Perhaps it was the year you took the introductory course in the discipline that you've now spent years or decades studying. Meanwhile you may have been researching a paper, catching up with readings, and trying to borrow someone's car for the weekend. Then, perhaps, a teacher raised questions you'd never considered before or suggested a new perspective. Things began to shift. And you found yourself thinking about the world in a new way.
Freshman year is a big change from high school.
New freedoms foster a confidence about the future that can be downright heady. This Fall, though, is less about banishment and more about minds falling slowly open. The scheme, which represents one of several paradigms of evolving thought, is more than twenty years old, but it has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Perry interviewed Harvard students in the late 1950s through the 1960s to gain understanding about the students' growth experiences and transformations. He eventually created a continuum of thinking to reflect the conditional developmental process that may or may not occur depending upon the stimulation that students or young people receive.