Collegiate Seminar
A small group of students and a professor sit around a table and talk about books.
They argue; they theorize; they question. They examine passages closely and connect them to other passages, other books, other experiences.
They talk about ideas as living things.
They talk about the present as an extension of the past. They see the future in texts that are centuries old. They delight in the process of inquiry, the pleasure of approaching a problem from every possible angle, the thrill of joining an ancient, essential conversation about what we can know and how we ought to live.
The Collegiate Seminar is the heart of Saint Mary's core curriculum.
It consists of a series of required courses that give every student a firm foundation in the liberal arts. The program comprises four courses that examine major works of Western civilization: works of literature and philosophy, history and political theory, art and science.
In addition, two elective seminars are offered: Multicultural Thought and World Traditions. They provide a survey of contemporary multicultural writing from America and a consideration of works from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern traditions.
Core Courses
This first seminar develops the skills of critical thinking, critical reading and writing, and shared inquiry that are foundational to the Collegiate Seminar Program.
Students learn strategies for engaging with a diversity of texts, asking meaningful questions about them, and effectively participating in collaborative discussions. Reading and writing assignments are specifically designed to support students’ development of these strategies and skills.
Reading List
- Ursula K Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
- N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"
- Plato, "Allegory of the Cave"
- Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Essays
- Jane Goodall, Through a Window
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Epictetus, The Enchiridion
- Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
- Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All be Feminists
- Art Spiegelman, Maus
- Saint Augustine, Confessions
- Confucius, The Analects
- Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”
This second seminar builds on the skills of critical thinking, critical reading and writing, and shared inquiry that were developed in Critical Strategies and Great Questions (SEM 001).
Students continue to practice strategies for engaging with texts from the Greek and Latin traditions, asking meaningful questions about them, and effectively participating in collaborative discussions. Reading and writing assignments are specifically designed to support students' continued development of these strategies and skills.
Reading List
- Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Eumenides, & The Libation Bearers
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (selections)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (selections)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (selections)
- Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"
- Dante, Inferno (selections)
- Dante, Purgatorio
- Marie de France, The Lais (selections)
- Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew, parables
- al-Haytham, The Book of Optics (selections)
- Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (selections)
- Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (selections)
- Plato, Crito
- Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation (selections)
- St. Augustine, Confessions
- Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (selections)
- Virgil, The Aeneid
This first seminar for transfer students develops the skills of critical thinking, critical reading and writing, and shared inquiry that are foundational to the Collegiate Seminar Program.
Students will read, write about and discuss a selection of classical, early Christian and medieval texts from the Western tradition.
The reading list is current but subject to modification. From some texts selections are read.
Reading List
- Toni Morrison, "Lecture and Speech of Acceptance..."
- Ursula K Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
- N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"
- Thomas Jefferson, "The Declaration of Independence"
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments"
- Martin Luther King, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
- Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet"
- Art Spiegelman, Maus
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Sappho, Poems and Fragments
- Plato, "Allegory of the Cave"
- Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone
- Thucydides, "Pericles' Funeral Oration"
- Thucydides, "The Plague of Athens"
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham, The Book of Optics
- Marie de France, The Lais
- Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: First Part: On the Existence of God
- Dante, Divine Comedy, Vol 1: Inferno
- Dante, Divine Comedy, Vol 2: Purgatorio
- Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Employing and building upon the strategies of critical thinking, critical reading, and shared inquiry learned in previous seminars, students will read, write about and discuss a selection of Renaissance, 17th, 18th and 19th century texts from the Western tradition.
The reading list is current but subject to modification. From some texts selections are read.
Reading List
- Maps, c. 1500, contemporary and historical
- John Donne, “The Good Morrow”
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
- Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian
- ernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex
- Francisco de Vitoria, On the Indians
- Marguerite de Navarre, Selections from the Heptameron
- William Shakespeare, King Lear
- René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”
- Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
- Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- Maps, c. 1850-1900 contemporary and historical
Building on the Western tradition explored in the second and third seminars, readings focus on the Great Conversation of the modern world, which includes the West but also includes important intercultural and global voices.
The course focuses on issues of significant relevance for a 21st century student, as well as texts that allow for integrative thinking across the entire Collegiate Seminar sequence. The last portion of the course will include students reflecting on what they have learned and how they have grown, revisiting the steps of their intellectual development in a capstone experience.
The reading list is current but subject to modification. From some texts selections are read.
Reading List
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- Miguel de Unamuno, "Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr"
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
- Hong Xiao, “Hands”
- Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait With Cropped Hair
- Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, Composition VII
- Paul Jackson Pollock, Convergence
- Mahatma Gandhi, Writings
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience”
- Paul Celan, “Death Fugue”
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Babi Yar”
- Nelson Mandela, “I Am Prepared to Die”
- Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness
- Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes
- Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”
- Frantz Fanon, “On Violence”
- Hannah Arendt, On Violence
- Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action
- Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1978 Harvard Address
- Andrea Dworkin, Selections from Pornography
- Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
- Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part One: Millennium Approaches
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part Two: Perestroika
- Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
- Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”
Seminars
Unlike traditional teacher-centered learning, the seminar is a method of interrogating texts and examining the questions that arise from them in discussions in which the student and the seminar leader engage together in the pursuit of understanding.
The core of Collegiate Seminar is four courses that explore major texts and ideas of Western civilization, with readings literature, history, philosophy, science, politics, and art:
Students may also enroll in two optional courses that investigate multicultural and non-western writing. Both of these electives may substitute for SEM 103 only:
Optional Courses
This elective seminar pursues the study of a broad range of authors, mainly from the Americas but also including several from non-European traditions.
The Multicultural Thought reading list tends to vary somewhat from year to year. Shown below is the Spring 18 list.
Reading List:
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
- Junot Diaz, Drown
- Rigoberto González, Butterfly Boy
- Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
- Select essays/poems from the following texts
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera
- Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman (Eds.) Colonize This! : Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
- Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman
- Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
This course, taught in Spring, may substitute for SEM 103 by emailing regoff@stmarys-ca.edu.
This course is currently not being taught. Check in later for updates.
The Co-leader Apprenticeship is a quarter credit course for experienced seminar students.
In the Co-leader Apprenticeship, experienced seminar students assist faculty as co-leaders in seminar classes. They serve as facilitators and models in seminars they have already completed. This course may be repeated for credit.
Upcoming Events
Learning Outcomes
Critical thinking within Seminar is grounded on the processes of analysis, synthesis and evaluation necessary to read with understanding. Through careful reading, listening, and reflection, which lead to a solid understanding of the texts, critical thinking allows students to make perceptive insights and connections between texts, Seminars and ultimately their life experiences. Critical thinking within Seminar also includes skills that allow for sound judgments to be made when multiple, competing viewpoints are possible. Seminar is a place where reading critically is transformed and integrated into a habit of mind, providing students with the tools to question the authority of the text and the foundations of their own assumptions. In short, critical thinking allows students to recognize, formulate and pursue meaningful questions, which are not only factual but also interpretive and evaluative, about the ideas of others as well as their own.
Critical Thinking Learning Outcomes: As a result of their participation in the Collegiate Seminar Program, students will grow in their ability to:
- Distinguish the multiple senses of a text (literal and beyond the literal).
- Identify and understand assumptions, theses, and arguments that exist in the work of authors.
- Evaluate and synthesize evidence in order to draw conclusions consistent with the text. Seek and identify confirming and opposing evidence relevant to original and existing theses.
- Ask meaningful questions and originate plausible theses.
- Critique and question the authority of texts, and explore the implications of those texts.
A mind is not truly liberated until it can effectively communicate what it knows. Thus the Collegiate Seminar Program seeks to develop strong written and oral communication skills in its students. Students will develop skills that demonstrate an understanding of the power of language to shape thought and experience. They will learn to write and speak logically, with clarity, and with originality, and grow in their intellectual curiosity through the process of writing.
Written and Oral Communication Learning Outcomes: As a result of their participation in the Collegiate Seminar Program, students will grow in their ability to:
- Recognize and compose readable prose, as characterized by clear and careful organization, coherent paragraphs and well-constructed sentences that employ the conventions of Standard Written English and appropriate diction.
- Recognize and formulate effective written and oral communication, giving appropriate consideration to audience, context, format, and textual evidence.
- Analyze arguments so as to construct ones that are well supported (with appropriate use of textual evidence), are well reasoned, and are controlled by a thesis or exploratory question.
- Use discussion and the process of writing to enhance intellectual discovery and unravel complexities of thought.
Shared inquiry is the act of reasoning together about common texts, questions, and problems. It is a goal of Collegiate Seminar to advance students' abilities to develop and pursue meaningful questions in collaboration with others, even in the context of confusion, paradox, and/or disagreement. Through the habits of shared inquiry students will carefully consider and understand the perspectives and reasoned opinions of others, reconsider their own opinions, and develop rhetorical skills.
Shared Inquiry Learning Outcomes: As a result of their participation in the Collegiate Seminar Program, students will grow in their ability to:
- Advance probing questions about a common text or other objects of study.
- Pursue new and enriched understandings of the texts through sustained collaborative inquiry.
- Reevaluate initial hypotheses in light of evidence and collaborative discussion with the goal of making considered judgments.
- Engage in reflective listening and inclusive, respectful conversation.
Contact us
Come see, email, or call us with your questions or concerns. We are located in the South Arcade bell tower archway, next to the Brother Gary York Seminar classroom (opposite Mission & Ministry).
For specific questions please contact:
Program Director:
Ellen Rigsby
erigsby@stmarys-ca.edu
(925) 631-4953
Program Manager:
Melissa Benham
mrb15@stmarys-ca.edu
(925) 631-4633
For general questions please email us at:
collegiateseminar@stmarys-ca.edu