These classes are open only to students in the Bard Baccalaureate Program.

 

Course:	BAC 120  Life Writing Seminar
Professor:	Dorothy Albertini
CRN:	15896		Schedule/Location:		Fri       9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 303
Distributional Area:
Credits: 4						Class cap: 10

“...The call of the writer is the same as the call of the reader. / Take me to other planes of myself.  Agnes Martin said her paintings were for / people to look at before daily care strikes. Suppose reading and writing do their best / work after daily care has struck (and struck hard).”  C.D. Wright. We will gather to do our best work with and for reading and writing.  Life Writing has many forms; usually it is a kind of personal narrative.  For our purposes, let’s think of Life Writing as practice in attending to life (including memory--yours, others’), using the lens of writing.  Our methods will include observation, listening, reflection, recursion, close reading, and writing practice. In class, we’ll read and we’ll write; during the week outside of class, you’ll continue to hold space to be a writer, flexing your muscles of observation and attending to what’s there. The goal is to create more fluidity for you between your mind and the page.  There will be regular short assignments (usually one page or less), and you'll have the opportunity to revise and grow the texts you create over the course of the semester, with the support of in-class revision workshops. Think of this class as a container you will fill, with many hands ready to help steady the weight.

 

Course:	BAC SEM  Baccalaureate Seminar: Writing Voice
Professor:	Sarah Dunphy-Lelii  + Rufus Müller
CRN:	15893	Schedule/Location: Or:		Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Blum Music Center HALL Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 308
Credits: 4					Class cap: 20

Required for all Bard Baccalaureate students, the Baccalaureate Seminar is an exploration of writing across two disciplines over the course of one semester. Led by a professor of Psychology and a professor of Music, students in Writing Voice will use writing as a tool for communicating ideas that originate in non-text based, experiential content. Students will practice both informal and formal writing, cultivating writing as a thinking practice with a final project in each section. Metacognitive work will be a key component of the seminar, as students reflect on their learning process within and across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. 

 The two sections will begin the semester together, then break apart for six weeks. At midterm the groups will come together to share experiences, then separate again, switching professors. At the end of the semester, the groups will rejoin for a final collaborative week.

 For the spring semester, the Bard Bac lenses will be arts and science based, unified by our shared practice of writing as a means toward documenting what we observe. In the music section, students will attend at least two opera performances at the college in February and March, watch a variety of performances online, and study archival documents by musical artists, critics and historians.  We will discuss ways of cultivating our own personal language to describe, interpret and critique performances so as to make the experience vivid to readers, as well as examining psychological aspects of being a vocal performer and/or a member of an audience.

In the section focused on science texts, we will look to the study of human behavior through the lens of psychology. We will examine the experimental evidence on our thinking and behavior about the self, by viewing the primary sources and analyzing public-facing writing that interprets the same data. We will practice techniques for digesting published science texts, and learn to translate their content into writing that is accessible to all readers.