This class was taken the first semester of my junior year. Coming into this class, I was a little nervous as I was within the first group of Civitae students to take this Honors Citizen 410 course. Reflecting back on my Citizen 110 class that I took my first semester of my freshman year, I knew that this class was going to be intensive with a lot of reading and annotating involved. While it seemed overwhelming at first, Dr. Blincoe made the class very welcoming and purposefully designed it to make sure we didn’t have to worry about our grades. The topic of our class was called “Flourishing Together” which is based off of Dr. Blincoe’s dissertaiton focused on ethical philosophy. I found this to make the class more interesting because Dr. Blincoe was actively involved in not only teaching us his philosophical beliefs, but he made sure that we were able to practice it on our own time as well. Putting what we learned into action was my favorite part of the class because it not only reinforced our knowledge we had gained over the course of the semester, but it also made me become a more healthy and happier person. The contemplative practices involved daily consciousness checks to reflect on what went well, bad, and what we could do better to improve ourselves, multiple contemplative walks during the week, and leisurely reading once a week. I have really bad anxiety and stress so these contemplative practices significantly helped me learn to control those high levels throughout the semester which I really appreciated. I absolutely loved this class and learned so much about not just becoming a better and healthier individual, but I learned a variety of ways that I could help others to benefit the community surrounding me. Ever since that class, I have made a conscious effort to implement the contemplative practices into my everyday life routines, and I have even bought some new books that I can leisurely read this summer going into my senior year!
Artifact:
Title: Virtue of Habituation Report
Author: Katelyn Weber
Date: December 9, 2020
The artifact for this class was our Virtue of Habituation Report that we completed at the end of the semester. Toward the beginning of our class after we had learned some of the content for ethical philosophy, our professor asked us to choose a virtue that we wanted to habituate throughout the entirety of the semester. We had to draft a written plan of steps we would take throughout the semester in order to display our understanding of what a virtue versus vice was as well as showing a concrete plan of action that would help our development as a flourishing individual. This artifact is the report of the plan we pursed throughout the semester in order to show our understanding of the content we learned in the class and reflect on what we thought went well and what we could work on in the future to continue to habituate our virtue we chose.