Faculty Guidelines for Senior Seminar

Program Goal and Intention

The traditions of the liberal arts and the Benedictine character of our two colleges emphasize the need to develop in our students an ability to lead responsible lives in a contemporary world. This concern has always been a central element in notions about striving for a "good life" defined as leading a life of civic responsibility, a life of personal integration, and a life of "wholeness."

At the junior/senior level of the curriculum, this objective implies that explicit and focused attention paid to developing the ability to make good moral judgments on issues that affect our lives. Developing this ability is the goal of this program. By "good moral judgments" we understand choices which are consciously elected and defensibly maintained.

We also incorporate another goal in our program: to enhance the ability of students to think well about problems that resist easy solutions, problems that call for combining many separate resources and skills, both intellectual and personal. By examining the principal notions of this goal in its several parts, we find aspects that define it more sharply and indicate directions or approaches that will best help achieve it.

The program goal; developing an ability to make good moral judgments, is a lifelong process and must always take into account changing conditions, information, relationships, and personal growth. Thus, what will serve our students best is not an attempt to lead them to preconceived answers but rather to show them how to arrive at questions and possible answers.

Process and Methods

Thinking well demands an ability to account for complex of contributing aspects, both cognitive and affective, in each moral situation encountered. The complexity of factors in each situation must not remain fragmented or the judgments made on the situation are at best partial.

Therefore, the program goal involves working on the ability to create an integrated perspective on an issue, recognizing the various dimensions needed for sound judgment. Creating this integrative perspective requires that students understand many approaches to thinking about and questioning issues. No single method, type of analysis, or school of thought has a privileged position. Among the practices and approaches that are important are the following:

1. An understanding of the role that empirical information plays in justifying moral judgment
2. An ability to sort relevant from irrelevant data
3. An understanding of relationships
4. An ability to assess the cogency of arguments
5. An appreciation of the implications of claims
6. An ability to analyze concepts
7. An appreciation of and ability to use contextual thinking
8. An ability to imagine vividly the impact of events and decisions upon the needs, perceptions, and desires of others
9. An appreciation of emotions in the decision-making process
10. An ability to identify and assess normative components of issues
11. An ability to clarify the relationship between an issue and one’s own values

These and other practices and approaches which professors may find helpful should be engaged in an integral manner rather than in a linear or serial manner.

Since the aim of the program is to develop skills, these skills must be readily engaged in by both students and professors. The practice requires opportunities to reflect and to test one’s thought against the judgment of self and others. Thus, classes must be small and supportive enough to allow for each participant to engage in this activity daily and for the professor to closely monitor the quality of each student’s development in the process or activity.

Content Issues and Concerns

Issues and concerns around and through which these abilities are developed must be pertinent and persistent in the lives of both students and professors. They should be issues which broaden and deepen the scope of our concern, that increase our consciousness of connections between our lives and the rest of the world. Further, the issues and concerns cannot be presented as having been resolved once and for all time. Rather, they should be essentially contestable concerns that allow for individually autonomous and defensible judgments. Therefore, the material chosen for course topics and themes must reflect pertinence and contestability.

Educational Setting

Developing this type of moral reasoning requires a degree of intellectual acumen, personal maturity, and recognition of need that often does not occur until late in the formal educational experience. Therefore, to provide for these conditions as much as possible, students should participate in the program only after they have completed three of the four general areas of liberal education and have achieved upper-class, preferably senior, standing.

The classes should be a mixture of women and men and of students majoring in a variety of areas so that in discussion the ways of thinking common to a particular gender or field can be made conscious, be explored, and be challenged.

Faculty training for participation in these courses would center on two areas: developing greater skills in teaching through discussion and greater skills in raising and working through moral issues. This development can take place in faculty workshop and/or in team-teaching with more experienced faculty members.