Liberal Arts and Sciences Seminars

All students enroll each year in liberal arts and sciences seminars, courses in which students consider multiple perspectives on personal, social, and philosophical issues by reading, discussing, and writing about the seminar topics. According to their class standing, students choose from a variety of seminars exploring the topics listed below.

Freshman Seminar: Dimensions of the Self (100 level)
Sophomore Seminar: Community, Culture, and Diversity (200 level)
Junior Seminar: Technology, Work, and Leisure (300 level)
Senior Seminar: Virtues and Values (400 level)

While liberal arts and sciences seminars are taught by instructors from various disciplines representing alternative approaches to the general topics, they share several features. As seminars, they are courses in which students, led by an instructor, investigate problems, design projects, explore resources, and share findings. They are, that is, courses in which students learn with and from each other. The seminars are thematic. Building on each prior semester, they take as their departure point questions, problems, and issues that are both universal and urgent—questions, problems and issues that engage the whole person throughout life.

Because all seminars at each class level share a common general topic and a common text or texts, they place at the center of students’ Dominican education a shared experience; they embody for students the distinctive community of learners they have joined.

Finally, the seminars are integrative. They help students see and articulate connections between information and ideas originating in other courses. They help students see and articulate connections between their course work and their lives beyond the classroom. They help students see and articulate connections between their own lives and the lives of others—past, present and future—in the communities and, ultimately, the society to which they belong. And, as seminars, they place the individual student at the center of this activity of mind: the student, in the company of others, makes her or his education coherent.

Specifically, the seminars help students: maintain and extend skills acquired elsewhere: reading critically, writing effectively, finding and evaluating information sources, applying computer technology; synthesize the knowledge they are drawing from other courses both within and outside the chosen field of study; learn how, respectfully and fruitfully, to collaborate with others in building knowledge and understanding; acquire the habit of reflection on matters intellectual, moral and spiritual.

Students will “take” from their seminars no more and no less than they “give” to them. By engaging actively the materials encountered and the ideas of classmates, by first informing themselves, then participating thoughtfully in class discussions, and by completing diligently their portion of the work of the group, students gain new information, new insights, and new perspectives. More important, though, is that they gain a “new” way to learn and new respect for the power of the mind that they will carry with them into their lives beyond the classroom.

Freshman Seminars: Dimensions of the Self

Although freshman seminars take a variety of approaches to this topic, all take as focal point these fundamental questions:

What is “the self”?
Is “the self” made? …inherited? …given? …discovered?
What are some of the key influences on a person’s physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development?
How does “the self” interact with a community?

Sophomore Seminars: Community, Culture, and Diversity

The central questions raised in all sophomore seminars are:

How are group membership and personal identity interrelated?
What are the causes and effects of inequality among and within groups?
What does it mean to live in a diverse community?

Junior Seminars: Technology, Work, and Leisure

Although the topics that serve as departure points for individual Junior Seminars vary widely, all seminars have in common a systematic exploration of the following questions:

What is work? What is leisure? What is technology?
What is the place of work and leisure in the life of the individual in society?
What impact does technology have on work and on leisure?
What part does making a living play in making a life?

Senior Seminars: Virtues and Values

In the senior seminar, students take up the questions:

What does it mean to be good, to lead a good life?
How does what I do relate to who I am?
How does one reconcile self-interest with a broader sense of responsibility?
How does one negotiate conflicts between social norms and personal convictions?

Courses

LAS Freshman Seminars

LAS Sophomore Seminars

LAS Junior Seminars

LAS Senior Seminars