In order to participate in an education that has both breadth and depth, all students complete a Core Curriculum and a Major Curriculum. Each course of study is designed so that clearly identified objectives are built upon and reinforced.
Avila University Core Curriculum
The Avila Core Curriculum manifests Avila’s commitment to higher education grounded in the Liberal Arts. Focused on gaining an understanding of human culture and the physical world, the core requires students to study arts, humanities, mathematics, and sciences. To complete the core, students take a clear series of courses taught by disciplinary specialists, working toward intellectual integration of diverse ways to examine culture and the world. Alongside disciplinary-specific courses, Avila’s Core Curriculum emphasizes crossing boundaries and reaching beyond one’s self to see the value of collaboration, community, and global perspectives. Altogether the Core Curriculum is divided into three levels of requirements that students complete while meeting the requirements for their baccalaureate degrees.
- Skills Level requirements develop fundamental skills key for both academic and professional success.
- Liberal Arts Level requirements provide diverse disciplinary lenses through which to examine the world. Concepts learned and viewpoints experienced at this level promote critical thinking and ethical decision-making with reference to real-life situations across the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and arts.
- Core Component Designations requirements focus on seeing beyond the self, immediate community, or chosen discipline. Designations include Interdisciplinary Studies, Global Studies, and Community Engagement, all of which call for application of learning across boundaries.
Avila University Core Curriculum Intended Learning Outcomes
Skills Level
Composition
Students will be able to comprehend complex material, write in clear academic prose, support claims with appropriate evidence, and exchange constructive feedback as they plan and produce rhetorically sound compositions.
Communications
Students will be able to apply communication theories, principles and practices, critically analyze and create appropriate messages, utilize communication to embrace diversity, and demonstrate the ability to accomplish communicative goals.
First-Year Seminar
Students will be introduced to the academic and social knowledge, skills, and resources within the Avila community and encouraged in their ongoing development through exploring personal values, Avila’s mission, and global issues.
Designations
Interdisciplinary Studies
- Recognition of both strengths and limits of disciplinary knowledge in understanding subject matter; and
- Integration, application, and communication of knowledge from multiple disciplines as directed at subject matter.
Global Studies
- Development of a globalized perspective with respect to course subject matter,
- Examination of responsibility for the ethical consequences of personal and social actions within global contexts regarding course subject matter,
- Formulation of potential paths toward right relationships with others in a culturally diverse global community regarding course subject matter
Community Engagement
- Identification of how course subject matter connects to lived experience of those in a specified community
- Participation in service to the dear neighbor that features a connection to the course subject matter, the reciprocal nature of service, and the necessity of meeting community values when addressing an issue
- Reflection on an individual’s responsibility to their local, national, or global community and capacity to create change at the intersection of the course subject matter and reciprocal service to the dear neighbor
Technology
The ability to employ general or specific technologies that are relevant to one’s major.
Liberal Arts Level
Arts
The development of creativity, critical analysis, and reflection of the visual and performance arts through intellectual and experiential responses.
History
The ability to contextualize materials from the past to convey both the particularity of past lives and the scale of human experience through analysis of the effects of the breadth of time and place, the depth of detail, the multiplicity of perspectives, and the complex ways humans shape and/or are shaped by their past.
Literature/Rhetoric
An understanding of literary or rhetorical language through interpreting and applying a critical approach to a broad array of texts, connecting a text to others within major creative and intellectual developments, or tailoring a rhetorical approach suitable for a particular situation.
Mathematics
The ability to construct mathematical models gleaned from quantified real-world phenomena, make predictions derived from (and thereby deducing the consequences and implications of) those models, and recognize that the models being studied are idealized approximations of those phenomena.
Natural Science
An understanding of the nature of science through knowledge of (a) atomic and molecular basis of all matter; (b) physical laws of nature, or (c) concepts that characterize and govern living systems.
Philosophy
Knowledge of how to identify, analyze, and evaluate the thinking, discourses, and arguments of different modes of human inquiry, forms of identity, and complex human relations as they pertain to issues of ethics, knowledge formation, questions of existence, and rational argumentation.
Religious Studies
Knowledge of how to employ historical, sociological, and critical methods to understand and analyze the social institution of religion as well as its relationship to individuals and collectivities.
Social Science
Knowledge of how research and evidence are employed to understand the behavior of individuals, collectives, or societies.