The Convivium Initiative: What Do You Really Teach?

The Convivium Initiative is a Collegium Catalyst Grant-supported project that aims to probe the core question, “What do you really teach?” through sustained interdisciplinary reflection. The project brings together faculty across disciplinary boundaries to engage in a series of reflective conversations and writing retreats, using dialogical and generative practices to surface the often-unarticulated commitments, values and aims that shape classroom work.

Rather than producing a single report or curriculum, The Convivium Initiative is intended to culminate in a curated collection of essays that capture varied disciplinary perspectives on what instructors actually teach—beyond stated learning objectives to the fuller formation students experience. These essays will be grounded in the reflective conversations and the concentrated writing time afforded by the retreats, creating space for participants to translate lived teaching practices and classroom encounters into sustained reflective prose. Situated within Collegium’s catalytic grantmaking environment, the project exemplifies the network’s encouragement of collaborative, campus-embedded initiatives that stretch across academic units and invite renewed attention to pedagogy.

The Convivium Initiative foregrounds reflective practice as both method and outcome: conversations among faculty serve to clarify implicit pedagogical commitments, while writing retreats provide the concentrated practice necessary to render those insights into essays suitable for wider dissemination. Through this dual emphasis, the initiative aims to make visible the educative goods—ethical, intellectual, civic, spiritual—that faculty cultivate in their classrooms, often without explicit articulation.

By bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives into conversation, the project also seeks to reveal how different fields frame and pursue formation, and how those differences might illuminate new possibilities for interdisciplinary teaching or shared curricular priorities. The resulting collection of essays will serve multiple audiences: participating faculty will have a documented record of their reflective work and developed arguments; member campuses of Collegium can draw on the essays for faculty formation, recruitment and curricular conversations; and the broader community interested in Catholic higher education and integrative pedagogy will gain insight into the lived realities of teaching across disciplines.