Engaging with Contemporary Issues

All first-year seminars share an emphasis on navigating the Berklee experience, building a foundation for success as a student and an artist, and creating a sense of community among students and faculty. This seminar’s unique focus is on the artist’s engagement with and response to the social and political world. Students will develop habits of mind that help them evaluate media as sources of information, analyze issues, and persuasively support their views. The course helps students discover and advocate for the issues they care most about and creates a safe, reflective space for discourse and debate. It gives them tools to put their own and their classmates’ beliefs and values in context, expose their own biases, and examine emergent events, ideas, and trends through multiple lenses. Students will engage collaboratively in weekly responses to events and draw upon their skills and concerns as artists to reach for a more informed, nuanced, and open-minded grasp of the world.