UCI Humanities Core

Information for Students Starting in Winter

Welcome to Humanities Core

Humanities Core offers students the opportunity to start our program in the winter. Please see the Enrollment and Policies page for more details. We help students begin Humanities Core in winter with the following resources:

  • First, your seminar instructor is an invaluable resource in connecting you to previous course materials. Ask to speak to your instructor during office hours and let her know that you are new to the program.
  • Writing Specialists are available for free consultations at the Writing Center. Sign up for an appointment.
  • This page is designed to help contextualize what we have covered in the fall, offer you some of the vocabulary that we commonly use, and help you navigate the logistics of the course.
  • Optional: Watch the Fall 2021 Welcome video. Watch the Fall 2021 website workshop.

Logistics

Humanities Core Website:

  • Take time to browse the HumCore website.
  • Be sure to explore the Canvas sites for Lecture and Seminar to inform yourself about course readings being covered in lecture, campus holidays, events, and resources available to you.

Lecture:

  • You are enrolled in two classes: Writing (4 units) and Lecture (4 units). As part of your Lecture class, you view two pre-recorded lectures a week on the Canvas Lecture site, where you will also find information about the office hours of lecturing faculty, periodic lecture-related workshops and forums, and viewing parties.
  • You should treat lecture like another text for this course: take careful notes and be prepared to discuss lecture materials in your seminar section.
  • Your lecture grade will consist of a midterm, a final, and participation. All written work will be completed in your seminar and graded by your seminar instructor, not the faculty lecturers.

Writing:

  • The Writing class takes place in your seminars. Your seminar instructor will be in touch about how remote instruction during Weeks 1 & 2 will work in your class. All assignments for both Writing and Lecture are detailed on your seminar leader’s syllabus and are graded by your seminar leader.

Texts:

  • Your course texts can be found in two places. Our textbook, the Humanities Core Handbook, is available at the UCI Bookstore – The Hill (these are listed at the top of the Winter Schedule). PDF readings have been electronically linked to the syllabus on your Canvas Seminar site.

Critical Thinking and Writing in Humanities Core

First, please read our course director Nasrin Rahimieh’s “Introduction to Humanities Core and Animals, People, and Power” (pp. 1-10) and “Critical Thinking in Humanities Core” (pp. 11-20) in the course textbook, the Humanities Core Handbook. These will give you a sense of how to approach the larger cycle theme, how to take notes in lecture, and how to read and prepare for seminar.

The first assignment of the quarter is one that most students started in the fall: a website that presents multimodal compositions. You will need to set up a website as soon as possible. If you don’t have experience with online writing, don’t worry! Setting up a website is easy work. But, before doing so:

  • Read the Fall Website Project Assignment and Humanities Core Handbook chapters “Rhetoric and The Writing Process” (pp. 131-140) and “A Website for Online Writing” (pp. 141-146). You of course don’t need to complete the fall activities, but the section on “The Site Building Process” will be useful as you begin the Winter Website Project. In Fall 2021, students participated in a website help session.
  • Look at some examples, and then create your own. We recommend creating a free site on Google Sites using your UCI login.

The academic essays you will write for Humanities Core are distinguished by the disciplinary approaches and forms of humanistic analysis that you practice. In the Fall, for example, students wrote a Rhetorical Analysis essay and a Literary Analysis essay. This quarter you will first be writing an essay in which you explore Scholarly Conversations and Animal Histories, and a second in which you will conduct a Comparative Visual Analysis of Two Surrealist Artworks of Animals.

Each of these assignments requires slightly different abilities because each discipline asks different questions, looks at different evidence, and conforms to different conventions. The Learning Goals, Writing Process, and Rubric sections of each of your assignment prompts helps you think about the writing process for each assignment.

Your writing abilities, moreover, are designed to build upon one another over the course of the year. An important part of catching up to the other students in HumCore will be reading the chapters Humanities Core Handbook dedicated to structuring and organizing your writing (“Generating Claims and Structuring a Paragraph” [pp. 155-73] and “Evaluating Essay Organization and Transitioning” [pp. 188-97] were all assigned in the fall quarter). These provide you with a vocabulary that we use regularly in HumCore and will continue to use throughout the year.

Here are some important terms to take note of as you read the Humanities Core Handbook:

  • Humanistic research questions
  • Primary source
  • Secondary source
  • Scholarly conversation
  • The rhetorical situation
  • Ethos/logos/pathos
  • Multimodality

Research

Each quarter, you learn and hone research strategies that you will incorporate into your writing. “The University Library” (pp. 147-54) is a great introduction to how the libraries work in the Handbook, though of course some of the library resources are different during remote instruction. Should you have any research questions, you can also browse our Humanities Core Library Guide.