Liberal Studies Commons^™

Fostering Relationships With Faculty, Peers, And Parents To Support Undergraduate Honors Students’ Mental Health, Allison Buskirk-Cohen, Alicia N. Shenko

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors students are typically high-achieving, academically motivated individuals. Confronting the stressors of emerging adulthood makes them particularly vulnerable to heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and stress surrounding their performance and support networks. This essay blends developmental theories and research with personal reflection to underscore the importance of nurturing relationships among students and faculty, peers, and parents for promoting student well-being. Authors advocate honors programs and practitioners facilitate positive social interaction, appropriate parental involvement, and personal development. Strategies, such as smaller class size, non-traditional assessment, extracurricular engagement, and familial support, can help create caring communities within honors. Authors suggest that prioritizing …

Honors Is More Than A Grade: Removing The Experiential Ceiling In Honors, Justin L. Rheubert, Marisa Prisco, Paige A. Grum, Abby L. Kalkstein

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The stress created by academic pressure may prevent honors students from exploring curricula beyond that required by their majors. Challenged with additional workload and extracurricular requirements, students in honors often confront added stress caused by a desire to perform favorably in all academic pursuits. This pressure may result in hesitancy to explore new ideas, nurture curiosity, or break free from the rigors of a defined program of study—the opposite of what honors pedagogy and practice purport. This essay presents the process of converting a weighted grading system to pass/fail in an effort to provide students with opportunities for academic exploration …

You Are Not Alone: An Innovative, Collaborative Approach To Student Wellness And Mental Health In Honors, Sheryl Ford, Joshua Stockley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay presents an innovative, proactive solution to the growing mental health needs of honors students. Authors discuss the ways in which one program at a large public university revised curriculum, created programming, and formed strategic partnership with the university’s Marriage and Family Therapy Program to understand and address student mental health in honors. Acknowledging a growing national trend of depression, anxiety, and suicide among college students, authors posit that dynamic outreach and dialogue with students about their struggles with assignments, activities, and academic expectations can create effective strategies for nurturing student development and well-being.

Charting A Course For Belonging: Creating An Honors Mindfulness Learning Community, Kristy Spear, Gayathry Prabhakaran

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In today’s post-pandemic world, a sense of belonging within and in the larger relational world is something that many people struggle with, particularly those individuals leaving home to enter college. Socially engaged mindfulness can connect individuals with their breath, thoughts, emotions, and one another to promote and support well-being. This essay presents a programmatic overview of a Mindfulness Learning Community (MLC) in honors. Created for incoming first-year students (N = 31) to aid in their transition to college life, the multi-semester academic, social, and experiential-based learning community aims to teach honors students the psychological and physiological value of mindful practice, …

Mental Health Among Honors College Students: Evidence From College Entry Essays, Mohini Gobin, Jaclyn Kopel, Eric Osborne-Christenson, Anna Shostya

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This study explores the effect of preexisting mental health issues on college students’ academic performance. Using unique data from the honors college at a medium-sized urban private university, authors examine college entry essays (N = 1,062) in five classes (two pre-pandemic and three post-pandemic), as well as advisors’ (N = 7) notes. Mental health (MH) concerns are grouped into six non-mutually exclusive categories: depression/anxiety, neurodiversity/learning disabilities, identity-related concerns, grief/loss, trauma, and the mental health of others whose lives impact the student. The study finds that the number of honors students citing mental health in their entrance essays more …

The Well-Being Of Honors College Students Compared To Non-Honors College Students Accounting For Prior Gifted Experience, Hannah C. Dewald, Allyson S. Graf

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Student wellness is a growing concern among educators. Previous studies on the well-being of honors students as compared to other undergraduates result in mixed findings. This study examines the trajectory of gifted programming in education and specific challenges to the collegiate experience, presenting differences between honors students (N = 49) and non-honors peers (N = 138) using two well-being indicators (academic anxiety and academic self-efficacy) and three related factors (perceived past school competitiveness, maladaptive perfectionism, and pressure due to labeling). While authors posit that honors students may have higher academic anxiety and lower self-efficacy than those not enrolled …

Face-To-Face: A Sociologist Looks At College Students' Mental Health, Maureen Kelleher

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

While both individual honors programs and their broader campus communities have implemented new initiatives and intervention strategies to address undergraduate mental health, significant needs remain unmet and concerns unaddressed about the long-term implications for students. This paper provides a framework for understanding the current (2023) environment on many campuses by presenting national legislation that shapes campus response, offering cases of specific institutional responses to crisis, and exploring the impact of face-to-face interaction between faculty and students in classrooms. Awareness of these three levels of response—national, campus, and classroom—equips and empowers the honors community to understand and effectively deal with myriad …

Volume Cxliv, Number 1, September 27, 2024, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

The Grizzly, September 26, 2024, Kate Horan, Caitlin Cunnane, Sidney Belleroche, Ella Schneider, Henry Probolus, Estella Bower, Adam Denn, Grace Lynch

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

New Member Education Begins • October is Lantern Submission Month • Yik Yak Culture • Madeline Hepburn is Missing: A Short Story by Ze'ev Shaheen • Love of the Craft • Opinions: PSA: Flush the Toilet! • Women's Soccer Soars to Great Start! • Men's Soccer Kicks Off With Success! • Performance of the Week

The Grizzly, September 19, 2024, Kate Horan, Sophia Kumar, Ashley Adam, Katie Cressman, Xazlee Carroll-Smith, Adam Denn, Hadley Whitman

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Into the Breeches! • New AAPI House • Editor List • Confidence: Ursinus Graduate Katie Cressman's Journey and Advice • Opinions: Ritter Hall Needs Work • Ursinus Football Roars to a Strong Start! • Field Hockey Stuns #10 Rowan!

College Of Liberal Arts Faculty Bylaws - Amended 9/17/2024, College Of Liberal Arts Faculty, Rollins College

College of Liberal Arts Bylaws

No abstract provided.

Decreasing The Reading Gap In Upper Elementary, Carly L. Johnson

Masters Projects

Students are entering 4th grade well below grade level in reading, and the reading achievement gap continues to grow every year. When students are below grade level it can lead to other subject areas being more difficult on the student. The main factors of students struggling to read are low motivation to read and the lack of phonemic awareness. This project provides research explaining why students are below grade level and the best ways to address these problems. Teachers have the ability to aid students in reaching grade level when it comes to reading. Next, the project addresses strategies and …

Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism And The (Post)Human, Stephen C. Tumino

Publications and Research

Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour …

The Perspective Of An Alumnus, Rifah Tasnim

Early College Folio

No abstract provided.

Editor’S Note, Amanda Landi

Early College Folio

No abstract provided.

Contributors

Early College Folio

Contributors, Early College Folio, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2024).

Critical Media Literacy: Taking Steps To Understand And Implement (In First-Year Composition Courses), Kevin Shank, Lara Searcy

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article considers ways to advance critical media literacy (CML) in English language arts spaces, particularly first-year composition. Due to the growing need for critical media literacy, authors outline two steps — first, taking steps toward understanding CML and second, sharing resources to help educators integrate more critical media literacy into the field of English language arts. The authors created and share a Media Text Complexity Rationale (https://bit.ly/MediaTextComplexityRationale) that can guide educators in text selection, along with three other related resources to help teachers understand and implement CML during instructional design.

The Embedded Scaffolded Writing Mini-Course (Teswmc): An Approach To Improve Teacher Candidates’ Writing Skills And Attitudes, Vicky Giouroukakis Ph.D., Laurie Bocca

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

High-quality academic writing is critical to student success in graduate-level education courses and professional advancement in our field. The Embedded Scaffolded Writing Mini-Course (TESWMC) was designed to both improve teacher candidates’ skills in writing critically and effectively and to positively influence teacher candidates’ attitudes towards writing. The 7-week mini-course was taught by the teacher educator/researcher as a “push-in” into a semester-long graduate Education course. The mini-course also served as a pilot study to determine its efficacy. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. Data revealed that teacher candidates reported that their writing skills and attitudes towards writing improved. …

Full Issue 2024 (Volume 2), Taylor University

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

This open-access journal endeavors to showcase the excellent academic inquiry of Taylor University students. The content within this issue represents multiple academic disciplines within the humanities, natural and applied sciences, and social sciences, and demonstrates the “Light and Faith” mentality that is so central Taylor University’s educational philosophy. We are grateful to all who submitted articles, our faculty reviewers, and the editorial board.

For the first time, Lux et Fides contains both Research Briefs and articles. Research Briefs are abstract-length summaries of grant-funded faculty-mentored student research projects conducted during the summer of 2023 and allow students to articulate to our …

Kantian Reason & Epistemic Humility, Elias Seeman

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

Immanuel Kant continues to be one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. His thought shapes much of contemporary culture and has dramatically influenced Christian philosophy and theology. While some of this influence is beneficial, there are components of Kantian thought – especially as it pertains to the capabilities of human reason to arrive at true knowledge of God – that are decidedly problematic. In this paper, two different readings on Kant’s work on this subject are presented, followed by a brief overview of key insights and shortcomings. The final section charts a positive way forward for …