Tutorials

In the tutorial every entering student explores a topic of interest to the student and the instructor in a small group, discussion-intensive setting. The objectives of the tutorial are to illuminate methods of inquiry rather than to cover topics comprehensively, focusing particularly on writing, critical reading and oral communication. In addition, the tutorial initiates the process of planning for a liberal education at Grinnell through advising conversations between students and their instructors. By promoting close working relationships between tutorial instructors and their students and by combining the roles of instructor and academic adviser, the College provides students with academic advisers attuned to the interests and abilities of their advisees.

A tutorial (4 credits) is required of all students who enter Grinnell as first-year students and of all transfer students below third-year student standing whose previous work does not qualify them for an exemption. A student must complete the tutorial with a grade of C or higher to meet the tutorial graduation requirement and to be eligible to enroll in a “Plus-2” or independent project. Students who receive a D or F in the tutorial must earn a grade of C or better in a course designated or approved by the dean’s office as Intensive Writing (IW).

The following tutorials are offered in 2020–21: 

• Gender, Body Hair, and Hairlessness: Constructing the Feminine Woman (Bailey)
• Prima Donna: Women in Opera (Brown)
• The Politics of Commemoration (Byrd)
• Envisioning Identities: Self, Subgroups, “the Other,” and Belonging (J. Chen)
• The Liberal Arts as a Force for Evil (Cohn)
• Humanities I: The Ancient Greek World (W. Cummins)
• Chocolate, from Ghana to Grinnell (Driscoll)
• Numbers (C. French)
• The Black Athlete: Changing 20th and 21st Century Society? (Hamilton)
• Energy (Hasegawa)
• Literature, Intertextuality, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Herold)
• Late Victorian Fantasies (C. Jacobson)
• Far from Flyover: The Literature of Iowa (P. Jones)
• Ghost Stories (Kapila)
• Food: Rituals, Technologies, and Policies (Lyons)
• Stuff (Maynard)
• Learning and Unlearning How to Tell Time (McGavock)
• Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, Right Wing Populism and the Assault on Democracy (Meehan)
• Epic Heroes’ Journeys (Mercado)
• Pedagogy in the Time of Pandemic (Michaels)
• Writing to Dance, Dancing to Write: Becoming bodily-based Scholars (Miller)
• From Text to Image: the French New Wave and the Transformation of Cinema (Moisan)
• Coping with Climate Change: How Science, Politics and Ethics Interact (Moyer)
• Songs of Hope (Perman)
• The Open Curriculum, Tutorial, and a 21st Century Liberal Education (Rebelsky)
• Words and Guitar: From Rock n’ Roll to Hip Hop (Roberts)
• Babylon Berlin (Samper Vendrell)
• Arts of the Silk Road(s) (Shea)
• The Art of Craft: How Crafting Informs The Social World (Snook)