Goals of the General Education Curriculum

The General Education Curriculum

The General Education Curriculum in the the College of Arts and Sciences is carefully designed to develop foundational knowledge, academic and critical thinking skills, values and intellectual growth to prepare students to be leaders in their personal, professional, and community lives. The General Education Curriculum both honors Trinity’s tradition as a Catholic women’s college grounded in the liberal arts and embraces the ethos of inclusive excellence that is a hallmark of Trinity’s renewing legacy.

Curricular Areas of the General Education Curriculum

The General Education Curriculum focuses on four different curricular areas, followed by a capstone seminar:

  • Foundational Skills
  • Knowledge and Inquiry
  • Values and Beliefs
  • Applications: Turning Knowledge into Action
  • General Education Capstone Seminar

The Foundational Skills area enables students to acquire and practice essential skills for academic success in the areas of critical reading and writing, numeracy and mathematical reasoning, and critical thinking and oral argumentation.  Students then embark on their journey of knowledge and inquiry where they apply skills and gain knowledge in liberal arts disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and a second language. Once they’ve practiced skills and develop a knowledge base, students explore values and beliefs in order to develop moral agency.  Finally, students turn knowledge to action in areas of civic knowledge and leadership where they apply knowledge, skills and values to real-world contexts, often through experiential learning modules embedded in courses.  Finally, Capstone Seminars bring together the learning and application from all of these areas to concentrate on a particular curricular area; capstones require a significant paper of comparable product that demonstrates goals and learning outcomes of the General Education sequence.

Goals and Learning Outcomes of the General Education Curriculum

Students take courses within each of the five areas to achieve outcomes of eight learning goals. As a result of successfully completing Trinity’s general education curriculum, students will be able to:

  1. Read, understand, and analyze texts;
  2. Communicate effectively in speech and in writing;
  3. Understand and use quantitative reasoning to solve problems;
  4. Locate, evaluate, and synthesize information in the construction of knowledge;
  5. Explore and connect fields of knowledge in the liberal arts;
  6. Develop facility for moral reasoning and examine the moral and religious dimensions of human experience; and
  7. Develop capacities for responsible citizenship and leadership in diverse communities.