it means to enter college and trying different experiences. We strive to accompany the students as they transition into college.”
This form of accompaniment, he says, is part of the broader BC commitment to the Jesuit tradition that engages the whole student to foster joy and a sense of purpose. To emphasize that—and to help students build meaningful connections with faculty—Martínez-Alemán invited full-time faculty from all Lynch School departments to design seminars that reflect their personal passions. The resulting options include courses on the relationship between food and identity, the challenge of designing fair college admissions, and the science of play.
Associate Professor Andrés Castro Samayoa (Photo: Caitlin Cunningham)
Castro Samayoa, for example, is an expert in the field of higher education, but he is now offering the class Why Do We Create? Art and Expression in College. “Because creativity is not where my research has been,” he says, “I can learn alongside the students and model for them what it looks like to take on something new.”
The program developers hope that when professors join in the learning process, students will see them as peers they can turn to for support when thinking through the personal and academic challenges involved in navigating college. “That type of relational underpinning was incredibly formative for me when I was in college,” Castro Samayoa says. “Connecting with faculty broadened my horizons for what I could do and imagine, which is part of why these relationships are so important to how students experience college.”
“All of these courses are designed to be intellectually rigorous [and] ... are rooted in an appreciation of the students as full people, navigating what it means to enter college and trying different experiences. We strive to accompany the students as they transition into college.”
—ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ANDRÉS CASTRO SAMAYOA
The desire to help students understand college life—and imagine their place in the community—informed Castro Samayoa’s course design. He takes his seminar students to visit Boston’s museums and galleries, and he also encourages them to examine the myriad ways their peers are making creativity an intentional part of their lives at BC. “I want everyone in my class to be aware of how other students are expressing themselves creatively and of the arts scene on campus,” he says. “The goal is to get students to ask themselves, ‘What does creativity look like in my everyday life as a college student?’”
The seminars also illuminate what being a professor requires, particularly the creative and intellectual skills involved in inquiry and research. All first-year students meet with faculty members several times a semester for plenaries in which they discuss some of the broad, open-ended topics that touch on their lives, such as the benefits of disagreement and the proper role of artificial intelligence in higher education. The idea is that to fully develop the skills needed to excel in college, students must see those skills modeled by faculty.
Students in Music, Mind, and Meaning (Photo: Caitlin Cunningham)
Students in Why Do We Create? Art and Expression in College (Photo: Matthew Healey)
The primary goal of the seminar program is to help students evaluate and strengthen how they think and how they learn. To that end, they are each keeping a “growth log,” a space of personal reflection similar to a diary that focuses on thoughts instead of feelings. In it, they respond to prompts, such as This week I changed my mind about… and Something that counted as compelling evidence for me, which Castro Samayoa says provide students “space to reflect on their own thinking process.”
They also must think about how to demonstrate what they’ve learned. At the end of the spring semester, students will complete an independent project of their own design that connects to the course materials, such as following a particular recipe or taking up figure drawing as a weekly practice. Crucially, doing the project itself is only half the work. Just as essential is for each student to articulate why the project is meaningful to them in a way others can understand. This will give students a chance to show they have learned not only how to conduct an intellectual inquiry but also how to convey their ideas to others.
If the program is successful, it won’t just engage what Castro Samayoa calls the “full personhood” of each student. It will also help every student who arrives at the Lynch School to stop asking “Do I belong here?” and start answering one of the three key questions Boston College asks them to consider: “What here brings me joy?”
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Explore the Courses
These newly designed seminars invite first-year students to explore alongside renowned faculty from across the Lynch School.
| Course Title | Faculty Member |
|---|---|
| Food, Identity, and the Art of Belonging | G. Michael Barnett, professor
Dept. of Teaching, Curriculum, & Society |
| Why Do We Create? Art and Expression in College | Andrés Castro Samayoa, associate professor and program director, Ph.D. in Higher Education Dept. of Educational Leadership & Higher Education |
| What Matters and Why? Adventures in Lifeleading | Chris Higgins, professor and co-program director, Ph.D. in Formative Education
Chair, Dept. of Formative Education |
| Designing Fair College Admissions: Data, Evidence, and Debate | Emma Klugman, assistant professor of the practice and program director, M.S. in Data Science
Dept. of Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, & Assessment |
| Serious Science of Play: Keeping Joy in Learning | Elida Laski, associate professor
Dept. of Counseling, Developmental, & Educational Psychology |
| Finding Your Purpose: Vocation, Education, and Society | Andrew Miller, associate professor
Dept. of Educational Leadership & Higher Education |
| Finding Your People: A Seminar on Friendship | Laura O’Dwyer, professor
Dept. of Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, & Assessment |
| How Do We Know? Truth, Evidence, and the Science of Belief | Gabe Avakian Orona, assistant professor
Dept. of Counseling, Developmental, & Educational Psychology |
| Music, Mind, and Meaning | Brian Smith, Nelson Chair and associate dean for research
Dept. of Teaching, Curriculum, & Society |
Students in Finding Your People: A Seminar on Friendship (Photo: Matthew Healey)
Students in Serious Science of Play: Keeping Joy in Learning (Photo: Matthew Healey)
Students in Finding Your People: A Seminar on Friendship (Photo: Matthew Healey)
Students in How Do We Know? Truth, Evidence, and the Science of Belief (Photo: Caitlin Cunningham)