Core Curriculum and Honors Program

The core curriculum plays a key role in an undergraduate education that is steeped in the Dominican ethos, promotes liberal learning through foundations, breadth, depth, and integration, and prepares students for responsible global citizenship. In distinctive ways, the core curriculum helps students meet the learning goals outlined in the Vision for Undergraduate Education.

The core curriculum consists of:

• Foundations: courses that equip students with basic skills fundamental to all other facets of the undergraduate course of study;
• Liberal Arts and Sciences Seminars: courses that apply multiple perspectives to the “big” questions and help students integrate what they are learning elsewhere
• Area Studies: courses that introduce students to area studies or “disciplines” practiced by scholars as they explore materials and apply methods of inquiry particular to their academic field; and
• Multicultural Course: engagement of diverse cultures in the United States or beyond its borders.

Foundations

Before graduation each student must demonstrate:

• The ability to read with understanding and to communicate in writing. This requirement may be met by placement examination or by completing with a C- or better Dominican’s ENGL 102  (students with transfer credit will be required to take a writing placement exam and may be required to complete ENGL 190  at Dominican);
• The ability to understand and use mathematics. This requirement may be met by placement examination or by completing with a passing grade college-level course work equivalent to MATH 130 , MATH 150 , MATH 160 , or MATH 170 ;
• The ability to understand the connections between human languages and specific cultures and the ability to interact appropriately with people of diverse cultures. This requirement may be met by placement examination or by completing with a passing grade a foreign or heritage language course at the level of 102 or 192 or by completing SEDU 466 . Foreign nationals educated abroad at the high school level are exempt from the requirement;
• The ability to find, evaluate, and use information effectively; that is, to acquire information literacy. Introduction to these skills will take place in ENGL 102 , where students will learn the basics of library research, including the ability to locate both print and electronic resources by searching library databases for articles and books. They will also learn how to use the internet for academic purposes, how to evaluate information critically, and how to use information ethically and legally. Students who do not take ENGL 102  at Dominican University will be required to complete an Information Literacy Workshop during their first semester at Dominican; and
• The ability to understand and use computers and their applications. This requirement may be met by a proficiency examination or by completing with a passing grade CIS 120  or its equivalent.

Liberal Arts and Sciences Seminars

Each year, students must enroll in and complete with a passing grade an integrative seminar. According to their class standing, they may choose from a wide variety of seminars that have some elements in common but that are offered by instructors representing alternative approaches to the general topics listed below. Seminars invite students to integrate multiple perspectives on personal, social, and philosophical issues by reading, discussing, and writing about the seminar topic.

• Freshman Seminar: The Examined Life
• Sophomore Seminar: Life in Community
• Junior Seminar: A Life’s Work
• Senior Seminar: The Good Life

All entering freshmen enroll in the freshman seminar during their first semester; the seminar instructor is their academic advisor for the first year. Transfer students begin the seminar sequence at the point at which they enter the university (i.e., students who transfer as sophomores must complete a sophomore, a junior, and a senior seminar; junior transfer students must complete a junior and a senior seminar). A student is classified as a sophomore if 28 semester hours have been completed, as a junior if 60 semester hours have been completed, and as a senior if 90 semester hours have been completed. For purposes of determining the point of entry to the seminar sequence, however, transfer students who enter with total semester hours within seven of a higher classification begin the seminar sequence at that higher classification (i.e., students entering the university with 21 hours begin the sequence with the sophomore seminar; students entering with 53 hours begin the sequence with the junior seminar; students entering with 83 hours are required to complete only the senior seminar). However, transfer students must have reached the necessary classification level in order to enroll in that first seminar (e.g. a transfer student with 53 transfer hours may begin the seminar sequence with a junior seminar, but the student is not eligible to enroll in the junior seminar until the student has earned 60 or more total hours).

Students studying abroad for a full academic year are exempt from that year’s seminar requirement.

A description of individual seminars can be found under Liberal Arts and Sciences Seminars  .

Area Studies

Through area studies, Dominican University enables each of its students to engage in informed conversations of genuine breadth, both within and beyond the university. All students will engage in seven distinct areas of study needed for such conversations. In each of these areas, students will:

• become familiar with the relevant language and concepts of that area of study;
• acquire a familiarity with modes of inquiry and methods used in that area; and
• draw upon and apply that knowledge to begin addressing significant questions or issues within that area and beyond its borders.

Courses that fulfill these area studies requirements are indicated both in the departmental course offerings listed in this bulletin and in each year’s schedule of classes.

Fine Arts

apparel, art, art history, communications, digital cinema, modern foreign language, music, and theatre

Students will:

1. Recognize representative works, styles, techniques, or performances from an artistic genre.
2. Explain elements of a work, style, technique, or performance from an artistic genre.
3. Create and/or analyze an artistic work with attention to aesthetic, historical, and cultural influences and context.

History

Students will:

1. Use relevant primary and secondary sources in their own accounts of the past.
2. Analyze the significance of a given historical change.
3. Formulate an argument about historical causality.

Literature

English, French, Italian, Spanish, and theatre

Students will:

1. Describe how a work’s historical or cultural context and genre shape its purpose.
2. Interpret works through specific knowledge of literary traditions and devices, appropriate terminology, and critical approaches.
3. Analyze texts through close readings that engage basic formal and aesthetic features of the works.

Natural Sciences

biology, chemistry, natural sciences, nutrition, physics, and psychology

Students will:

1. Define the scientific terms, practices, and concepts essential to the scientific method.
2. Apply scientific methods to investigate the natural world.
3. Assess observations of the natural world using analytical reasoning.

Philosophy

Students will:

1. Demonstrate a philosophical disposition by showing intellectual flexibility, humility, comfort with ambiguity, and an appreciation of the complexity of core theoretical problems. 
2. Explain key philosophical concepts, texts, and thinkers as they relate to central questions in metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology from a global and/or diverse perspective. 
3. Apply philosophical methods, such as critical thinking and logical analysis (for example: deductive, inductive, and analogical reasoning), in order to situate oneself within ones communities and the world. 

Social Sciences

communications, criminology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology

Students will:

1. Identify basic terminology, core concepts, and theories in a field of the social sciences.
2. Explain individual behavior, social institutions, governance forms, or social policy from a social science discipline perspective.
3. Analyze an issue or policy at the individual, community, or societal level with an acceptable social science methodology (quantitative or qualitative).

Theology

Students will:

1. Recognize the methods and sources proper to theological and religious reflection.
2. Describe specific ways that religious traditions, especially Catholic Christianity, raise and attempt to answer questions of ultimate meaning and value.
3. Articulate a theologically-informed position on key questions regarding the transcendent meaning and value of human existence and experience.

Multicultural Studies.

Courses that meet the multicultural studies requirement encourage multiple ways of knowing, being, and acting in the world and focus on a culture substantially different from those of the dominant groups in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. These courses address manifestations of institutional injustice, such as racism, systems of privilege, and imbalances of power and foster an understanding of efforts to promote agency, equity, and justice.

Cultural diversity provides an important context for the educational mission of pursuing truth, giving service, and creating a more just and humane world. Thus, in meeting the requirements of the core curriculum, each student must select one course in multicultural studies of at least three semester hours in which the student will:

• Identify specific causes and forms of institutional oppression and injustice and their intersections in the US or in a global context;
• recognize biases and social position;
• describe efforts to promote agency, equity, and justice; and
• analyze the historical and/or cultural contexts that give rise to the experiences and/or expressions of underrepresented groups of people in the US or in a global context.

Illinois Articulation Initiative

Transfer students who enroll at Dominican with 30 transferable hours from a school that is a full participant in the Illinois Articulation Initiative (IAI) General Education Core Curriculum (GECC) have the following options:

• Complete IAI GECC at Dominican using Dominican coursework in lieu of completing Dominican’s core requirements and Dominican graduation requirements noted below
  • The following GECC requirements can be completed at Dominican as follows:

    • IAI GECC	Dominican course
      Composition I	ENGL 101
      Composition II	ENGL 102
      Speech Communication	CAS 155
      Mathematics	A course that satisfies the mathematics foundation requirement
      Life Science	Appropriate course that satisfies the natural science area requirement
      Physical Science	Appropriate course that satisfies the natural science area requirement
      Humanities	Course that satisfies the literature or philosophy area requirement
      Fine Arts	Course that satisfies the fine arts area requirement
      Social and Behavioral Sciences	Course that satisfies social science or history area requirement

  • The Dominican graduation requirements include:
    • Junior liberal arts and sciences seminar
    • Senior liberal arts and sciences seminar
    • Theology area requirement
• Complete Dominican’s core requirements using applicable transfer work and Dominican courses and forgo completing the GECC.