Trailhead: Seeking God S Call Proposal to Offer Course Credit

Trailhead: Seeking God’s Call | Proposal to Offer Course Credit

Summary

Trailhead: Seeking God’s Call is a Lilly Endowment-funded summer youth theology institute. Designed and run by the Gaede Institute, Trailhead is designed to introduce high school students to:

• the possibility of an integrated vocational life--one that draws together academic learning, concern for the world, faith commitment, and career aspiration;
• spiritual-direction practices that can aid in self-knowledge and discernment as students attend college and explore careers;
• connections between Christian theology and pressing concerns in the social and natural world.

We’ve designed these lines of inquiry to be robust: they draw on instructors from Westmont and Fuller Seminary; they engage students in intensive discussion and reflection; and they place classroom learning in conversation with practical experiences in the community. We propose offering up to two units of optional course credit for Trailhead participants, with the following goals in mind: A) to provide an avenue for especially motivated students to do additional formal work relevant to program content; B) to demonstrate to potential applicants the rigor of the program; and C) to appeal to students and families who favor credit-bearing summer opportunities.

Rationale

Beginning in 2011, Westmont offered a credit-bearing pre-college program in the form of Westmont Summer Scholars (WSS). We see the Trailhead program as an opportunity to capitalize on and extend the best elements of WSS (e.g., exposing students to Westmont’s philosophy of faith and learning, encouraging interdisciplinary exploration, highlighting the value of learning in community) while incorporating new values and opportunities that weren’t possible under the WSS format (e.g., significant experiential and participatory learning, interaction with a broad range of faculty and local professionals, and extended times for personal processing, reflection, and discernment). In that sense, Trailhead represents a culmination of WSS, which the Gaede Institute will no longer offer as a separate program.

Though we did not offer credit as part of the initial Trailhead session in 2017, an ability to earn course units seems a suitable element to carry over from WSS. Unlike WSS, Trailhead is not a vehicle for offering four-unit GE classes; Trailhead’s curriculum is designed to be exploratory and diverse, offering exposure to a variety of disciplines and modes of community engagement. But the volume of content is significant (approximately 18 hours of classroom work and 20 hours of off-campus experience in 2017), the rigor of instruction high (pitched at generally the same level as an undergraduate first-year seminar), and the students unusually engaged and motivated (judging, at least, from our first program year).

Course Content

The Trailhead program features a sequence of teaching modules that explore real-world problems from the perspectives of classroom, church, and community. On campus, teams of faculty bring academic learning and theology to bear on specific issues in the social and natural world, investigating how Christian intellectual life can propel people into engagement with the world. In partnership with Santa Barbara-area business, nonprofit, and ministry leaders, students then encounter these issues up-close in our community. Interstitially, students participate in spiritual-direction workshops, individual and group reflection, and thematically directed worship.

All Trailhead participants take part in the above program elements. We propose that students receiving course credit would also:

• Read one or more texts related to Christian vocation prior to arriving at the residency;
• Submit regular written reflections related to module content and focused on topical readings assigned by instructional faculty;
• Complete a written project following the residency that draws together the program’s theological, academic, and community-based content, placing it in conversation with the student’s own home context and vocational path.
  

Logistics

Proposed Course Title: “Christian Calling in Contemporary Society”

Instructors and Evaluation: We intend that Gaede Institute personnel (likely Aaron and Christen), rather than modular faculty, would be the instructors of record for the course. With the exception of regular submission of journal entries, the residency experience for course enrollees would be identical to that of non-enrollees; the instructors of record would work with enrolled students following the residency to complete other assigned readings and projects.

Enrollment and Cost: Pegged to 2018 Mayterm rates. With sustainability in mind, using GILA faculty, rather than modular faculty, might allow us to reduce that tuition cost, as would adjusting our grant budget to support tuition with scholarship dollars.

Eligibility: Rising high school sophomores through seniors who enroll in the two-week residency. Participants in the one-week residency are not eligible for credit.