First-Year Seminar
The First-Year Seminar is crucial to the UHCL experience.
PSYC 1100 and PSYC 1300 Learning Frameworks (First-Year Seminar) are courses designed to promote the intellectual readiness that ensures students thrive in college.
Seminar students and faculty engage in a shared process of inquiry around the broad, interdisciplinary topic of civic engagement in a learning community combined with a core curriculum course. Through their investigation of this topic, students are explicitly taught how to engage in skilled critical thinking. By attaching these critical thinking skills to real world problems, students become convinced of the importance of critical thinking to their own educations and lives.
These small seminar-style classes are taught by experienced faculty who use varied and engaging pedagogies to help students make the transition to academic life at UHCL. Faculty achieve this objective by developing creative and critical thinking abilities, cultivating effective communication skills, and introducing students to a variety of research tools.
The Seminar also promotes intellectual readiness by helping students build and find the resources which will enable them to overcome the challenges they may face as students, by providing many opportunities to make connections with faculty and other students, by discovering the wide range of resources UHCL provides its students, and by becoming active members of the university and local community.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should I take this course?
Learning Frameworks is unique to UHCL and prepares you to be successful here. Unlike some other colleges and universities, where it is taught primarily as a study skills course, our course is designed to make you an active learner, a critical thinker and a good researcher. You will also learn how to take advantage of the resources available at UHCL so that you have the support to meet any challenge you face on your road to graduation.
Do I have to take the Seminar?
Students take PSYC 1100 or PSYC 1300 during their first year at UHCL as a required part of the core curriculum. However, some students have taken a course that will complete this requirement at another institution—Ask your academic advisor.
Who will my professor be?
UHCL dedicates its resources to having full-time faculty, recognized as excellent teachers, teach this course. Anne Gessler, Ph.D., a cultural historian who researches grassroots cooperative organizations, is the director of the First-Year Seminar Program and full-time instructor for the course. Wanalee Romero, Ph.D., a literary scholar who researches Latina women writers, is the other full-time faculty member. Additional faculty are recruited as needed from other university programs in a selective process that ensures a lively and engaging classroom with quality instruction.
What will I do in the Learning Frameworks course?
Learning Frameworks Faculty
Learning Frameworks is taught by faculty who work full-time in the program. Also, guest faculty are selected from different programs in the University who teach sections of the course. These guest faculty members are recognized for their scholarship, exemplary teaching, and innovative approaches in the classroom.First Year Seminar Peer Mentors
Anne Gessler
Director of First-Year Seminar Program; Coordinator of UHCL Common Reader Program;
Clinical Associate Professor of First-Year Seminar, Humanities, and Women’s and Gender
Studies,
Human Sciences and Humanities
Contact number: 281-283-3471
Email: gessler@uhcl.edu
Office: Arbor Central 1307.09
Wanalee Romero
Clinical Associate Professor, Director of First-Year Seminar Program, Director of
Women's and Gender Studies,
Human Sciences and Humanities
Contact number: 281-283-3423
Email: romero@uhcl.edu
Office: Bayou 1508.10
First Year Seminar Peer Mentors
To model a path of student success though which incoming students will develop a deep understanding of and appreciation for university life. We strive to create, through our encouragement and support, a safe environment in which our mentees can thrive. We are guides who encourage our mentees to take risks, reach out for support services, build new skills, explore new ideas, and forge new identities. We believe that our mentees have much to teach us and that our eagerness to learn with our mentees, as partners, will empower them with the confidence to become our community’s next generation of leaders and mentors.