Integrations courses challenge students to take learned skills and knowledge from the Foundation and Exploration courses, together with their majors, and apply them to interdisciplinary consideration of thematic questions.
Integrations courses are meant to serve as culminating experiences for the Core Curriculum, encouraging students to develop a more mindful engagement with the world. In these courses, students will integrate the knowledge and skills gained in the Foundations and Explorations courses and their major programs of study and apply them to a range of questions of contemporary significance. Courses may be taken in the appropriate level of any language available at LMU.
Students are required to take three* Integrations courses in Years 3 and 4. Students are strongly advised to take Integrations level courses after having completed a significant portion of or all of the Foundations and Explorations core requirements:
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Faith and Reason institutes dialogue between theology and other fields that inform and enrich the pursuit of questions of ultimate concern, an essential feature of a Jesuit and Marymount education that serves faith and promotes justice.
Faith and Reason Learning Outcomes:
Students will...
- Value the existential importance of ultimate questions.
- Understand the search for God as a culturally and historically embedded process.
- Be able to analyze the meaning of theological ideas and religious institutions in light of one or more disciplines that inform, explicate or challenge these ideas.
- Be able to compare different perspectives on religious, ecclesial and spiritual traditions
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Ethics and Justice reflects LMU's commitment to the promotion of justice as a hallmark of the Core by exploring major philosophical, theological and spiritual traditions of ethics, and then engaging students in applying these theories to the ethical analysis of situations in a specific applied area, such as business ethics, war and peace, ecology, and the challenges of economic justice.
Ethics and Justice Learning Outcomes:
Students will...
- o Understand one or more of the major ethical theories—virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology, natural law, various theories of justice, and so forth.
- o Understand the difference among ethical theories, by investigating ultimate grounds of their validity.
- o Value the importance of striving to be virtuous, ethical, and just, as well as the importance of rational reflection and engaged discourse with diverse perspectives in such striving.
- o Develop ethical strategies for the analysis of complex situations.
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Interdisciplinary Connections, which demonstrates LMU’s commitment to the education of the whole person through interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Students will expand their understanding through the integration of at least two disciplinary approaches. The courses in Interdisciplinary Connections will fall into one of the following thematic categories: 1) Virtue and Justice, 2) Culture, Art and Society, 3) Power and Privilege, 4) Globalization and 5) Science, Nature and Society.
Interdisciplinary Connections Learning Outcomes:
Students will...
- Demonstrate the ability to recognize and analyze similarities and differences between at least two disciplinary perspectives or modes of knowing.
- Know discrete characteristics of each discipline.
- Be able to integrate different disciplinary approaches to explain or solve a phenomenon, issue, or problem.
- Value different ways of knowing and thinking about issues and value the use of multiple perspectives and viewpoints to address a given issue.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the core concepts of one of the five interdisciplinary thematic connections.
* Note: Students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science in Engineering or Engineering Physics are required to take two Integrations courses—one in Faith and Reason and another in Ethics and Justice.