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Not So Gifted: Academic Identity For Black Women In Honors, A. Musu Davis

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors students are often regarded as the best and brightest at their universities, but the standard definitions of high achievement are not always useful for identifying talented undergraduate Black women. In a qualitative study of Black women in honors inside and outside the classroom at two urban predominantly white universities (PWIs), data derived from the students’ experiences provide insights about the standard labels of high achievement in higher education. The voices of these women expand the discourse on student academic identity. Picture one of these honors students: Anissa wipes her finger through the word “gifted,” which is written on the …

Gifted Students, Honors Students, And An Honors Education, Jaclyn M. Chancey, Jennifer Lease Butts

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The seeming lack of connection between honors and gifted education has puzzled us for some time. Both of us incorporated gifted education and higher education into our doctoral studies, and both of our dissertations used gifted education theories as lenses into the honors student experience. Our lives as researchers and higher education administrators have been spent in the shared space between gifted students and honors programs. We know that this combination strengthens our work with the University of Connecticut Honors Program, and we are excited at the possibility of greater collaboration between the two fields. In this essay, we will …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council 19.2 (Fall/Winter 2018)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Forum Essays on “Gifted Education and Honors”

Gifted Education to Honors Education: A Curious History, a Vibrant Future — Nicholas Colangelo

Honors Is a Good Fit for Gifted Students—Or Maybe Not — Annmarie Guzy

Are You Gifted-Friendly? Understanding How Honors Contexts (Can) Serve Gifted Young Adults — Jonathan D. Kotinek

If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When? — Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison

Gifted Students, Honors Students, and an Honors Education . Jaclyn M. Chancey and Jennifer Lease Butts

Ways We Can Do Better: Bridging the Gap Between Gifted Education and Honors Colleges . Angie L. Miller

Not So Gifted: Academic …

Opening Doors: Facilitating Transfer Students’ Participation In Honors, Patrick Bahls

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Those of us who reflect on our work as honors educators and administrators are more certain than ever that honors programs and colleges are critical sites for development of equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education. Numerous roundtable discussions and research presentations at recent regional and national honors conferences signal this awareness as do equally numerous honors-related publications, including two monographs released through the National Collegiate Honors Council; Setting the Table for Diversity, edited by Coleman and Kotinek, and Occupy Honors Education, edited by Coleman, Kotinek, & Oda. Lisa Coleman opens the former volume with a series of questions that …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council 19.2 (Fall/Winter 2018) [Editorial Matter]

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

indexing statement

production editors

editorial board

contents

Call for Papers .

Editorial Policy, Deadlines, and Submission Guidelines

About the Authors

Front and back covers

If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?, Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Last year’s surprise hit of the television season was The Good Doctor, in which Freddie Highmore plays a gifted surgical resident who is also a high-functioning autistic. Critics speculate that it succeeded because audiences are hungry for good-outcome fantasy, or “warm bath” television. Fantasy is right. As much as we love watching Shaun Murphy show up not only all the other residents but all the attending physicians, we wouldn’t want to work with him in real life. Gifted students who can move through the K–12 curriculum so quickly that they can earn college-ready SAT scores at 11 or 12 are …

Ways We Can Do Better: Bridging The Gap Between Gifted Education And Honors Colleges, Angie L. Miller

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Over the past decade of my academic career, I have increasingly noticed the gap between K–12 gifted education and honors college education as my research has forced me to straddle the two areas. My doctoral education at Ball State University included a specialization in gifted studies, which was a natural fit with my own interests in creative cognitive processes. During this time, I worked with a team that amassed a large data set from the honors college students, with twelve different measures ranging from topics of temperament to perfectionism to social dominance orientation. These measures addressed mostly psychosocial and emotional …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors educators are used to organizing and teaching interdisciplinary courses and so are familiar with the paradox that faculty in different academic departments are typically unaware of what goes on in disciplines other than their own despite quickly recognizing that they have mutual interests, methodologies, and challenges. They inevitably learn about and from the work of colleagues in different fields, discovering opportunities to strengthen their scholarly and pedagogical work. They typically want and ask to teach other interdisciplinary courses and wonder why they haven’t thought to do so before. The same paradox exists in the scholarship on gifted and honors …

The Value Of Honors: A Study Of Alumni Perspectives On Skills Gained Through Honors Education, Christopher M. Kotschevar, Surachat Ngorsuraches, Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors education is often marketed as a means to offer enhanced value to a collegiate education. This value has the capacity to bolster a student’s academic experience, to add to his or her comprehensive skill set, to enhance a resumé, and to improve professional development. Ernest Pascarella argued that theoretical value without data is often used to justify collegiate programs such as honors and criticized those practices for lacking research and data to validate the claim of enhanced value. The current research was designed to obtain validation by eliciting the perspectives of alumni from South Dakota State University’s (SDSU’s) Honors …

Are You Gifted-Friendly? Understanding How Honors Contexts (Can) Serve Gifted Young Adults, Jonathan D. Kotinek

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

I was tangentially aware of gifted education while I was in elementary and middle school, but my first real awareness of the concept came through my work in the University Honors Program at Texas A&M. In truth, I was not yet working for the University Honors Program; I was a graduate assistant for then-Associate Director, Finnie Coleman, who tasked me with helping host a group of Davidson Young Scholars visiting campus for a lecture from Stephen Hawking to mark the opening of the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy in 2003. I was hired into a full-time role in …

Gifted Education To Honors Education: A Curious History, A Vibrant Future, Nicholas Colangelo

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Gifted programs and honors education have evolved along parallel tracks in the past decades with little interconnection or cross-communication. Exploring what these two fields can teach each other should allow us to collaborate in addressing their overlapping goals and potential conflicts in order to better educate bright young students. At both the high school and college levels, teachers often assume that gifted students need no special attention, that we can simply get out of their way and focus our attention on students who struggle academically. Those of us in both gifted and honors education know better. At the University of …

Honors Is A Good Fit For Gifted Students— Or Maybe Not, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the field of composition studies, a core pedagogical objective is to familiarize students with types of argumentation strategies, such as causation, evaluation, narration, rebuttal, and definition. Introducing definition arguments in their textbook Good Reasons: Researching and Writing Effective Arguments, Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer state that “[d]efinition arguments set out criteria and then argue whatever is being defined meets or does not meet those criteria. Rarely do you get far into an argument without having to define something” (97). They identify three categories of definition—formal, operational, and by example—and then apply these to sample documents. For my honors composition …

Dedication -- Lisa Lynn Coleman

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors director, diversity advocate, book editor, journal reviewer, Virginia Woolf scholar, yoga and Pilates instructor—Lisa Coleman is a modern-day Renaissance woman. Recently retired as English Professor and Honors Director at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Lisa has been a moving force in the National Collegiate Honors Council for two decades. Most NCHC members know her as the instigator and implementer of the Diversity Forums at the annual conferences for the past fifteen years or so. An active member and often chair of the Diversity Committee during that time, she has also been contributing co-editor to two monographs on diversity in honors …

Social Media For Honors Colleges: Swipe Right Or Left?, Corinne R. Green

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the face of new technologies, honors faculty and staff should begin understanding the way their students interact with these technologies to apply them appropriately within the honors experience. Social media is a prominent and controversial technology that requires more research on how honors students and students with gifts and talents embrace or reject the trending innovations. Honors pedagogues express some controversy over whether the presence of online technology enhances or decreases the sense of community within their college (Alger; English; Johnson, “Meeting”; Salas), but this issue is moot if honors professionals do not seek understanding about how honors students …

Thinking Critically, Acting Justly, Naomi Yavneh Klos

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In October 2011, just two months after I became Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola New Orleans, my new home town was simultaneously proclaimed both “America’s Best City for Foodies” (Forbes) and the country’s “Worst Food Desert” (Lammers). The city known for beignets and crawfish, Mardi Gras and jazz, was revealed to have only one supermarket for each 16,000 residents (half the national average), with some residents traveling over fifteen miles from their homes to purchase fresh produce.

In the past six years, the situation has been somewhat ameliorated by multiple farmers markets throughout the city that accept …

How To Drink From The Pierian Spring: A Liberal Arts And Humanities Question About The Limits Of Honors Education, Christopher Keller

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors educators frequently engage in conversations about the decline of interest in and funding for the liberal arts and humanities. Larry Andrews’s essay “The Humanities are Dead! Long Live the Humanities!” is one of several that contributes to a metanarrative about the liberal arts and humanities, playing out along the following lines: workforce-minded politicians, short-sighted university administrators, STEM-related programs, and market-driven students no longer understand the true value of the liberal arts and humanities because they cannot be easily measured in dollars and cents; consequently, higher education today typically narrows students’ perspectives, facilitates short-term and uncritical thinking, and fails to …

Perceptions Of Advisors Who Work With High-Achieving Students, Melissa Johnson, Cheryl Walther, Kelly J. Medley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors programs in higher education are designed to optimize highachieving students’ potential by addressing their particular academic and developmental needs and common characteristics. Gerrity, Lawrence, and Sedlacek suggested that high-achieving students can be “best served by course work, living environments, and activities that differ from the usual college offerings” (43). Schuman, in his handbook Beginning in Honors, noted:

"An important point to keep in mind as regards honors advising is that honors students can be expected to have as many, and as complicated, problems as other students. It is sometimes tempting to envision all honors students as especially well …

Cultivating Empathy: Lessons From An Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Course, Megan Jacobs, Marygold Walsh-Dilley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” Naomi Yavneh Klos suggests that the key questions for honors education and social justice are first “how to engage our highest-ability and most motivated students in questions of justice” and second “how honors can be a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education.” These goals are both important and complementary; achieving the latter helps achieve the former. Honors education creates a fruitful space for inclusion where the knowledge and experience of diverse students develop skills oriented toward justice for the whole community. Making honors a place of access and equity prompts deeper engagement …

Social Justice Education In Honors: Political But Non-Partisan, Sarita Cargas

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, Neil Gross introduces research that suggests fifty to sixty percent of college professors are leftist or liberal, a much higher proportion than the seventeen percent of Americans in general (7). He posits the conservative fear that “bias” in higher education is a “very serious” problem (Gross 5). April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner examine studies that also show that college students are more ideologically diverse than the professoriate (498) and, further, that students tend to discredit information presented by biased professors and consider them untrustworthy sources (499). If the majority …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): Forum On Honors And Social Justice, National Collegiate Honors Council

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy, Deadlines, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Jack W. Rhodes

Editor’s Introduction — Ada Long

Forum on “Honors And Social Justice”

Thinking Critically, Acting Justly . — Naomi Yavneh Klos

Making Honors Success Scripts Available to Students from Diverse Backgrounds — Richard Badenhausen

Cultivating Empathy: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Course — Megan Jacobs and Marygold Walsh-Dilley

Socioeconomic Equity in Honors Education: Increasing Numbers of First-Generation and Low-Income Students — Angela D. Mead

Social Justice Education in Honors: Political but Non-Partisan — Sarita Cargas

Research Essays

What Makes a Curriculum Significant? Tracing the Taxonomy …

Making Honors Success Scripts Available To Students From Diverse Backgrounds, Richard Badenhausen

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In her lead forum essay, Naomi Yavneh Klos thoughtfully encourages us to reexamine our admissions practices in honors. She argues,

"We need a more nuanced reevaluation of standards that recognizes the role of systemic bias in traditional metrics of academic excellence and that holistically evaluates each student’s strengths and challenges in the context of individual and cultural experience. Such practices strengthen honors by identifying a diverse spectrum of students who both benefit from and enrich our honors community. (8)"

I would like to take that call for reevaluation one step further by asking members of the honors community to interrogate …

Editor's Introduction (Vol. 9, No. 1), Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Even in these perplexing times, most citizens of the United States would agree that social injustices in this country need to be addressed and alleviated. Most would acknowledge the high rates of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, incarceration, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and bias in college admissions, for instance, that undermine the ideals essential to a thriving democracy. The challenge, though, is getting beneath these abstractions to a level of empathy that can bring about change. While the National Collegiate Honors Council has taken on this challenge in years past, the energy and commitment required to meet the challenge has generally waned …

Editorial Matter: Jnchc 19:1 (Spring/Summer 2018)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Cover

Masthead

Indexing Statement

Production Editors

Editorial Board

Contents

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy

Deadlines

Submission Guidelines

Dedication -- Jack W. Rhodes, The Citadel

Forum on Honors and Social Justice

About the Authors

About the NCHC Monograph Series

NCHC Monographs & Journals

NCHC Publications Order Form

Back cover

ISBN 978-0-9911351-9-6

Socioeconomic Equity In Honors Education: Increasing Numbers Of First-Generation And Low-Income Students, Angela D. Mead

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Many honors administrators can cite the numbers and percentages of students of color and statistics on the male to female ratio. Public institutions might cite in-state to out-of-state comparisons. For most, however, socioeconomic status is low on their list, if there at all, even though it is an important measure of diversity. First-generation college students, neither of whose parents has a baccalaureate degree, make up 58% of college enrollments (Redford & Hoyer). Students with a Pell Grant, which qualifies them as having a low-income background, compose 33% of the American higher education population (Baum et al.). Approximately 24% of college …

From Campus To Corporation: Using Developmental Assessment Centers To Facilitate Students’ Next Career Steps, Rick R. Jacobs, Kaytlynn R. Griswold, Kristen L. Swigart, Greg E. Loviscky, Rachel L. Heinen

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

introduction

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. —Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Honors graduates have much to learn when transitioning into their first position after college. For instance, workplaces have an entirely different culture and set of expectations from undergraduate honors classrooms (Wendlandt & Rochlen). Furthermore, the skills they need to become successful employees or graduate students are different from those required of successful honors college students, with a greater emphasis on communication skills (Stevens) as one example.

Honors students are bright, curious, and hard-working (Achterberg), and honors programs give …

General Strain Theory And Prescription Drug Misuse Among Honors Students, Jordan Pedalono, Kelly Frailing

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty years of age, having surpassed deaths from guns, HIV, and even car crashes. Clearly driving this trend is prescription drug misuse, especially of opioids. Of the over 62,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone, a full third resulted from the misuse of prescription opioids such as Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, Vicodin, and Morphine (Katz; NIDA; see also DHS). Evidence indicates that college students are among those losing their lives each year to prescription drug misuse (Spencer), but many facets of prescription drug misuse, including types, prevalence, and especially explanations, are …

Creating A National Readership For Harper’S Weekly In A Time Of Sectional Crisis, Ashlyn Stewart

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

PORTZ-PRIZE-WINNING ESSAY, 2017

Throughout the 1840s and ’50s, localized and specialized periodicals serving specific regions, religions, pastimes, and vocations inundated the American magazine market (Lupfer 249). The vast majority of these publications were short-lived; Heather A. Haveman, a sociologist who in 2015 conducted a quantitative analysis of historical American magazines, estimates that the average lifespan of a magazine between 1840 and 1860 was a mere 1.9 years (29). As book historian Eric Lupfer says, “most were risky ventures— undercapitalized, poorly advertised, haphazardly managed, and with limited circulation” (249). However, magazines with the stability and capital of a sponsoring publishing house, …

Linking Academic Excellence And Social Justice Through Community-Based Participatory Research, Lydia Voigt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Naomi Yavneh Klos poses two questions for the NCHC community in her essay, “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” which appears in this issue of JNCHC: (1) how honors pedagogy/curriculum can engage the highestability and most motivated students in questions of social justice; and (2) how the honors curriculum can serve as a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education. The University Honors Program (UHP) at Loyola University New Orleans has recently implemented several honors social justice seminars that have been experimenting with various approaches to these pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic questions. Violence and Democracy, an honors sociology/criminology seminar, not …

What Makes A Curriculum Significant? Tracing The Taxonomy Of Significant Learning In Jesuit Honors Programs, Robert J. Pampel

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Over the last few years, I have sat in the opening sessions of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference and felt equal parts concern and conviction. In 2015 and 2016, opening speakers enumerated the challenges and opportunities that confront honors educators in a rapidly changing higher education landscape. I sympathized with their concerns in an institutional and cultural context marked by what Schwehn called the “Weberian ethos” of education—an instrumental, and less charitable, attitude toward academic inquiry. Yet, even as I acknowledged the veracity of their arguments, I was buoyed by belief in the Jesuit mission that animates my …