Leading a Life of Meaning: Liberal Learning and You

Catalog description

Allows ASU students from a variety of disciplines to encounter liberal education, classic texts and Socratic seminars in an intensive, supportive and beautiful environment. Explores a fundamental question: How do I live a life of meaning? Students read thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Plutarch and Cicero to Viktor Frankl, Toni Morrison and Marge Piercy--and bring to bear their own life experiences--to understand concepts of love, friendship, work, community, citizenship and identity in relation to living an examined life. Expands these studies through practical experiences of service work, meditation and film to create a vital cohort and intellectual community. A central assessment for the course, the Organic Reflective Assessment (ORA), is a series of prompts and responses designed to allow students to think about and receive feedback from professors regarding the practice and methods of liberal learning: how to read texts and annotate them, how to ask questions of authors, how to think about one's own life in relation to and using language from classic texts--on the idea that to use existing, perhaps even widely known, language and relate it to our lives is a way to make our ideas known to ourselves and others. Students need to keep up with these ORA responses during the retreat.