Service Leadership & Catholic Social Teaching Overview
Framed by Catholic Social Teaching and rooted in the heritage and ministries of the Sisters of Providence, the SLCST minor combines real-world service experiences with a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and responding to social problems and challenges.
Through dialogue and collaboration with other students, staff, faculty, and community members, students will:
- Serve and reflect together through immersion in local and regional communities
- Organize and lead service initiatives with other students in collaboration with Campus Ministry, faculty, and other members of the UP community.
- Build on service experiences begun in COD, ILCs, and other courses in Core and majors.
- Learn the key principles of CST and participate in interdisciplinary dialogue with other students and faculty
- Discover the connections between CST, Service, the Sisters of Providence, and their own respective callings/vocations.
- Reflect and connect service experiences and CST to disciplines, majors, and future professions.
Program Highlights
Explore, Discover & Pursue your Interests
- SLCST fits easily with your major and other pursuits: Build on courses you are already taking in your major and Core, and connect courses in Business, Biology, Psychology, Theology, Philosophy and Criminal Justice
- Explore topics like ecology, conservation, sustainability, economics, sociology, poor and vulnerable populations, and servant leadership
- Discover potential career paths in human services, health care, wild life biology, criminal justice, business, finance, theology, and non-profit work
- Reflect on your calling, discover your gifts – discover gifts and talents you may not know you have, work alongside students and faculty from other majors and disciplines, and collaborate with members of the local and regional community
Activities and Internship opportunities
- Connect & Contribute: responding to the needs of communities in which they serve, students have organized winter clothes and pet-food drives for the homeless, run camp activities for children, hosted underserved kids at Argo athletic events, and other creative activities
- Serve & Collaborate: students have participated in service immersion trips and activities with agencies like St. Vincent de Paul’s Angel Room, Thrift Store, and veteran homes, with UP’s Camp SkyChild, Renaissance Care facilities, the Juvenile Detention Center, Literacy Tutoring at local schools, St. Francis Inn (Philadelphia), Eagle Mount, Boys & Girls Club, AWARE, Alliance for Youth, Heisey Youth Center, and many other agencies.
- Work alongside professionals and community members in a variety of fields and settings including medicine, social work, psychology, law enforcement, contracting/construction, legal studies and more
Program Curriculum
Through a combination of coursework and service and immersion activities, students develop deeper understanding of the social factors that affect communities and of the central principles of Catholic Social Teaching including dignity of the human person, solidarity, the call to participation, the option for the poor and vulnerable, care for creation, the dignity of work and the rights of workers, and rights and responsibilities. Students choose from a range of courses, taking at least one course related to ecology, one related to economics, and one related to poor and vulnerable populations. Students also choose from an array of courses focused on practical application and skills for working with vulnerable populations, often taking a course already offered in their respective majors. Finally, students do a Service Internship and participate in a multidisciplinary seminar focused on connecting CST and service experiences to their particular fields of study, presenting final projects at the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.
Service Leadership & Catholic Social Teaching Minor Courseleaf link coming soon
Skills You’ll Learn
Throughout the minor, students will:
- Develop Awareness of needs of others, community and society
- Demonstrate awareness of personal strengths, gifts, and vulnerabilities through reflection on service experiences and studies
- Demonstrate awareness of the emotions, vulnerabilities, and needs of others
- Explain how social and communal factors can support or undermine respect for human dignity and development
- Understand Catholic Social Teaching as a dialogue amongst various disciplines
- Explain the theological and philosophical foundations and basic principles of CST and apply them to real-world economic, social, and ecological problems.
- Explain and apply concepts of the human person inherent CST including human dignity, solidarity, and the call to participation
- Explain how real-world social, economic, and ecological issues affect humans and communities.
- Integrate: Synthesize, Discern, Respond
- Explain the ramifications and applications of CST principles through the lens of particular disciplinary expertise [will vary depending on student’s major]
- Drawing on CST, and disciplinary expertise, identify and assess needs of a particular community encountered through service
- Discern and respond to the needs of particular individuals or communities through community engagement, presence, reflection, and action.
Other Degrees You May Like
