Roundtable Discussion
September 14, 2021, 12-2 pm (on Zoom)
Deadline: June 28, 2021

In a continued effort to generate cross-disciplinary conversation for first year students and faculty, we invite proposals for participation in the second biannual First-Year Conversations roundtable to be held on September 14th, 2021, 12-2pm. Once again, this discussion will highlight a week of class activities focused on exploration of a shared theme.

This fall’s theme is “CHOICES”.

Our days are filled with choices, large and small, straightforward and complex, quick and considered. First-year students begin Pratt after making the significant choice of where to go to college and what to study.  As ever-present as choices may seem, for each discipline, choices can entail varied sets of perspectives, models and/or methods that in turn, lead to different conditions or consequences of those choices.

In the roundtable and throughout the week, first-year students and faculty will discuss all these manifestations whether in drawing, painting, design, writing, architecture, photography, film, history, theory, etc.  In developing a continued cross-disciplinary conversation, we hope to create an intellectual community for our first-year students that transcends disciplinary or departmental borders.

If you are interested in participating in the roundtable with a 5-7 minute presentation please complete the following google form, including proposals (one paragraph) addressing the role of CHOICES within your discipline or your work, keeping an audience of first-year students in mind. These presentations should be invitations to conversation rather than polished arguments. If you would like to nominate a student with a special interest in this theme, we would be delighted to consider their proposal as well. Please note that the roundtable will  include a guest participant (TBD) also.

We are excited to continue these First-Year Conversations. Started last spring, with the theme, Points of View, it will continue not only this Fall with CHOICES but next spring with a focus on RULES (how they are made, played, broken, and bent).  The “We” are faculty from Foundation and the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences who teach first-year students.

The deadline for proposals is June 28, 2021; notifications will be sent by July 16th.