A&M Student Media honchos teach seminar

(Thanks to Bob Wegener for sending this!)

Three members of Texas A&M University’s Student Media Board will teach a First-Year Seminar (FYS) on the First Amendment during Fall 2008.

Dr. Carol Binzer, director of Student Life and chair of the Student Media Board; Dr. Deb Dunsford, senior lecturer and program coordinator, Agricultural Communications and Journalism, and Bob Wegener, general manager of Student Media, will teach Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: The First Amendment and College Students.

This seminar is designed to enhance students’ understanding of the First Amendment and the five freedoms therein; to share contests to those freedoms throughout history, especially in higher education; and to explore legal, moral, social, technological, and cultural perspectives on the Constitutional protections.

Texas A&M’s new FYS program applies "seminar-style” teaching in a learning community setting to provide intellectual and social transition into the university under the guidance of faculty/staff in classes of 20 or fewer students. Courses are designed to encourage students to participate in their learning through critical inquiry; by listening and contributing to class discussion; in reading broadly from research sources, and writing original works. The one-credit courses are open only to first-year freshmen.

In 2005, Binzer and Wegener completed training at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.