Faculty and Seminar Method
Transfiguration College faculty will be predominately Eastern Rite Catholics. Faculty selection is currently underway; biographies will be available by the end of 2005.
Transfiguration Faculty
The faculty are called tutors at Transfiguration College because the teachers are more like midwives of the great ideas than lecturers of those ideas. The job of the tutor is to direct the discussion that the students themselves have, to keep the discussion from getting too far a field of the topic at hand, and to help resolve certain difficulties that can arise in any discussion when an impasse is reached.
The Seminar Method
The great discussion as described by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler is the model for the classroom at Transfiguration College.
The students prepare a selection of one of the original source authors by reading and mentally wrestling with the text on their own. Then the students are led in a discussion by the tutor in a class no larger than 10 to 15 students. By having the discussion themselves, the students are forced to engage the arguments made by the great authors in a very personal way.
Sometimes the progress seems slow, but the personal "ownership" of the ideas by the students is increased by their personal participation.
Regular Lectures
To aid the students in their own understanding of the material, regular lectures on the very topics they are addressing in the classroom are given by visiting lecturers and adjunct faculty in order to bring the whole picture together.
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