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Honors in Practice Online Archive

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In This Issue

Constitution Day: An Opportunity For Honors Colleges To Promote Civic Engagement, Richard J. Hardy, Paul A. Schlag, Keith Boeckelman

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The United States Constitution is the bedrock upon which government and society rest, yet its precepts remain generally unfamiliar to contemporary college students. Considering the extent of its impact and the misinformation regarding its purpose, content, efficacy, and limits, the authors provide suggestions for civic learning based on this seminal document. While all American educational institutions receiving federal funding must celebrate the U.S. Constitution each year on or near September 17th, research suggests that comprehensive and integrative instruction is scarce. Citing a lack of formal Constitution Day programming among honors colleges, the authors present a multi-modal framework for honors students …

Using Issues In Honors Education To Teach Argumentation, Annmarie Guzy

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

In my first-year honors composition course, I frequently use materials and topics from honors education, ranging from National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) publications to local campus honors issues, to demonstrate rhetorical analysis and argumentative genres. Rather than using a composition reader, I pair textbook chapters with relevant websites and selected essays from Journal of the National Collegiate Honors …

Counterstories Of Honors Students Of Color, Michael Carlos Gutiérrez

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This study explores the experience of high-achieving students of color in an honors program at a large research university. Qualitative methods involve surveying students (n = 39) and interviewing a select group (n = 5) in attempts to measure both the frequency and severity of racial microaggression as well as subjective experience relating to diversity and representation in honors. Using critical race theory, a discourse analysis of four broad questions pertaining to pre-entry, entry, continuation, and exit of honors programs suggests that more is needed to foster an honors community that better understands and meets the needs of students’ racial, …

Building Community During Covid-19 And Beyond: How A Community Garden Strengthened An Honors Community, Steve Garrison

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Amid social distancing restrictions, community gardening becomes a focal point of one honors program. While providing fresh produce to the campus food pantry, this student-run initiative generates a new setting for experiential and service learning.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, honors programs across the U.S. struggled to maintain community as higher education moved largely to a virtual setting. Although this shift produced numerous innovations in creative programming, real social interaction greatly diminished. For young adults, social interaction is especially crucial to intellectual and social development, and with community as a key pillar of honors education, compensating for this …

Embracing New Opportunities In And Beyond First-Year Honors Composition, Teagan Decker, Scott Hicks

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors describe course-embedded research experiences at a diverse, rural, regional university. Emphasizing the capacity for conventional teaching and learning in first-year honors composition, these experiences provide relationshiprich education through faculty and peer mentorships. Positing that first-year honors composition is undervalued as a means for establishing programmatic foundations that resonate with students throughout their honors experience, the authors reinforce its importance as a place for disciplinary research and thus for opportunities in mentoring. By addressing an urgent need for mentoring underrepresented students, the authors consider how a research-based first-year honors composition course might help such students make meaningful disciplinary connections. A …

Creating Knowledge: The Literary Dictionary Assignment, Rebecca Cepek

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A literary dictionary assignment provides honors students with an understanding of the ways knowledge shifts and changes over time as well as an opportunity to create knowledge rather than just recall correct answers.

For honors students, reciting the correct definitions of key terms—regardless of discipline—is generally simple. Where they struggle is understanding the ways such definitions may shift over time, shedding or accruing meanings with changes in usage, context, and critical perspective. To allow students to engage with such changes and to continue a tradition of “teaching the conflicts,” I have students create a dictionary of literary terms over the …

Disorientations And Disruptions: Innovating First-Year Honors Education Through Collaborative Mapping Projects, Nathan W. Swanson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A series of courses on the Evolution of Ideas introduces interdisciplinary study, develops collaborative discourse, and promotes a sense of community among first-year honors students. The curriculum encourages faculty to use a range of strategies to help students understand an idea and its history while also fostering awareness as to its social, political, economic, and broader contexts. Using the social history of maps as an example, the author demonstrates how disrupting students’ understanding of the map itself and, through creative group projects, disorienting emergent understanding of campus spaces, fosters a questioning atmosphere and makes room for growth. Through planned disorientation …

The Critically Reflective Practicum, Aaron Stoller

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A defining feature of honors education is meaningful engagement within and across disciplines, yet significant challenges for creating and sustaining meaningful transdisciplinary research remain. One such challenge involves a nuanced understanding of a discipline, or what educational researchers call “disciplinary literacy.” This article introduces critically reflective practicum (CRP) as a pedagogy for developing disciplinary literacy among honors students. CRP acknowledges forms of inquiry as design situations and seeks to simulate instructional scaffolding so that students both experience and reflect on their questioning. Through the practicum, students begin to understand, engage with, and critique the methods and sociocultural standards of one …

Inclusive And Effective Holistic Admission Frameworks For Honors Programs: A Case Study Continued, Andrea Radasanu, Gregory Barker

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This study continues an earlier (2021) examination of a program’s move from an admissions framework that used standardized test score thresholds to a test-blind holistic review. While the initial study evinced holistic review as a more equitable gateway to honors education for students from underserved backgrounds (as compared to admission frameworks that rely heavily on SAT/ACT thresholds), the current study further substantiates this finding as the program fully transitions to its subsequent admission cycle. In addition to affirming holistic admissions practice as effective for diversifying honors populations, the study considers two additional results. First, the holistic review rubric is assessed …

Disrupting The Way We Work: An Honors Summer Vacation, Lexi Rager, Mollie Hartup

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors describe how a summer respite introduces alternative ways and spaces in which to work, positing how collaborative discourse and dismantled hierarchies can affect positive change and productive outcomes for honors programs.

While some assume that the summer is our off-season, the team at the Sokolov Honors College at Youngstown State University knows that it is the time we have to be most “on,” tackling all that we don’t get to do in the semester and positioning us for a strong start to the upcoming fall. Summer 2021 seemed particularly daunting with a laundry list of items to catch up …

Professional Transitions In Honors: Challenges, Opportunities, And Tips, Suketu P. Bhavsar, Jill Granger, Marlee Marsh, Matthew Means, John Zubizarreta

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors reflect on ways that honors practitioners have experienced various professional transitions and provide insights to help others successfully manage such changes.

Honors transitions are inevitable. Many of us in honors, for example, have relocated from other disciplines, moving from the prescribed boundaries of our academic areas to the diverse and challenging demands of honors, quickly learning new leadership skills and approaches to navigating challenges and prospects within and outside our institutions. Some of us have relocated to different institutions; some have negotiated growth from programs to colleges; some have advanced to positions in higher administration; some have witnessed changes …

Honors In Practice, Volume 18: Frontmatter Materials, National Collegiate Honors Council

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Cover

Indexing

Editorial Board

Contents

Editorial Policy, Deadline, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to P. Brent Register

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

Using Algorithmic Imaginaries And Uncanny Pedagogy To Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research And Digital Scholarship, Philip L. Frana

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An interdisciplinary honors course titled “Minds, Machines, and Meaning” incorporates the notion of the algorithmic imaginary, which explains how people make use of algorithms to create new information infrastructures and communities and how these algorithms shape us in turn. Describing a culminating writing assignment in speculative research, the author explains how this course facilitates interdisciplinary research while fostering student and faculty growth, and he reflects on the possibility of its future variation, the uncanny valley of algorithmic anti-humanism.

Mapping The Hero’S Journey Into Thinking: Assigning A Geo-Literacies Multimodal Assignment In A First-Year Honors Seminar, Amy Lee M. Locklear

Honors in Practice Online Archive

By incorporating visual mapping into students’ thinking and writing processes, a narrative assignment in geo-literacy creates a reflective and agency-based learning experience for student writers in a first-year honors seminar.

At Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM), I ask my first-year honors students to reflectively examine and practice habits of thinking and knowledge-building in a series of interrelated writing projects and readings. Each reading and writing task is designed to give students the opportunity to build their synthesis-level critical and creative thinking habits. The course theme of “Hero’s Journey” challenges students to consider the idea of the heroic, especially as it …

The Effect Of Instructional Coaching On Third-Grade Reading Achievement, Jane Ann Schmidt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Instructional coaching has been implemented in schools to improve student achievement; however, literature shows a lack of evidence of the efficacy of improving student reading achievement. The problem addressed in this study was that school districts have implemented instructional coaching to improve student reading achievement, but the effectiveness was unknown. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the effect of instructional coaching on third-grade reading achievement. Guided by Walberg’s theory of achievement, the overall research question investigated the effect of instructional coaching on third-grade reading achievement. In this quantitative, comparative study, ratio-scale data from students who received instructional …

Elementary Teachers’ Use Of Data-Driven Instructional Practices, Kristi Cathcart Tucker

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A school in South Carolina developed a strategic plan to implement a professional learning community structure in the school, where teachers work together to evaluate student data to improve instruction. However, teachers at the school did not understand how to use data-driven instructional practices to drive classroom instruction. The purpose of this study was to explore understanding of elementary teachers at this school in South Carolina how to use data-driven instructional practices. The framework for this study was the learning target theory of action, focusing on researching the data-driven instructional practices teachers used when working with data. The research questions …

A Model For Intentional College And Career Learning Inside And Outside The Classroom, Kathryn Burke, Kathleen Becht

All Institute for Community Inclusion Publications

In this Insight Brief, the authors present a five component model of student-directed learning for use by college programs to teach and track student specific college and career academic, social, and independence, skills without segregated courses. The five components include, 1) the foundational use of person-centered planning, 2) a set of college and career skills divided into four domains (academic and career habits, community engagement, balance of multiple roles, and self-direction), 3) a goal setting and monitoring process supported by 4) circles of support, and 5) intentionally planned college and career experiences. Three worksheets are a included and facilitate both …

Breaking Barriers: Creating Inclusive Dance Spaces For High School Students With Cerebral Palsy, Samantha Michelle Barnewolt

Dance (MFA) Theses

Abstract This thesis explores the power of positive mindsets as it relates to creative movement development in dance for students living with Cerebral Palsy (CP) who also use motorized wheelchairs. This research dives into the development of movement mantras used to break negative mindsets and create thinking strategies that encourage movement development for varied bodies. As a result of collaborative efforts between the researcher, a student living with CP, and students living without CP, this study reveals that through the removal of mental barriers which complicate the accessibility of intentional movement in dance, students with CP may overcome obstacles that …

A View From Somewhere: Situating The Public Problem In Creative Writing Workshops, Erika Luckert

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay is an effort to better situate the creative writing workshop in the diverse perspectives of its participants, by drawing on parallels between critiques of the writing workshop and critiques of the idealized public sphere. Habermas’s idealized public sphere has been critiqued for privileging dominant identities, much as creative writing workshops have been critiqued for privileging white writers like me. In this essay, I begin by listening to the critiques and testimony of BIPOC writers, which reveal that workshops are hegemonic spaces that reproduce and magnify racist, sexist, and classist systems. By reading these testimonies in conversation with critiques …