Franciscan courses added to teach hertiage

Incoming freshmen in the fall 2010 semester will have a different experience than those who came in fall 2009. The change in the fall 2010 semester will be the addition of a required seminar for all freshmen students on Franciscanism. This is the first of a series of revisions that are being made to Viterbo's General Education program.

"The seminar will be a one-semester course, required for all freshmen," Sister Laura Nettles, FSPA, told Lumen. "We're supposed to have 20 sections of this class starting in 2010-2011." 

The course will be interdisciplinary, so professors from any department will be able to teach it. "This will give the class the potential for a lot of twists, depending on who is teaching it," Nettles said. "There may be one section that focuses on an environmental look at Franciscanism, while another might look at it from a musical perspective."

The purpose of the course is to help freshmen understand the values that Viterbo strives to uphold.

"It will give a foundation in Viterbo values, and help freshmen look at themselves to see how to live these values in their lives," Nettles said. "We will use St. Francis and St. Claire as guides in the course to show students what Viterbo was founded in, and what it's all about," said Nettles.

However, there are a lot of issues with the course that are still being resolved. "What we have at the moment are basically current suggestions. One of the proposals we are looking at is to have the course count as three of the six religious studies credits students need for their GenEd requirements, but this is by no means what we plan to do." 

The exact shape the course is going to take is still in flux. "There's a lot of guesswork and speculations at the moment," Nettles said. "It's exciting, but there are still lots of questions, and there are going to be more as we go along." Despite this, however, the seminar course will definitely be in the curriculum for fall 2010. "It's well on its way to being ready by fall."

The upcoming seminars for freshmen are only part of the planned revisions. "We've divided the GenEd program plans into several categories, each an area we'd like the GenEd program to focus on," Academic Vice President Barbara M. Gayle said.

"First, Viterbo students will take four different mission seminars, then there are foundational skills, intellectual and artistic traditions, and finally outside emphasis areas or concerns. These are only placeholder categories, though, until we finalize what the new GenEd program will look like. We're still in the process of surveying the faculty about these categories, and they may change as we go along."

"The process started about 18 months ago," Gayle said. When Viterbo faculty examined the General Education requirements at the beginning of this revision process, they found it wanting.  "It was time for it to be reviewed, and when we did, we felt the current requirements were generic and did not accurately reflect Viterbo's strong basis in the liberal arts, our Catholic intellectual tradition and our Franciscan tradition," said Gayle.

The revisions are still in an early stage. "We've had one meeting and there is another one coming up," Gayle said. "It's in the process of going back and forth between the subcommittees. We've never done a revision like this before, so we're sort of making it up as we go." 

There are about 40 faculty involved in the revision process, all organized into separate subcommittees focusing on different aspects of the revisions. The faculty has also created a mission statement for the new General Education program. 

 "Our mission statement goes like this:  In the tradition of our Catholic Franciscan heritage and our firm foundation in the liberal arts, the Viterbo University General Education Program prepares students to live and work in our global society, to affirm the dignity of all people, to embrace a passion for justice, to revere the natural world and to nurture a spirit of inquiry and a love of truth," Gayle said.