ABSTRACT
The ID1: Critical Inquiry Seminar program at Pomona College is, on the one hand, a first-year writing course, designed to introduce students to the rhetorical situations and exigencies of college writing. But it’s also an introduction to the ethos of “critical inquiry,” an ethos that shapes and deepens—as we understand it in the context of a liberal arts college—all of the disciplines. As the WPA of the Critical Inquiry program at Pomona, I help students and colleagues understand the common disposition that underwrites the disciplines from the fine arts to engineering to chemistry to anthropology—the experience of wonder. This chapter profiles a writing program at a private, selective liberal arts university shaped by the foundational, cross-disciplinary, rhetorical experience of wonder embracing not only what we now call STEAM but also a deeper epistemological consilience of the disciplines. The chapter discusses both theoretically and practically what it means to run a program based in the philosophical experience of wonder, and how it helps us see beyond disciplinary divides.
