Senior Year Capstone

Description

In various ways, DePaul University tells undergraduate students that relatively more specialized learning in the major is best pursued in the broader context of relatively more general learning in the Liberal Studies Program. As students move toward completion of requirements in the major and in Liberal Studies, they have the opportunity to consider the relationship between these components of their university education. The Senior Year Capstone course is an opportunity for students to attend explicitly to connections between these specialized and general learning experiences.

Goals

1. To consider and explore possibilities for integrating the primary goals of students' major programs with the central emphases of the Liberal Studies Program: reflectiveness, value consciousness, critical and creative thinking, and a multicultural perspective.
   
   
2. To provide students with opportunities to draw selectively on the wide range of different Liberal Studies courses they have taken, in ways that will illuminate what they have learned in their major programs.

Capstone courses should be designed, proposed and offered by schools, colleges, departments and programs for their senior majors. Programs with existing capstone courses may choose to modify those courses so they meet the Liberal Studies Capstone goals, rather than creating a second capstone requirement for their students. In some cases a set of departments and/or programs may decide to propose a joint Liberal Studies Capstone course for their respective students. Schools, colleges, departments and programs may wish to develop strategies for utilizing the capstone as one way of assessing aspects of their programs. The Liberal Studies Council anticipates using materials from these courses in its assessment of the Liberal Studies Program.

Class sizes for different Capstone courses will most likely vary and should be determined based on an enrollment cap appropriate to the design of each course, and to the needs of the departments and programs making course proposals.

The Liberal Studies Council encourages programs to develop Capstone courses that, while meeting the goals listed above, are appropriate to the subject matter, approaches and methods of their fields and disciplines. We would expect a range of themes and pedagogical practices to be expressed in the various Capstone courses.

For example, a Capstone course in English might deal with works of literature read in the light of students' work both in the major and in the Liberal Studies program. The primary texts in the course could be chosen for their relevance to a broad, humanistic topic or problem that is not exclusively literary. A Capstone in History might pose these questions: What is history? And how do we study history? Why do history at all? Books considered in the course might raise the issues of cultural values particular to certain historians and their societies, and students would be asked to think critically about the relations among histories, various dimensions of societies, past and present—such as sociological, economic, or political dimensions—and their own assessment of these culturally-determined values. A Capstone in Commerce might explore how business practice fits into the larger context of a dynamic, diverse world. It might explore business in relation to a variety of perspectives, for example, cognitive psychology, labor economics, or mythology. These few examples are meant to be illustrative and not comprehensive or restrictive—either for the departments mentioned or for other programs.