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Resisting Disciplinarity: Curriculum Mapping And Transdisciplinarity, Megan Snider Bailey

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

American higher education relies on a taxonomy of knowledge stemming from Puritan ways of thinking and knowing—a disciplinary classification system that sorts “questions asked” and “answers possible” into epistemic categories. This paper interrogates the notion of disciplinarity to better understand the arbitrariness of epistemic divisions and the harm that these decisions cause. The author explores transdisciplinarity as an emerging concept in honors education, one which rejects boundaries and explores problems through multiple, competing perspectives. Transdisciplinary pedagogical approaches offer honors educators a mechanism for pivoting teaching and learning away from outdated assumptions of honors as elitist, giving honors students a liberating …

Diversity In Honors: Understanding Systemic Biases Through Student Narratives, Aman Singla, Minerva Melendrez, Mable T. Thai, Sukhdev S. Mann, Denise Zhong, Kim T. Hoang, Isabella H. Lee, Andrea V. Aponte

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Centered on superiority over a certain group or individual, discrimination becomes predominant in prestigious institutions that pride themselves on exclusivity. Collegiate honors programs tend to deepen this practice by creating highly elite spaces accessible only to a select few. This rigidity can lead to an underrepresentation of historically marginalized groups, students who often lack the necessary resources for achieving academic excellence. This case study examines the ways honors programs inadvertently perpetuate discrimination among different social identities. Using inductive interviewing of honors students (n = 12) to gauge individual perceptions of program diversity, researchers rely on content analysis to generate …

Meet The New Boss: An Honors Faculty Member Weathers Administrative Change, Annamarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The author reflects on the role of honors faculty in effectively responding to short- and long-term administrative change, discussing the value of resistance to deleterious administrative decisions and offering advice for successfully navigating cyclical administrative shifts in honors.

Regime Change As Opportunity: A Case For A Radically Inclusive Response, Massimo Rondolino

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The author proposes a radically inclusive approach to reimagining and rebuilding honors education at a time of institutional change, suggesting that when directives do not include a clear vision for academic curricula in practice and orientation (and instead focus on budgetary bottom lines and cost-maximization), honors practitioners benefit from an invaluable opportunity to exert self-determination and agency. This essay describes the effective rebuilding of an honors program by leveraging faculty experience to establish a collaborative community framed within a model of student self-governance and grounded in principles of mindful leadership, anti-cruelty mentality, and maternal thinking.

Developing Honors Faculty Through Faculty Development Programs, Aaron Hanlin

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Despite its crucial role in student success, there is scant research on how honors faculty develop teaching expertise and pedagogical authority. This essay considers the ways in which faculty development programs assist instructors by enhancing the critical skills necessary for positive student outcomes and successful honors programs. While honors scholars continue to advocate for institutional support toward faculty development, this essay provides further rationale and a specific example.

Jnchc 23:1 Backmatter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

about the research authors

about the nchc monograph series

NCHC Monographs & Journals

NCHC Publications Order Form

In This Issue

Citadels Of Interdisciplinarity, Colin Christensen

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As part of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (2022) collection of essays about the value of honors to its graduates (1967–2019), the author reflects on the personal and professional impacts of the honors experience.

As the demands of academic research galvanize disciplinary silos and market forces pressure students into increasingly specialized courses of study, honors education stands as one of the few remaining citadels of interdisciplinarity on America’s college campuses. My experience as an undergraduate honors student was characterized by a community of deep intellectual richness committed to student-driven, collaborative, integrative and critical inquiry. Honors constellates diversity in tradition and …

Dutch Honors Alumni Looking Back On The Impact Of Honors On Their Personal And Professional Development, Arie Kool, Elanor Kamans, Marca V.C. Wolfensberger

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This study considers the value of honors programs by investigating alumni perspectives of learning goals relative to personal and professional development. Using a longitudinal cross-sectional survey instrument, authors track participants (n = 79) for four consecutive years (2017–2021). Qualitative measures indicate the importance of freedom to develop within the curricula, stimulus to experiment and shape one’s own path, and insights and inspirations resultant of rigorous study. Respondents identify certain learning goals (i.e., ability to look beyond boundaries and show initiative and guts) to be critical in their personal and professional development but question the role of the honors certificate in …

Refusing Erasure: Nugent, Fire!!, And The Legacies Of Queer Harlem, Samantha King-Shaw

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This study examines the work of two queer Black artists, Richard Bruce Nugent and Marlon Riggs, within the historical and sociopolitical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and cultural backlash of the late 1980s. Through comparative textual analyses, the author explores fluctuations of Black queer cultural production during the twentieth century and considers how each artist subverts dominant racist and heteronormative ideologies in mainstream society and Black communities. Engaging tools from the fields of critical race theory, queer theory, critical legal studies, and cultural representations of race and sexuality, the author analyzes “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Tongues Untied structurally and …

“Best Of Both Worlds”: Alumni Perspectives On Honors And The Liberal Arts, Angela King Taylor, Kelsey Daniels, Molly Knowlton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This study explores the extent to which skills acquired through liberal arts curricula facilitate immediate post-graduate employment of honors college alumni. Using qualitative methods and semi-structured interviews (n = 16), authors examine the honors college experience and the attainment of skills through the lens of graduates (2017–2020) at a large research institution. Results indicate that while honors alumni identify certain skills that helped them realize initial employment, they were often unable to translate and apply these skills in professional workplaces, particularly nonacademic ones. Data further suggest that liberal arts skills (communication, research competence, critical reasoning, intercultural competence, interdisciplinary inquiry, disciplinary …

Editor's Introduction (To Jnchc 23:2), Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (JNCHC) includes a Forum on “Honors Beyond the Liberal Arts.” The focus of the Forum, as established in the title as well as in its lead essay by K. Patrick Fazioli, is the desirability of outreach to professional schools by the NCHC and by honors educators generally. Although the essays reveal a shared and unambiguous consensus about what is meant by “professional schools,” they display considerable differences in what people mean by “the liberal arts.” While the standard dictionary definition of the liberal arts includes the sciences and social …

Disordered Eating, Perfectionism, Stress, And Satisfaction In Honors: A Research Collaborative Investigating A Community Concern, Jeffrey E. Hecker, Jainie Giguere, Ethan Lowell, Mimi Killinger, Bailey Lewis, Ailin Liebler-Bendix

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Moved by the lived experience of an honors student, authors describe a three-year Honors and Eating Concerns Research Collaborative (2019–2022), which examines the relationship between perfectionism and eating concerns among honors students. Under faculty advisement, first- and second-year honors psychology majors (n = 5) participated in the collective, carrying out three empirical studies (producing two honors theses) and gathering data from 413 high-achieving students across the curriculum (54 identifying as honors). In survey research, the instruments used were questionnaires and interviews; measures involved four scales—Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (APSR), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ), and Eating Disorder Examination …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council Vol. 23, No. 2. Fall/Winter 2022

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Inside this Issue:

Frontmatter: Masthead • Call for Papers • Editorial Policy, Deadlines, and Submission Guidelines • Dedication to Patricia J. Smith

Editor’s Introduction. • Ada Long

Forum Essays on “Honors Beyond the Liberal Arts”

Who Owns Honors? • K. Patrick Fazioli

Bringing Professional Honors Communities into NCHC • Beata Jones

Honors Education Is Discipline-Neutral • Mike Sloane

Honors Is Pedagogy • John Zubizarreta

The Messages Are Everywhere: An Intersectional City as Text™ Approach to Enhance Honors Preprofessional Student Learning • Carla Janell Pattin

Modifying Practices to Serve Underrepresented Preprofessional Students with Help from Gifted Education • Bailey …

Jnchc Vol. 23, No. 1 (2022): Backmatter, National Collegiate Honors Council

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

No abstract provided.

The Messages Are Everywhere: An Intersectional City As Text™ Approach To Enhance Honors Preprofessional Student Learning, Carla Janell Pattin

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay recounts efforts to teach liberal arts to engineering, nursing, pharmacy, and pre-medicine majors. Showing how various forms of public media reinforce harmful ideologies about social identities in the United States serves as a convergence between preprofessional disciplines and the liberal arts. At the same time, City as Text™ offers exploratory learning beyond the traditional classroom. This educational approach fosters students’ transformation in thinking about power and privilege, enabling a dialogue about the miseducation of various economic, racial, ethnic, gender, and (dis)abled communities.

Modifying Practices To Serve Underrepresented Preprofessional Students With Help From Gifted Education, Bailey J. Nafziger

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Gifted education and honors education often parallel one another. By using a theoretical construct from gifted education as guidance, honors colleges could adjust their programs to spark interest and expedite talent development of minorities in STEM and health preprofessional tracks. Small improvements include adjusting advising models, using phenomena-based teaching practices to frame science content in a more feminine context, and making room for indigenous epistemologies in coursework. Adjustments to honors programs may bridge the gap between honors and preprofessional tracks while helping to increase diversity in STEM professional fields.

Reading As Bearing Witness: Incorporating The Voices Of Incarcerated Youth In Honors, Lauren Collins, Amelia Hawes, Jorgia Hawthorne, Nicole Gomez, Erin Saldin

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors faculty often engage students in service-learning and community- engaged courses to help students learn curricular concepts, develop skills in responsible citizenship, and positively impact their community. Authors consider how the greatest impact honors students can have may sometimes be through bearing witness rather than through direct service or volunteering. This essay explores a case study involving a community partnership between an honors college and a local non-profit serving incarcerated youth, where the primary goal is to bring the writing and voices of young, incarcerated authors into the college classroom and give their stories a wider audience. Authors describe the …

“Building Together”: City As Text™, Intersectionality, And Urban Farming During Covid-19, Carla Janell Pattin

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay considers various challenges to honors educational practice in a post-pandemic context and against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter. The City as Text™ course, Multicultural Toledo, cultivates student knowledge about intersectionality in light of public health and social justice emergencies in the United States. The author describes course content, curricular objectives, and teaching strategies toward helping students understand the dynamic interplay (intersection and interaction) of ableism, sexism, elitism, homophobia, and racism relative to the accession and acquisition of land. The course espouses a post-pandemic vision: an intersectional lens that fosters knowledge about power relationships and diverse lived experiences …

Honors The Hard Way, Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The conventional structure of most honors colleges made it difficult to deliver curricula and programming during the global health pandemic. Traditional modalities for content delivery and community building did not always adapt well to online environments. By requiring that honors students come to campus, programs have been offering a brick-and-mortar education to prepare their students for a virtual workplace. Instead of clinging to what has now become obsolete or cost prohibitive, honors practitioners must think creatively about what honors education in virtual reality might look like. The author suggests a reallocation of resources from physical to virtual spaces and argues …

Human-Centered Design As A Basis For A Transformative Curriculum, Bhibha M. Das, Tim Christensen, Elizabeth Hodge, Teal Darkenwald, W. Wayne Godwin, Gerald Weckesser

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This pilot study describes a nascent first-year honors colloquia series using human-centered design (HCD). An interdisciplinary team of instructors redesigned the course with the intention of engaging the whole student in transformative learning and creating a curriculum that addresses problems and opportunities focused on the needs, contexts, emotions, and behaviors of all students, faculty, administrators, and community involved in the series. Authors describe the HCD process, observing the challenges faced by faculty in realizing its design principles, and student (n = 98) reflections on a two-part prototype involving innovation and entrepreneurship emphasizing “wicked” problems and resolutions. Students were asked to …

Bridging The Interval: Teaching Global Awareness Through Music And Politics, Galit Gertsenzon

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Inquiry in Global Studies: Music and Politics is a regular course offering in which first-year honors students examine the social and cultural import of music in a global context. This qualitative study examines the practical and pedagogical implications of teaching music and politics during the coronavirus crisis. In a thematic, five-part series analyzing non-Western music both in service to the government and as protest against it, the author describes how students perceived the commonalities and diversities in global culture, history, politics, and society through music while at the same time demonstrating growth in music-making processes and confronting a remote learning …

“Here’S The Church, Here’S The Steeple”: Existing Politics Of Honors Education, Owen Cantrell

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In considering the extent to which honors education should engage with political and social justice movements, the author argues that its programs must first reckon with their own histories and complicity within systems of domination and oppression before determining the best approach. This essay examines how the continued legacy of racialized tracking at the secondary level, as well as the exclusionary nature of collegiate honors programs, has often exacerbated inequalities for marginalized student populations. The author concludes with a call for honors practitioners to confront the history of honors education; to de-center honors in service learning and community engagement; and …

The Recruitment And Retention Of Diverse Students In Honors: What The Last Twenty Years Of Scholarship Say, Jason T. Hilton, Jessica Jordan

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Common to most colleges and universities across the United States, honors programs are often criticized as havens for academically elite and privileged students. To help address concerns about the recruitment and retention of diverse honors students, this study presents a systematic review (2000–2019, inclusive) of published literature relating to diversity in honors education (n = 66). Identifying six emergent themes, authors examine the types of research presented in the literature; how diversity is defined by scholars; and programmatic best practices for increasing student diversity. A thorough description of one program’s flexible, innovative, and adaptive strategies for curricular improvement, recruitment practices, …

Owning Honors: Outcomes For A Student Leadership Culture, Adam Watkins

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The author provides an overview of a peer mentorship program within an honors curriculum and an assessment of its leadership culture. This culture is based on the values of servant leadership and an inclusive community of learners, and it is promoted through an orientation, training, and robust extracurricular component. The author explores the efficacy of leadership culture, considering its influence on peer mentors’ identification with the honors community and its influence on their learning outcomes.

The Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council: A Bibliometric Study, Emily Walshe

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This paper analyzes summative content and citation patterns in the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (ISSN 1559-0151), a peer-reviewed, scholarly publication related to honors education, during its first 20 volumes of existence from 2000 to 2019. The bibliometric study consists of two parts: an analysis of articles and analysis of citations. Quantitative and qualitative measures are used to examine article types, authorship patterns, cited references, and coverage of core subjects. Results indicate 522 articles with an annual output average of 26 .1. Annual input averages 37 .4 authors, featuring 492 unique authors who represent 248 unique institutions and …

Claiming Debate’S Value For Honors Student Learning, Megan Snider Bailey

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One reason that honors faculty often engage students in seminar discussions is to keep debate’s features of competition, argument, and discord at bay. Intentionally structured academic debate represents a transdisciplinary pedagogy capable of cultivating ethical and empathetic citizenship through critical and creative thinking. The author uses such debate in a seminar curriculum to engage multiple sides of a single, complex sociopolitical issue with students of different disciplinary backgrounds, thereby fostering new understandings of beliefs: what is believed, why it is believed, and how one might live in accord with one’s beliefs as an ethical citizen. Through research, writing, and oral …

About The Authors; About The Nchc Monograph Series; Nchc Monographs & Journals; Nchc Publications Order Form

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

No abstract provided.

Using Possible Selves And Intersectionality Theory To Understand Why Students Of Color Opt Out Of Honors, Cindy S. Ticknor, Andrea Dawn Frazier, Johniqua Williams, Maryah Thompson

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors education values diversity, not simply to enrich our classrooms but for equity and social justice. At Columbus State University, students of color were underrepresented in honors education, and we sought to determine if institutional structures hindered them from being able to access educational programming that was commensurate with their ability. We used focus group interviews with students of color who were academically eligible to enroll in honors education yet never participated. We combined focus group interviews with an analysis of our recruiting practices. Using a theoretical framework based on intersectionality and possible selves theory, we found that our participants …

Student Perception And Affinity: Establishment Of An Institutional Framework For The Examination Of Underrepresented Programs Such As Agriculture In Honors, Kayla L. Kutzke, Rosemarie A. Nold, Michael G. Gonda, Alecia M. Hansen, Rebecca C. Bott

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This (2019) study assesses student perceptions of an honors college relative to other colleges in an institutional framework. Disproportionately low enrollments in honors from specific majors (particularly those in the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Sciences) prompt researchers to investigate the culture of honors, perceived curricular demands, and the relationship of honors to other colleges and the students they serve. Researchers survey honors and non-honors students (n = 259) across disciplines (n = 59) representing all academic colleges across campus. Data suggest that while a majority of students affirm their abilities to complete the honors curriculum and perceive honors …

Practicing What We Preach: Risk-Taking And Failure As A Joint Endeavor, Alicia Cunningham-Bryant

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Faculty and administrators often present risk-taking as something honors students must do, but rarely do they take risks themselves. In an ideal situation, communal risk-taking would subvert institutional power dynamics, free students from grade-associated anxiety, and enable them to build dynamic partnerships with faculty. This paper discusses how one honors college piloted self-grading in the second semester of its first-year seminar as a mechanism of liberatory learning for both faculty and students. While self-grading was originally intended to provide increased freedom for risk-taking, in truth it led to increased anxiety in students and high levels of frustration for faculty. This …