(37-38 credits)
The Lasallian Honors Program is especially for those students interested in a rigorous academic experience conducted through interdisciplinary, shared inquiry seminars. Students with eligible academic records are invited to join the Program during their university application process. Others who are interested in the Program should inquire with the Program Director about possible participation before they enroll in classes at the university. Successful completion of the Program satisfies all the requirements of a student’s general education course of study.
The Program is designed around seven core interdisciplinary seminars that incorporate as their defining practice the exercise of shared inquiry, a mode of learning in which the students and teacher explore together the significance and implications of foundational texts throughout history. The Program uses a cohort model of learning such that all students in the Program take the same series of classes together throughout their collegiate career. By emphasizing foundational texts, shared inquiry, interdisciplinary study, and service learning, students in the cohort gain significant skills in speaking, writing, and critical thinking while preparing for successful careers and future lives engaged in servant leadership.
Lasallian Honors Program Goals
1. Devise precise questions interrogating the meaning or interpretation of material (including writing, art, music, data, and experience) that allow more than one defensible response through appeal to supporting evidence.
2. Articulate defensible interpretations derived from the analysis of texts, including writing, art, music, data, and experience.
3. Incorporate evidence and information, both in writing and in discussion, as a way to explain one’s understanding of a concept, event or text.
4. Generate written works that reveal a mastery of the English language sufficient to make one’s position clear, coherent, comprehensible and convincing.
5. Communicate orally, both in formal presentations and in the context of shared inquiry, one’s understanding of and engagement with a particular concept, event or text.
6. Describe the assumptions, methodologies and consequences inherent in different systems of knowing (epistemologies), including scientific and religious thought.
7. Describe the relationship between specific cultural or historical conditions and the political, artistic, intellectual and theological practices that emerge from them.
8. Provide interpretations of artistic works that are defended through specific references to aesthetic sensibilities and textual evidence.
9. Engage in service learning in such a way that one is able to include those experiences in one’s ethical statements and positions.
10. Incorporate foundational texts of both the classical western and eastern as well as the contemporary global traditions in one’s arguments in such a way as to show an understanding of their complex meanings, their cultural significance, and the contemporary implications of their ideas.
