What the Core Means to You

The courses that make up the Integrative Core Curriculum are informed by the University’s nine academic learning goals. These learning goals are value statements about what the JCU faculty and administration deem essential for your educational experience and aspire for each student to achieve.

We expect graduates of John Carroll University will be able to:

Demonstrate an integrative knowledge of human and natural worlds
Develop habits of critical analysis and aesthetic appreciation
Apply creative and innovative thinking
Communicate skillfully in multiple forms of expression
Act competently in a global and diverse world
Understand and promote social justice
Apply a framework for examining ethical dilemmas
Employ leadership and collaborative skills
Understand the religious dimensions of human experience

The Integrative Core Curriculum ensures that these nine academic learning goals are met in multiple places and times throughout your undergraduate years so that the skills, knowledge, competencies and values the goals seek to instill are re-iterated, deepened, and actualized.

The principles underlying the Core Curriculum are the following:

The Core highlights foundational competencies in writing, oral expression, and quantitative analysis, and ensures that these competencies are re-iterated and refined in subsequent courses both in the Core and in major requirements.
The Core includes courses that provide students a solid grounding in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. The distribution courses provide these basic introductions to disciplines in these areas.
The Core includes integrated coursework that combines more than one content area and requires students to hone critical thinking and problem-solving skills that cross disciplines. Integrated courses create communities of shared inquiry and foreground the responsibility our students have as global citizens, entrusted stewards of the earth, and creators of just societies. The integrated coursework prepares students to participate, as leaders, in a world marked by increasing complexity, greater collaboration and interdependency, and intra-professionalism.
The Core develops students’ intercultural competence through its focus on global studies and languages: students demonstrate competency in a language other than English. The Core also emphasizes human diversity with courses devoted to issues in social justice.
The Core underscores essential principles of Ignatian pedagogy by valuing the rich history of Jesuit education with its emphasis on currency, relevance, communication skills, care for the learning of each student, discernment, and justice. The Core also highlights disciplines traditionally part of the Jesuit heritage in higher education with courses in Philosophy, Theology & Religious Studies, and the creative and performing arts. Courses on issues in social justice also consider important questions about justice and ethics.

In sum, the Core Curriculum asks students to be engaged learners who bring new knowledge into being through their study and collaboration and who do so with the realization that all knowledge has the capacity to raise ethical questions, and that the questions they raise and answer are meaningful and liberating.