By Mary Leong
First-year students who have chosen to build a custom timetable can use ASTU 150, English 100, or an approved external credit to fulfill the “Writing” component of the Writing and Research requirement. (Students in CAP and Arts One fulfill the writing component within their program.)
Arts Studies (ASTU) 150 was started in 2009 to provide incoming Arts students with training in research and writing for the academic disciplines. Students learn about research from different disciplines, conduct their own research, and write up their research.
Each ASTU 150 class focuses on a different theme, so students are able to research topics that interest them. Katharine Patterson is the Chair of the Arts Studies in Research and Writing program, and she is teaching an ASTU 150 class that examines the relationship between food and identity.
“First-year students come into university with an understanding of research that is very much based on their experiences in high school – basically, looking things up,” said Patterson. “This is insufficient. There is a big shift in understanding that needs to happen, and ASTU 150 makes it very clear what their instructors expect from them.”
With ASTU 150, students are not just exposed to the teaching and learning process, but are participating in the creation of new knowledge, right from their first year at UBC. Students are finding the small class sizes and hands-on learning aspect of the class helpful.
Through ASTU 150, first-year student Sarah Juvik was able to develop her own research topic on how advertisements framed environmentally friendly products. Juvik analyzed the types of backgrounds and colours used in images of environmentally friendly products, and read scholarly articles on the illustrations in advertisements to put together her research paper.
“I was surprised at how small the class was, and the professors were able to get to know all of us personally and help us individually,” said Juvik. “I’m really glad I took ASTU 150 in my first semester at UBC, because now I know how to develop a research question and write a research paper.”
The skills learnt through ASTU 150 are easily transferrable to upper-year Arts courses, where the focus is on academic writing and research.
“UBC is a research-intensive university, so it is really important to understand the role of the university in performing and disseminating research,” said fourth-year Geography student Victor Ngo, who enrolled in ASTU 150 in his first year.
Ngo, who started out in the Faculty of Science at UBC, found that he could apply his knowledge from ASTU 150 to both his Arts and Science courses.
“Learning how to summarize and read academic prose in ASTU 150 was really beneficial in my biology lab group in first year. I took the lead in writing the report because the other members in my group hadn’t taken any English courses in university,” said Ngo. “In my second and third year, studying Geography, I found that ASTU 150 provided a strong foundation for understanding citations and learning how to write references according to different style guides, such as MLA or Chicago style.”
