Senior Symposium

The Lynchburg College Senior Symposium and the Symposium Readings Program

SENIOR SYMPOSIUM

Since its founding in 1903, Lynchburg College has fostered a learning environment that encourages students to read significant texts, to ask meaningful questions, and to reflect on important and enduring ideas.  College faculty have fine-tuned the Senior Symposium since 1976 into a course that brings such texts, questions, and ideas to bear on various contemporary issues in discussion by academically mature students from various disciplines.  Its development has produced a truly bold approach to liberal studies.

Senior Symposium goes beyond simply exposing students to a variety of primary readings from across curricular boundaries. The course, required of all seniors for graduation, features a semester of weekly  formal lectures (often by speakers from off-campus), reading assignments from the LCSR series, student-led discussions in each section, and nine opinion papers. Each semester's 150-200 students take the course in sections of no more than twenty-four each, taught by faculty from a variety of disciplines.  After attending the public lecture as a group on Mondays, students then meet in their sections for student-led discussion on Wednesdays. 

To prepare for discussion, each student writes a two-page position paper based on some application of the ideas in the reading assignment and the lecture.  Students use their papers to focus on their own reactions to the ideas in the lecture and the readings.  For instance, a lecture on species loss and recovery may be accompanied by an excerpt from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.  A student may take a quick look at locally available pesticides and question how pesticides have changed since the publication of Carson's book in 1964; a nursing student might write about how new products that protect health care practitioners are becoming environmental hazards;  a golf team member may write about what a golf course does to address chemical run-off from course maintenance; another may consider the burgeoning organic food section in the grocery store as a sign of a new popular concern; another, the dangers of fluids seen leaking from cars in parking lots. The weekly papers are graded according to how well they present a well-reasoned discourse that shows a degree of critical thinking in engaging a contemporary problem.

 In asking students to apply what they understand to contemporary issues and to address the readings and the lecture in their section discussions, the course truly becomes a student symposium. It encourages students who are on the threshold of leaving college to take their learning with them--and not just the learning that they have mastered in their major disciplines, but ideas that range across the curriculum and continue to exert an impact on thinking about the issues and problems that confront adults living and working in the contemporary world.  The practices cultivated by Senior Symposium require students to reason their way through problems for themselves, to challenge assumptions that support reasoning, and to test the validity of familiar positions from a contemporary perspective.

SYMPOSIUM READINGS VOLUMES 

 Ideally, students would have exposure in their courses to some of the readings featured in Senior Symposium. To support this, the College publishes its own ten-volume set of readings for faculty to use in courses taken by students before they take Senior Symposium. Currently, the third edition of these volumes is in process. The volumes bring together excerpts of significant primary texts under particular thematic areas (the series is re-edited every decade or so to stay current). The readings are introduced in ways that help readers often working outside of their disciplines situate the text within its historic, cultural, and academic contexts. ( For contents of volumes in second and third series editions, please see the website section "Symposium Readings Volumes.")

SYMPOSIUM READINGS COURSES

Also in support of the Senior Symposium Program, Lynchburg College courses can be specially designed to feature Symposium Readings and particular pedagogies. These courses extend the use of the Symposium readings across the curriculum and give students the opportunity to engage in the discussion of these texts throughout their four years at Lynchburg College. An “LCSR Course” is a regular Lynchburg College course in which at least 20 percent of the grade is based on written and oral communication related to reading assignments from the Lynchburg College Symposium readings. This  innovative approach integrates selections from significant, primary works with  regular class material to provide depth and breadth of perspective within the context of regular courses. Our mission is to foster interdisciplinary study by all students, to read from texts of classic and modern significance, and to write and to speak about them in the context of contemporary society.  An annual summer workshop is offered to help faculty plan and deliver LCSR courses. LCSR faculty meet six to eight times during the year to share their experiences teaching LCSR courses (please see the website section, "Teaching an LCSR Course"). 

GOALS: The Senior Symposium is designed to have Lynchburg College Seniors utilize weekly lectures and symposium readings to examine issues of contemporary significance, in the process integrating the material presented with their personal views while dealing constructively with a wide variety of conflicting positions. It requires that seniors be able to combine understanding taken from the symposium readings with an appreciation for current, related issues and developments, as covered in weekly lectures and class discussions. The course is intended to help bridge the gap between receptiveness to established positions, appropriate to students, and a mature and independent point of view essential to educated adults. The Senior Symposium stresses the oral and written performance of the students.

OBJECTIVES: In order to fulfill the goals at the sophisticated level of college graduates, Senior Symposium, has established the following objectives for student learning:

1. Be familiar with a wide range of readings from the classics, dealing with issues that have contemporary significance.
   
   
2. Develop the ability to analyze these texts and make connections among them, the lecturers, and personal experiences.
   
   
3. See the classics as a way of understanding and appreciating diverse views from other cultures.
   
   
4. Develop critical thinking skills that are commensurate with upper-level students.
   
   
5. Hone writing skills by writing intelligently on the readings and the lectures.
   
   
6. Develop an ability to speak publicly by participating in weekly discussions and by leading a class discussion.
   
   
7. Synthesize the material learned throughout the semester in both written and oral forms.
   
   
8. Make connections between various major fields of study and the readings.