John N. Gardner brings unparalleled experience to this authoritative text for first-year seminar courses. He is the recipient of the University of South Carolina’s highest award for teaching excellence. He has twenty-five years of experience directing and teaching in the most respected and most widely emulated first-year seminar in the country, the University 101 course at the University of South Carolina. He is recognized as one of the country’s leading educators for his role in initiating and orchestrating an international reform movement to improve the beginning college experience. He is also the founding leader of two influential higher education centers that support campuses in their efforts to improve the learning and retention of beginning college students: the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina (www.sc.edu/fye) and the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (www.jngi.org) based in Brevard, North Carolina. The experiential basis for all of John Gardner’s work is his own miserable first year of college on academic probation, an experience that he hopes to prevent for this book’s readers.

Betsy O. Barefoot is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose special area of scholarship is the first year of college. During her tenure at the University of South Carolina from 1988 to 1999, she served as co-director for research and publications at the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. She taught University 101, in addition to special-topics graduate courses on the first-year experience and the principles of college teaching. She conducts first-year seminar faculty training workshops around the United States and in other countries, and she is frequently called on to evaluate first-year seminar outcomes. She currently serves as Senior Scholar in the Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education. In her Institute role she led a major national research project to identify institutions of excellence in the first college year. She currently works with both two- and four-year campuses in evaluating all components of the first year.

Negar Farakish is an educator and administrator with years of experience in teaching and working with community college students from diverse backgrounds and academic abilities. In her various roles, she has taught and assisted wide-ranging groups of students from the academically underprepared to those pursuing highly competitive majors and careers at these institutions. She currently serves as the Provost and Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of American Honors at Union County College in New Jersey and teaches as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.