The Paideia Seminar fosters students’ abilities to integrate learning by addressing real-world problems sufficiently broad to require multiple areas of knowledge and multiple modes of inquiry, offering multiple solutions and benefiting from multiple perspectives.
- The seminar is the culmination of your Southwestern Paideia experience and one of the milestones in achieving Paideia with Distinction.
- As a core component, the Paideia Seminar fosters interdisciplinary thinking, or the capacity to combine or integrate several disciplinary perspectives to better understand a given issue or topic. The co-teaching professors embody the interdisciplinary spirit of Paideia by coming from two distinct disciplines or academic departments.
- The Paideia Seminar spurs students to make meaningful connections between the content of the various courses they have taken at SU, their other academic experiences, and the fundamental questions and ideas that shape our world.
- The Paideia Seminar fosters student agency. Faculty design the seminar so that students are active collaborators in selecting much of the content, readings, assignments, and other learning experiences. This includes having Seminar students teach their own class days as part of the Seminar.
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Registration Process:
Students cannot register themselves for the Paideia Seminar. They must apply for admission by filling out the application form.
The latest date to apply for a Fall Paideia Seminar is April 15 and for the Spring Paideia Seminar is November 15.
The Director of Paideia receives student applications and strives to accommodate students’ first choice of semester. Priority is given to graduating seniors for whom the coming semester will be the last opportunity to take the seminar and therefore graduate Paideia with Distinction.