Wesleyan WISe 101 to focus on collaboration, compassion, and mutual support

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

This fall, the First Year Experience Faculty Coordinator, Dr. Melanie Doherty, has made significant changes to the WISe 101 curriculum. As an interdisciplinary course that introduces students to the value of a Wesleyan liberal arts education, students will focus on developing cognitive empathy through readings on racial justice, gender disparity, patriarchal systems, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. This challenging new material is also bracketed by significant structural changes. With an eye toward relieving the collective stress of the pandemic, Doherty has included daily mindfulness and self-care practices into the rhythm of the course, including short meditation moments, gratitude and goal-setting exercises, and awareness journaling. Doherty notes on teaching during the current pandemic, "We're focusing on helping students to move through their collective stress. We're also underscoring that empathy for other perspectives is a learned practice that we can improve through specific habits of mind. The focus this year is on collaboration, compassion, and mutual support."

Along with the new social justice focus and mindfulness approaches, WISe 101 continues Wesleyan's long partnership with the Interactivity Foundation (IF), a non-profit organization that teaches discussion methods that help people to work collaboratively on complex, real-world problems, such as climate change, education reform, and mass incarceration. As our First-Year students learn the IF Method of collaborative discussion-building and become discussion facilitators themselves, they also learn how to be generous and supportive participants in Wesleyan's seminar-style classes. Doherty notes, "Practicing discussion facilitation helps students to take agency in their own educational journey, and to develop empathy for viewpoints different from their own. Intergroup collaborative discussion skills are a powerful tool for social change."

Doherty has also shared "What's Up in WISe?" weekly updates with faculty, staff, and administration so that the campus community can follow along with the readings and ideas that First Years are discussing in the course. "This creates a campus-wide collaborative conversation that everyone can participate in. As the First-Year students read articles on white privilege and stereotype threat, or transgender rights and the blind spots of sisterhood traditions at women's colleges, faculty and staff can follow along and join in the conversation, too. As a campus community, we can collectively watch Trevor Noah discuss the dominos of racial injustice and listen to Greta Thunberg's calls for climate equity. Having a set of ideas that faculty and staff outside the course can share with the First Years helps new students to understand that Wesleyan cares about their world. The new WISe model helps us to support and expand messages about our shared values as a liberal arts college and as a compassionate and intentional community."

Doherty will feature the new WISe 101 course at the Council of Independent Colleges National Workshop, "Deliberation and Debate: Advancing Civil Discourse Through First-Year Courses" in Washington, D.C., July 25-28, 2021. Her proposal outlines how the WISe 101 course has made significant content changes to help incoming students learn to engage in meaningful dialogues across difference.