Welcome.

The Saint Louis University Core begins with the Ignite Seminar (CORE 1000), in which students are introduced to what makes teaching and learning at Saint Louis University distinctive and transformative. These pages are designed to assist faculty in designing an Ignite Seminar.

The Ignite Seminar is a first-year seminar course that utilizes a personal approach to inquiry, as articulated in the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. Based in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm places student experience, reflection, and action at the center of teaching and learning. The Ignite Seminar thus introduces students to the distinctive nature of Jesuit education. It introduces four University Core learning outcomes, requires four essential criteria, and represents a High-Impact Educational Practice.

In these small-group seminars, SLU faculty members invite students to join them in exploring the ideas and questions that have sustained and continue to fuel their passion and commitment as individuals and teachers. Each instructor’s distinct expression of disciplinary or interdisciplinary inquiry provides the lens through which students practice the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm—an integrative and personal approach to learning rooted in context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation. All faculty regardless of religious affiliation and faith (or lack thereof) are invited to teach their passion using the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm. Ignite Seminars therefore allow faculty members to model for students how individual scholarly commitments are necessarily forged in dialogue with the complex personal and social worlds we inhabit.