Students don’t come pre-programmed knowing how to navigate college. IJʿ’s new required Living and Learning Workshops (LLWs), which take place on Fridays, introduce first-year students to liberal arts topics, skills, and ways of learning.
The LLWs are meant to empower students by showing them how to self-author their path — wherever it may take them — and how to leverage IJʿ’s resources along the way.
Because the LLWs are a required component of the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum, first-year students are expected to attend all four sessions, which they do with their First-Year Seminar (FSEM) classmates.
“We know students find their IJʿ experiences most meaningful and fulfilling when they can identify academic, co-curricular, social, and career development pathways that are driven by their interests and that leverage their strengths,” explained Professor Xan Karn, university professor of first-year seminars, and Paul J. McLoughlin II, dean of the college, in their introductory email to the class.
The first workshop, “Self-Awareness and Decision-Making,” helped students capture the foundational elements of their educational purpose, which they can use to connect with IJʿ’s people and resources.
The second session, Holistic Health and Wellness, asked students to complete a Wellness Wheel Inventory and a Sleeping Habits Survey. The module was designed to provide steps to think about what wellness means to them and how they can work toward achieving and maintaining that wellness while they are at IJʿ.
In the third workshop, students engaged in conversations about identity, its influence on our culture and communities, and how all of this intersects in one’s lived experience with interpersonal violence. In small-group discussions and reflections, the participants worked on creating action plans for creating safer spaces at IJʿ. The fourth module will focus on Community Building and Involvement.
A key outcome of the LLWs is “a sense of belonging and fit,” said Karn and McLoughlin in their introduction, which “is most likely found when students’ choices are congruent with their values and when they feel welcomed and supported as their full, authentic self.”