Core Courses

An introduction to college life. Students will further develop the personal and academic skills necessary for success in college. A service project is central to the course.

COR 101 is a companion to YearOne, Lyon’s first-year experience seminar, which is designed to reinforce the academic and social skills that contribute to a successful adjustment to college life. COR 101’s course objective is to facilitate the student’s academic transition from secondary to post-secondary situations through applied practice in study skills that establish and support student success in the first semester of college.

This course explores the “Big Questions” of human experience and equips students to think through those questions with diverse responses from a range of historical and cultural contexts. Students will examine diverse worldviews and continually examine and refine their own as they explore these questions as the backbone of the course: “How should I live my life?,” “How can we understand the world?,” and “How should we live together?”

This course explores interconnections between government, political science, and political theory. Students will explain the fundamental institutions and ideas of the American political tradition. At least three assigned readings will come from a common list of “transformative texts,” taught in common across all sections.

This course explores world history from roughly 1450 to the present, emphasizing the cultural, economic, intellectual, and political developments that have shaped our world.
Students will learn how concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, human rights, and modernity have changed over time to develop broad contextual knowledge for understanding the world in which we live. They will also practice historical literacy skills, including historical thinking, historical empathy, analysis of evidence, and writing. Several assigned readings will come from a common list of “transformative texts” to encourage students to ask substantive questions of themselves and their worldviews.

Students in this course read narratives from world literature that raise important ethical questions. They apply those questions to their own thoughts and experiences, concluding the course in an exercise of what Martha Nussbaum calls the “narrative imagination.” At least 50 percent of the assigned narratives come from a common set of “transformative texts” from diverse cultures, with at least two common to every section, and at least one course reading or assignment will engage with the featured production in the theater program.