Education Commons^™

Infusing Critically Reflexive Service Learning Into Honors, Lauren Collins, Michaela Niva

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay describes a service-learning course designed with heart-centered pedagogy. Authors examine the relationship between individual and society in service learning and discuss the rationale and processes involved in curricular design to suggest an alternative approach to community engagement. Understanding service learning as going beyond merely the attainment of hours requisite for course completion, students are asked to develop critical reflexivity by first considering the focus, identity, and needs of community partners. Authors suggest that this curriculum provides practical opportunities for engaging students intellectually and emotionally in order to strengthen self-concept and cultural awareness of a vulnerable population.

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 …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In 2019, plans were well underway for the 2020 NCHC conference with the theme “Big Hearts, Big Minds.” Then came January of 2020 and the Corona virus with its vocabulary of social distancing, remote learning, the dangers of personal contact, and the importance of isolation. In addition to upending and redirecting all the conference plans that had been so carefully developed under the leadership of Suketu P. Bhavsar, the new language of COVID-19 was an assault on the very intimacy, connectedness, and close personal relationships in honors that were the theme of the conference. The virus has been an obstruction …

Teaching As A Whole, Mollie Hartup

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Deeply ingrained in honors culture and curricula is the value of connecting with and supporting students as whole persons. This essay offers personal experiences from the perspective of a compassionate educator who invests in the whole student, exploring how authentic teaching leads to rapport and belonging in the honors community and beyond. The author suggests that honors can serve the academy as an example of how investing in the complete person is mutually beneficial.

Putting The “Human” Into The Humanities, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

A recent (2020) report by the Modern Language Association addresses the ethical treatment of graduate students in the humanities, and the author considers this in the context of honors students and faculty. Lamenting missed opportunities for in-person group presentations, student-led Socratic circles, and final individual presentations during the coronavirus pandemic, the author reflects on ways of experiencing joy and practicing compassion in teaching. Students and faculty mutually benefit from exploring and honoring each other’s humanity.

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 …

Nefdc Exchange, Volume 33, Special Edition 2020, New England Faculty Development Consortium

NEFDC Exchange

Contents

Notes from the guest editor, Eric Matte (Landmark College)

Rescuing the canary in the coal mine: Addressing mental health on college campuses

Five )not ten) teaching practices inclusive of students with anxiety

Resilience through discomfort: Reframing anxiety and helpful strategies for the mathematics classroom

Learning and wellbeing: A collaborative approach to course design

Simulations offer transformational learning and anxiety reduction

NEFDC Board members

Health Education In Rural Areas, Jody Tomanek

Instructional Leadership Abstracts

Healthcare in the United States has been on the forefront of people’s minds for the last decade. In rural areas of our country this is even more prominent. The cost of healthcare is only a small piece of the puzzle. Rural areas of our country also must worry about access to healthcare, and quality healthcare. It is not uncommon in rural Nebraska for people to travel more than an hour to have access to quality healthcare. This is something I see everyday from two different perspectives. As the Vice President for Academic Affairs at a small rural community college in …

Building Honors Contracts: Insights And Oversights, Kristine A. Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs

Acknowledgments

Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights, Kristine A. Miller

Curriculum Gone Bad: The Case against Honors Contracts, Richard Badenhausen

The Timeliness of Honors Contracts, Shirley Shultz Myers and Geoffrey Whitebread

Honors Contracts: Empowering Students and Fostering Autonomy in Honors Education, Anne Dotter

An Undeserved Reputation: How Contract Courses Can Work for a Small Honors Program , Jon Hageman

One Hand Washes the Other: Designing Mutually Beneficial Honors Contracts, Antonina Bambina

Honors Contracts: A Scaffolding to Independent Inquiry, Cindy S. Ticknor and Shamim Khan

Enhancing the Structure and Impact of Honors by Contract Projects with Templates and …

Internationalizing Honors, Kim Klein, Mary Kay Mulvaney

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs

This monograph takes a “holistic approach to internationalization. [It] highlights how honors programs and colleges have gone beyond providing often one-time, short-term international experiences for their students and made global issues and experiences central features of their honors curricular and co-curricular programming. It presents case studies that can serve as models for honors programs and colleges seeking to initiate and further their internationalization efforts and highlights the latest research on the impact of internationalization on our students, campuses, and communities.” * * * “Our hope is that this monograph will serve multiple audiences: faculty wishing to develop new globally focused …

“A Victim/Survivor Needs Agency”: Sexual Assault Survivors’ Perceptions Of University Mandatory Reporting Policies, Kathryn J. Holland, Allison E. Cipriano, T. Zachary Huit

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

In institutions of higher education, mandatory reporting policies require certain employees to report students’ sexual assault disclosures to university officials, even if the student does not want to report. It is commonly assumed that these policies will benefit survivors, but there is a paucity of research to substantiate this assumption. The current study examined college sexual assault survivors’ perceptions of mandatory reporting policies, including three specific policy approaches (Universal, Selective, Student-Directed). Interviews were conducted with 40 college sexual assault survivors and thematic analysis was used to analyze these data. Results found that the mandatory reporting policy approaches that survivors prefer, …

A High-Impact Strategy For Honors Contract Courses, Gary Wyatt

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This essay describes a strategy implemented at Emporia State University for offering high-impact honors contract courses in a collaborative environment. After considering the role of honors contract courses in our college, the chapter demonstrates the importance of guiding students and instructors in creating contract applications and shaping requirements to ensure that contract courses are true honors experiences. Our contract applications demand a collaborative effort in which students and instructors demonstrate together how core requirements will be satisfied. Each application is unique and generally involves the development of a mentoring relationship. The chapter includes examples illustrating some key value-added outcomes students …

Building Honors Contracts: Insights And Oversights -- Introduction, Kristine Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This book asks an overdue question: can we build honors contracts that transcend the transactional? The word “contract” itself—as both noun and verb—delimits more possibilities than it reveals. The chapters collected here expand this restrictive term by reframing honors contracts as collaborative partnerships for experiential learning. While most, though not all, of the volume’s contributors accept standard definitions of honors contracts as “[e]nriched options within regular [non-honors] courses,” they also imagine many and varied possibilities for such enrichment (Schuman 33). The subtitle’s pairing of “Insights” and “Oversights” thus suggests not that the authors have seen it all or missed the …

“Same Same, But Different”: Trans-Nationalizing Honors In A U.S. Branch Campus, Jesse Gerlach Ulmer

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In July of 2013, I was appointed to lead the Honors Program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in Doha, Qatar (VCU Qatar), a branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. I attended my first National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference the following November. The location was New Orleans, Louisiana, a twentysomething hour flight from Doha, Qatar’s capital city. My goal was simple: to engage with honors directors like myself who were running honors programs outside the United States. Jet-lagged beyond belief, I stumbled through the conference in a stupefied, nine-hour time difference haze, rarely straying …

Early Impact: Assessing Global-Mindedness And Intercultural Competence In A First-Year Honors Abroad Course, Michael Carignan, Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Within the expanding field of study abroad scholarship, recent research on honors-based programming indicates an evolving understanding of how the goals of most study abroad programs align with those of honors programs (Camarena and Collins; Frost et al.; Markus et al.). The tradition of incorporating international experiences into honors education is longstanding, and recent descriptions of related programming highlight the diversity of disciplines, locations, aims, and pedagogies across institutions (Mulvaney and Klein ix–x). One common thread, however, is a desire to facilitate not only academic but also intercultural competencies in order to prepare honors students for an increasingly interconnected world. …

Institutional Responses To Events Challenging Campus Climates: Examining The Power In Language, Crystal Garcia, Benjamin Arnberg, Jessica Weise, Marit Winborn

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

This qualitative study explored administrative responses to local and sociopolitical events challenging campus climates at public research universities. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined the use of language as a form of power in publicly available documents addressing campus climate for diversity and inclusion at 31 U.S. institutions. Findings center 3 themes: underlying power in determining what to address; the power of language in perpetuating or deconstructing power, privilege, and oppression; and the distinction between espousing and enacting commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Implications for research and practice are discussed.