The College Fellows were asked to design their dream courses - ones they've always wanted to teach but never had the opportunity - and then teach them to first-year students. These Engagements pose different types of questions that are fundamental the way we think about everything - from medicine, to policy, to business, to philosophy, to science and everything in between. 

Overview

The Engagement courses are the highlight of the College Curriculum that offer a seminal experience for first-year students in the College.

Classes emphasize group work and discussion in a seminar-like environment, where they engage with big questions and challenges with the College Fellows, some of UVA’s best faculty.

Students will take 8 credits worth of engagements courses in their first year, 4 in each semester.

Engagement courses are offered in two formats: 2-credit, half-semester courses are offered that cover a single Engagement, or 4-credit, full-semester courses are offered that cover two different Engagements. See the course catalog in SIS for exact details.

Engaging Aesthetics

A general education should help you explore our world through the lens of human creativity in its many forms. In their shaping of materials, language, space, and sound, artists, architects, writers, and composers reinterpret the world, showing us vital ways of thinking about our present, our past, and the natural world. We will explore how their work provokes our most visceral emotional responses and invites engaged intellectual reflection and interpretation. Engaging Aesthetics courses will help you:

• Think critically about the nature of art and artistry;
• Describe and analyze aesthetic experiences and objects;
• Reflect on the historical, geographical, and cultural differences that shape human responses to aesthetic experience;
• Take stock of the moral and ethical capacities of the arts at moments of social, political, and environmental crisis.

Courses
EGMT 1510: Art - Inside/Out
EGMT 1510: Black and White - Race and Photography in America
EGMT 1510: Cultures of Play - Listening, Collaborating, Improvising
EGMT 1510: Extinction in Art and Literature
EGMT 1510: Immortality - A User's Guide
EGMT 1510: Meaning and Saying
EGMT 1510: On Ghosts
EGMT 1510: Sounds of Resistance
EGMT 1510: The Aesthetics of Trauma
EGMT 1510: The Lives of Everyday Objects
EGMT 1510: The Politics of Popular Music
EGMT 1510: Virtuosity and Its Others
EGMT 1510: What is Noise?

Empirical and Scientific Engagement

A general education should help you makes sense of the world by analyzing observable facts. Both within and beyond the university, you will encounter claims about the natural and social worlds and be confronted with situations that require you to evaluate and make decisions based on evidence. We will explore how questions and hypotheses are formulated and evaluated based on evidence. Empirical and Scientific Engagement courses will help you:

• Develop a framework of knowledge to discern what is empirical in the natural, physical and social worlds;
• Evaluate empirically supported claims by framing empirical questions and interpreting the claims in the context of new data;
• Recognize that empirical methods are a crucial component to addressing and answering a broad range of essential questions;
• Articulate the limitations of using empirical, data based inquiry to describe complex phenomena.

Courses
EGMT 1520: Boundaries of Knowledge in the Universe
EGMT 1520: Exploring Your Genome
EGMT 1520: Genetics: Solutions for Life!?
EGMT 1520: Life On the Move
EGMT 1520: Making Truth Claims - The Power & Limits of Empirical Reasoning
EGMT 1520: Poverty Counts
EGMT 1520: The Big Bang - The Creation of Our Universe
EGMT 1520: Thrifting: A Case Study for Empirical Inquiry
EGMT 1520: Why We Hold Hands

Engaging Differences

A general education should help you explore the ways in which people become unlike one another. Both within the university and beyond, you will encounter an ever greater range of forms in which human difference is realized, such as differences of culture, religion, and nationality, as well as those of class race, gender, sexuality, ability, and privilege. We will recognize that these differences are occasions for greater knowledge but also failures to understand one another. Engaging Differences courses will help you:

• Analyze and evaluate the richness and complexity of variable experiences;
• Reflect upon the social inequalities historically produced and patterned along some lines of difference;
• Consider how we encounter one another across social boundaries, perform and express our differences, clash, develop prejudices, and construct forms of discrimination;
• Understand the need to engage with different lives and cultures in a spirit of a common good to make sense of human experience.
   

Courses
EGMT 1530/1540: Do We Still Have Faith In Democracy?
EGMT 1530: #Stay Woke - Social Movements and Social Media
EGMT 1530: Origin Stories: Identity, Migration, and Homelands
EGMT 1530: Other People's Music
EGMT 1530: Real or Fake? The Politics of Authenticity
EGMT 1530: The Individual and Society
EGMT 1530: Unnatural
EGMT 1530: Visions of the Future - Where's the Difference? Where's the Good?
EGMT 1530: What is Inequality and Why Should We Worry About It?

Ethical Engagements

A general education should help you reflect upon and deliberate about your lives as ethical agents both within the University of Virginia community and beyond college. Engagement with ethical questions––questions of justice, liberty, equality, democracy, injustice, rights etc.––is inevitable, in as much as avoiding or ignoring conflict and controversy is itself an ethical decision. And consider how to integrate ethical reflection and practice while acknowledging that some differences on ethical questions are irreconcilable. Ethical Engagement Courses will help you:

• Reflect upon ethical traditions, your own and those of others;
• Grapple with the contingent and historically-rooted character of ethical action;
• Pose, evaluate and respond to ethical questions;
• Recognize yourselves as ethical agents within communities and the broader world.
   

Courses
EGMT 1530/1540: Do We Still Have Faith In Democracy?
EGMT 1540: Does Reading Literature Make Us More Ethical? Really?
EGMT 1540: Ethical Dilemmas and Science
EGMT 1540: How Do We Become Who We Are?
EGMT 1540: The Ethics of Piracy, from the High Seas to Torrents
EGMT 1540: The Examined Life
EGMT 1540: What is Authority?
EGMT 1540: What is Engaged Citizenship
EGMT 1540: What Isn't For Sale? And What Shouldn't Be?
EGMT 1540: Who Wants to Save the World, and Why? The Ethics of Global Citizenship