Matteo Ricci College

Jodi Olsen Kelly, EdD, Dean
Michael Matriotti, ThD, Associate Dean
Fr. John F. Foster, S.J., MA, STM, Executive Assistant to the Dean and Chaplain to the College
Nancy Bush, BA, Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities for Teaching
Daniela Resh, MPH, MPS, Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities for Leadership

Objectives

Matteo Ricci College seeks to develop students who shape their personal and social futures through responsible choices. The objectives of the program are to continue the harmonious development of students’ cognitive, affective, and evaluative potential; bring students to a reflective consciousness of how they learn; and foster an inquiring, caring community of learners and teachers. Focusing on students’ intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, ethical, and religious lives, the curriculum is designed to sharpen and test generalizable learning skills. Students exercise and develop verbal and non-verbal communication skills; develop specific skills, both in a broad range of traditional disciplines and in areas of specialization; and confront, through interdisciplinary investigation, problems, clarifying themes, and a variety of values. Students are aided in undergoing prescriptive self-assessment.

Matteo Ricci College has always been an “experimental college,” a laboratory for curricular innovation, hence among its objectives is the continuing enterprise of creating new elective courses for the benefit of Seattle University as a whole. A related objective is to keep alive the student-centered pedagogy of the best of Jesuit education through small classes, an integral curriculum, and close attention to individual students.

Although many graduates have gone directly from Matteo Ricci College to promising career placements, humanistic education should be seen as pre-professional, not as terminal, education. Matteo Ricci College, consistent with the mission of Seattle University, seeks to develop first fully human persons who can then take the greatest possible advantage of their subsequent professional training and opportunities. In the specific case of students seeking the bachelor of arts in humanities for teaching, the objective of the college is to educate future teachers who will become inspirations to their own students, exemplars to their peers, and de facto missionaries of the wisdom in learning. Students seeking the bachelor of arts in humanities for leadership will graduate with an articulate possession of knowledge in the humanities, an acknowledgement of their own skills and weaknesses at leading, an area of specialization that prepares them to make a contribution in the job market, an ever greater capacity for discernment as a way of life, and a deepening desire to serve others, especially the poor and marginalized.

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