Core Curriculum

Spring Hill’s Core Curriculum is organized around the principle of Education for the Common Good of the Global Community and provides a foundation for lifelong learning and vocational discernment. Spring Hill’s First Year Experience focuses on the holistic development of mind, body, and spirit by engaging student cohorts in curricular and co-curricular activities. The Magis Seminars invite students to engage in a common intellectual experience based on the reading and discussion of transformative texts, and the Pathways Sequence supports them as they find their place in the Spring Hill College community and engage with the wider world. Together, this approach enacts cura personalis for first year
students.

In addition to the Magis Seminars and Pathways Sequence, the Core Curriculum includes skills and foundation courses aligned with the Jesuit mission and the goal of educating responsible leaders in the service of others. The following specific student learning outcomes are introduced in the core curriculum and advanced through the entire curriculum:

1. Critical thinking: Students will be able to assess the quality of reasoning they encounter, construct their own well-reasoned arguments, and formulate defensible conclusions.
2. Reading: Through interactive engagement with written texts in a variety of media, students will be able to extract information and ideas, discern and follow arguments, and construct meaning.
3. Effective Communication: Students will be able to communicate effectively in both writing and speech that demonstrates an awareness of audience and purpose and sound judgment in the selection, evaluation, and use of evidence.
4. Quantitative literacy: Students will be able to reason and solve quantitative problems arising in everyday situations, understand and create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence, and clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats.
5. Moral development: Students will be able to critically evaluate their pre- existing beliefs about moral action and the good life, recognize and assess alternative systems of belief, and persuasively defend their convictions.
6. Social awareness through cultural diversity: Students will be able to identify the challenges faced by others in socio-cultural settings different from their own, evaluate proposed solutions, and promote justice-oriented outcomes.
7. Understanding Human Nature: Students will be able to use the methods of the natural and social sciences, arts and literature, philosophy, and theology to identify and evaluate different perspectives on human nature and its relationship to the natural and social world.
8. Integration of knowledge: Students will be able to synthesize knowledge and methods from across the disciplines to address complex problems.

Each degree program has its own unique course requirements in addition to those required for the core. For specific core course requirements per degree program, please visit Career and Academic Success and Advising (CASA) to access Academic Advising Forms.