The Moreau First-Year Experience, a one-credit class often billed as a formative introduction to the University, has been a fixture for Notre Dame students since 2015. While the program has seen small changes over the last nine years, this fall marks the first in which some freshmen are taking an entirely new version of the course.
After an initiative to rethink the course, it has been rebranded as the Moreau First-Year Seminar. This effort was backed by dozens of faculty and spanned three years.
William Mattison III is the faculty director of the Moreau Program, a position created in Oct. 2023. Thus, Mattison is the only person to have had the role and has overseen much of the redesign and implementation process.
The initial version of Moreau was formed after the University eliminated its physical education requirement. According to Mattison, Moreau was a patchwork of curricular content, including alcohol education, cultural diversity training and mental health guidance.
“It was more of a conglomeration of important topics that never really had a coherence,” Mattison said.
The new Moreau program, by contrast, has a more unified design. This design is physically embodied by the program’s “commonplace book,” a blue, hard-cover volume containing selected readings and lined pages for personal thought and reflection. The book was given to the 20% of freshmen enrolled in the pilot.
Fr. Kevin Grove, who served on the Moreau curricular committee and taught a section of the pilot, said the move to a physical book and away from digital resources on a learning platform like Canvas was an intentional one.
“What helped us to get to the commonplace book is that we wanted a classroom experience really focused on student discussion with one another in a seminar form, and so having the text in front of them was going to be important,” Grove said.
April García, an assistant teaching professor with the Institute for Educational Initiatives, also taught a Moreau pilot class. Including the current semester, García has taught seven semesters of Moreau. She shared similar thoughts on the introduction of the commonplace book.
“I believe that the commonplace book lent itself to a tech-free classroom in a way that supported student learning,” García said.
Contained within the commonplace books is a greater number of “enduring texts” compared to what the former curriculum featured, including excerpts from Aristotle, St. Francis of Assisi and Blaise Pascal.
“The commonplace book is meant to invite students into reflection on their lives, but in a manner that's informed by tradition, voices who have gone before them, so they don't begin it as a blank slate,” Mattison explained.
Mattison said he envisions Moreau as a place where students are “nourished by classic texts, in the company of peers” while reflecting on their lives and considering perennial questions.
Grove said he was edified by his teaching experience. This fall is his first semester teaching the course.
“I was delighted by how lively, engaged and thoughtful my Moreau students were, which gave me hope that these questions that this curriculum poses are worthwhile and the right ones, not only for them as freshmen, but for humans generally,” Grove said.
Instructors in the pilot were not alone in teaching their classes of roughly 20 students; each was aided by a “peer leader,” a sophomore, junior or senior who shares personal experiences and reflections with students during class.
“Unlike a teaching assistant that has mainly like bureaucratic or administrative tasks like taking attendance or checking work, we wanted the peer leaders to actually have a role in teaching the course,” Mattison said.
García said she was supportive of the addition.
“Having a Moreau peer leader in the class was truly a gift, I believe, to the classroom community because it’s a person who students are more likely to resonate with, a person who is modeling the reality of what it means to be a Notre Dame student,” García said.
Also new to Moreau is the introduction of co-curricular experiences, a series of thematically related events for students outside of the classroom. Examples from the fall semester include poetry readings, a spiritual retreat, a day of community service and sessions on grateful attentiveness at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Mattison said the co-curricular events complement and buttress classroom learning.
Another significant shift in Moreau is the program’s effort to recruit more faculty to teach the class. The class has historically included many staff members as instructors.
“At a university, the curriculum is administered by the faculty,” Mattison said, explaining the rationale for the effort.
While Mattison said there is “not any official target” for a faculty to staff proportion, he said he would like there to be a majority. García believes the push to include more faculty signifies the Moreau program is important to the University.
“If we don't signify as a University that this is important by inviting someone like the provost to teach this course, this course will continue to just be seen as a one-credit, something we all have to do, as opposed to a one-credit, formative experience that all Notre Dame students get to engage in,” García said.
While there are several weeks remaining in the fall semester, the pilot Moreau sections have already concluded. Classes were lengthened to 75 minutes instead of 50, so the duration of the course was shortened to maintain the same amount of instructional time as the previous Moreau program.
The second semester of the new Moreau program has yet to be designed, but it will be taken during students' senior year instead of the second semester of their freshmen year. A limited number of freshmen who took the pilot will have the opportunity to provide feedback through a “lab” in the spring semester to shape the final design of the new curriculum. Instructors and students will also be surveyed on the course.
“We’re assessing the heck out of it,” Mattison said.
