About the Tutorial

The Tutorial serves as a linchpin of your Grinnell education. While there are many purposes to the Tutorial, they all relate to a simple purpose: The Tutorial starts you on your path as lifelong learner. To be a successful learner and thinker, you must develop a number of requisite skills. These include:

• the ability to read critically and analyze what you have read;
• the ability to formulate useful and interesting questions, based on ideas you encounter;
• the ability to develop coherent and compelling arguments, in both written and oral form;
• the ability to to find and identify appropriate evidence when conducting research and developing arguments;
• an understanding of the purpose and components of a successful liberal arts education; and
• an understanding of intellectual property and its effect on your academic endeavors.

The advent of large-scale hypertext systems, such as the World-Wide Web, have not significantly changed the needs for such skills. However, the applications of these skills have expanded. For example, some claim that modern thinkers now need to be able to develop arguments not only in linear written form and oral form, but also in new hypertextual forms. Similarly, you need to be able to analyze hypertexts.

The Tutorial also has a second important purpose: The Tutorial creates the relationship between students and their first advisor. While we expect that you will form many close relationships with your faculty, Grinnell feels that it is particularly important that you form such a relationship as early as possible.

The Tutorial, like many classes at Grinnell, also gives you the opportunity to study a topic in depth with a small cohort. In this tutorial, we will emphasize the topic by permitting you to choose subtopics and lead portions of the course on those subtopics.