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On Honors Students Dreaming The Gothic, Mark Boren

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Filling an honors basic studies class in Gothic literature and culture was not a difficult challenge. By design, this course attracted students ranging from freshmen to seniors and from a wide variety of majors that included English, psychology, business, education, and chemistry. The trick was creating an even intellectual playing field, establishing and sustaining a high level of discussion in which everyone participated daily, and making the course intellectually rigorous for each student in the class. At the same time, I wanted to give to these students from different disciplines a flexible analytical method they could master for understanding the …

Honors Analytics: Science, An Interdisciplinary Lab-Based Course On Visual Perception, Stephen R. Campbell, Robert T. Grammer, Lonnie Yandell, William H. Hooper

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Interdisciplinarity has consistently been a hallmark of honors courses, particularly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Such an approach has been less universal in honors courses in the natural sciences, particularly in laboratory- based courses (Ramaley). We believe that a mark of success of any such course is the degree to which it moves from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary. Moreover, if the course fulfills a general education requirement in science, it needs to include exposure to the scope of scientific investigation, the techniques of science, and the nature of the scientific process. At Belmont University, we created and for ten …

The Genesis Of An Honors Faculty: Collective Reflections On A Process Of Change, Robert W. Glover, Charlie Slavin, Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Jordan P. Labouff, Justin D. Martin, Mimi Killinger, Mark Haggerty

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson introduced the concept of “preceptors” at Princeton University (Office of the Dean of the College). At the University of Maine a century later, we have adapted Wilson’s concept by hiring faculty members who lead small-group discussions in our interdisciplinary, two-year, four-course core Civilizations sequence, which is a requirement for all first- and second-year honors students. Like Wilson, we hope to “import into the great university the methods and personal contact between teacher and pupil which are characteristic of the small college, and so gain the advantages of both” (Leitch). During the 2010–2011 academic …

Designing A First-Year Honors Seminar With A Whole New Mind, Ellen J. Goldberger

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The book that swam into my ken was Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It was fall of 2008, and I had been appointed director of the newly created Mount Ida College Honor Scholars Program (HSP). The mission of the HSP is to promote creative thinking, interdisciplinary study, and close mentoring relationships with faculty. Program requirements include a first-year honors seminar (for academic credit) and three honors “contracts” (independent studies completed in addition to degree requirements, for honors credit but not academic credit) supervised by faculty mentors. Honor Scholars are required to present …

The Institutional Impact Of Honors Though A Campus-Community Common Read, Timothy J. Nichols

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The common reading program at South Dakota State University, coordinated and spear-headed by the SDSU Honors College, has in just three years of existence had powerful, positive, institution-wide impacts, including significant learning outcomes for both honors and non-honors students. The role that honors can play in the design and execution of a common reading program is one strategy for making an honors college or program an important contributor not only to its own students but to the mission of the institution. The specifics of SDSU’s program—its background, goals, approaches to meet those goals, and assessment results—might thus serve as a …

Death—Planning For The Inevitable: A Hybrid Honors Course, Jennifer Gresham, Betty Carlson Bowles, Marty Gibson, Kim Robinson, Mark Farris, Juliana Felts

Honors in Practice Online Archive

One of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Basic Characteristics of an Honors Program is that “the program serves as a laboratory within which faculty feel welcome to experiment with new subjects, approaches, and pedagogies. When proven successful, such efforts in curriculum and pedagogical development can serve as prototypes for initiatives that can become institutionalized across the campus.” Four faculty members from the departments of nursing and respiratory therapy at Midwestern State University, a public liberal arts university in Wichita Falls, designed and taught a hybrid honors course called Death—Planning for the Inevitable. This course, which combined traditional in-class and online …

The Place Of Drawing In Place Journaling, Allison B. Wallace

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Trained in American environmental literature, I typically teach one to three interdisciplinary courses a year built in some way around this subject, with special attention to the rich American traditions of literary nature writing and environmental activism. Most often I teach Nature’s Nation, focusing primarily on literature, and Eco-Freaks, centered on activism (the title is offered tonguein- cheek to suggest how activists tend to be seen by the mainstream). Beyond teaching about the key figures, movements, and milestones in the American experience of nature, I hope to inspire in students a desire to know more about our local biome, located …

An Outcome-Based Honors Program: The Honors Option Points (Hops) System, Bradley E. Wilson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

University honors colleges and programs come in many shapes and sizes, but one commonality exists: orientation around the completion of a group or series of courses. In some cases, the required courses are honors versions of regularly offered courses, and each semester honors students are able to choose from among those offered. In other cases, the core honors courses are designed to form a sequence, beginning in the first semester and often progressing to a senior thesis or capstone project.

Regardless of the structure, many honors programs face the challenge of designing a program that students can successfully complete in …

About The Authors

Honors in Practice Online Archive

About the Authors

Women Shaping Their World: An Honors Colloquium, Julie M. Barst, Julie D. Lane, Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Because gender maintains a significant influence on our education, careers, decision-making, families, and everyday lives, honors programs that wish to explore issues of social justice and equality should include coursework that illuminates historical and contemporary issues from a gendered perspective. In spring 2011, the South Dakota State University Honors Program offered an innovative three-credit honors colloquium entitled “Women Shaping Their World.” This multidisciplinary course focused on examining the ways that women’s lives are structured in cultural, social, religious, economic, historical, political, and scientific contexts; it also explored the potential of women to transcend these barriers and shape their own lives. …

Turning Challenges Into Gold: Cross-Listing Introductory Honors With Advanced Classes In The Visual Arts, Leda Cempellin

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Jim Lacey has offered an insight on the benefits of challenging courses for honors students: he prefers to think of an honors course not as a highly specialized, intensive-writing, and discipline-specific academic course but as the ideal general education course: “The courses themselves, I believe, should be challenging, different, and fun for instructors and students alike. When possible, they should be team taught and interdisciplinary; they should involve off-campus activities; and, instead of papers and exams, they should feature projects, preferably in teams” (79). During the early planning stages of the new course called Museum Experience at South Dakota State …

Honors Pre-Thesis Workshop, 2.0, Aaron T. Coey, Carolyn Haynes

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Almost every week throughout the year, the University Honors Program of Miami University holds recruitment programs for prospective honors students. High school juniors and seniors, often with assorted parents and family members in tow, file into an auditorium to learn about the key features, requirements, and benefits of our honors program. Smiles, nods, and eager questions greet comments relating to honors housing, honors seminars, advance course registration, and scholarships. Inevitably, when the mention of a required honors thesis arises, concerned looks, stony silence, and side glances emerge.

The hallmark of most honors programs across the nation is the undergraduate honors …

Affirming Quality Teaching: A Valuable Role For Honors, Kevin W. Dean, Michael B. Jendzurski

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Frequently university students as well as faculty and administrators need to be reminded of Catherine the Great’s advice: we are wise to affirm the good in others. “Knowing how powerful [celebration] is, it is shocking how overlooked it is in most areas of life, especially education” (Clifton 177). Blanchard adds that, while individuals far prefer receiving “one-minute praises over one-minute reprimands,” evaluation practices more frequently find individuals seeking to catch others doing something wrong rather than catching others doing something right (76–85). Although the culture of honors education traditionally promotes and recognizes excellence in student performance through multiple rituals such …

Dedication

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Gary Bell has been a stalwart supporter of honors locally, regionally, and nationally for almost twenty-five years. His commitment to honors started even earlier when he was an undergraduate honors student at Brigham Young University, where he got both his BA and MA. He then earned his PhD from UCLA, and, after teaching at Illinois State and Western Illinois University, he joined the faculty of Sam Houston University, where in 1988 he became the founding honors director until 1993. He then moved to Texas Tech University and became Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program, along with other …

Honoring The National Parks: A Local Adaptation Of A Partners In The Parks Adventure, Joan Digby, Kathleen Nolan

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The National Collegiate Honors Council has long recognized that collaboration among institutions is important to honors education. Since its inception over five decades ago, NCHC has promoted the mutual exchange of ideas about honors in order to disseminate the best of these ideas as potential prototypes (Andrews). In addition to its annual NCHC conferences, which offer a large forum for sharing ideas, NCHC has fostered and supported a variety of collaborative programs such as Honors Semesters and Faculty Institutes, the most recent of which is the Partners in the Parks Program (PITP), which—like its predecessor programs—is designed not only to …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Honors in Practice Online Archive

We begin this volume of Honors in Practice with Bonnie D. Irwin’s presidential address at the 2011 National Collegiate Honors Council conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Irwin develops a comparison between Scheherazade in 1001 Nights and the NCHC: like that fictional storyteller, the NCHC needs to assure the survival of honors by carefully shaping its narratives. The countervailing story of higher education is burdened with negative and dangerous reviews in today’s culture. By shaping a powerful and positive story of our own, Irwin argues, NCHC can not only energize honors programs and colleges but revitalize and enliven education generally.

The essays …

We Are The Stories We Tell, Bonnie D. Irwin

Honors in Practice Online Archive

As I approach my last hour of the presidency of NCHC, my voice will fade; it will become less prominent in the discourse of honors and our organization, and a new day will bring new stories into our midst. Yet my stories of our organization and our meeting in Phoenix will endure as I return to my campus, tired but enlightened, inspired to apply what I have learned and experienced over these four days. You each will do the same, returning home and telling your stories; by doing so, you will tell the story of NCHC.

I study storytelling and …

Doing The Honors: How To Implement A Departmental Honors Program In A Business School, Julie Urda

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Most research about honors has focused on general education honors. Less research is available on honors in management-related fields, two examples being Leong and Wagner’s work on honors accounting and Siegfried’s on economics. A guide to implementing a departmental honors program at minimal cost might thus be useful as honors programs continue to grow in number and in context. The revival of a departmental honors program in management and marketing at Rhode Island College (see Appendix A for background) provides the model for a nine-step process that can apply to other business school departments in institutions with existing general honors …

Editorial

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Table of Contents

Developing An Electronic Repository For Undergraduate Theses, Foster Levy, Rebecca Pyles, Celia Szarejko, Linda Wyatt

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Undergraduate honors theses represent an intellectual asset that a university should recognize and manage as such. However, when theses were submitted exclusively in print copies, the work often faded into obscurity, forgotten by all but the student and mentor. While theses for advanced degrees have been accessible for many years via interlibrary loan or abstract services, similar access options have been unavailable for undergraduate theses because these works are most often associated with and maintained by the institutional honors program without involvement or support from the institution’s library system. At best, an index of undergraduate theses might be available to …