Educational Administration and Supervision Commons^™

Honors In Practice, Volume 13, 2017 (Complete Issue)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

2016 Presidential Address
What Do We Belong to If We Belong to NCHC?
Jerry Herron

Practical Ideas about Honors

Best Practices in Two-Year to Four-Year Honors Transfers
Philip L. Frana and Stacy Rice

Leveraging a Modest Success for Curriculum Development
Kathy A. Lyon

Innovative Ideas for Honors

Encouraging Self-Reflection by Business Honors Students: Reflective Writing, Films, and Self-Assessments
Stephen A. Yoder

Interdisciplinary Teaching of Theatre and Human Rights in Honors
Maria Szasz

Critical Experiential Education in the Honors Classroom: Animals, Society, and Education
Nadine Dolby

Got Privilege? An Honors Capstone Activity on …

A Quality Instrument For Effective Honors Program Review, Patricia Joanne Smith

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Although the number of honors programs and colleges has grown dramatically over the last twenty years to over a thousand programs nationally (Member List 2010, National Collegiate Honors Council), little has been done to develop consistency of standards in honors. In the interest of seeking consistency, I designed a research study to provide initial insights into assessable measures that a panel of honors administrators agree are meaningful for use in honors program reviews. The study analyzed the content validity of a set of empirically and conceptually derived survey items to facilitate the development of an instrument to assess and review …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Editorial

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Table of Contents

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 …

About The Authors

Honors in Practice Online Archive

About the Authors

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Designing A Collaborative Blog About Student Success, Melissa L. Johnson, Alexander S. Plattner, Lauren Hundley

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The term “web log,” or “blog,” was first coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger (Blood). Blogs have been used in education as online journals, discussion platforms, course websites, and alternatives to mainstream media publications (EDUCAUSE, 2005). Two of the more common blogging platforms, Wordpress and Blogger , are relatively simple to use, requiring no knowledge of HTML to post entries. One of the many advantages of using blogs is that they can foster interaction among peers, thereby building community (EDUCAUSE, 2005; Richardson). For further explanation of how blogs work, Common Craft has created an easy-to-follow video entitled Blogs in Plain …

A Penny’S Worth Of Reflections On Honors Education, John Zubizarreta

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Giving the presidential address is a daunting task. For several weeks already, I’ve been receiving emails and phone calls from some of you, asking how my speech was coming along. “Oh, fine, just fine,” I fibbed, as I juggled the innumerable responsibilities back home that I know all of us share in our demanding roles as teachers, learners, and leaders. In past years, the address was a formidable one-hour-or-more event over sit-down dinners or luncheons. But times change. As the conference has grown steadily, year after year, and hours—no, even just minutes—have become precious, the address has had to shrink …

Team Teaching On A Shoestring Budget, Jim Ford, Laura Gray

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Team teaching is an established pedagogical practice, particularly in honors education. Many institutions have long traditions of combining the gifts of multiple faculty in one honors course. For schools that lack such a tradition, however, securing the institutional resources to support team teaching can be a daunting obstacle. If team teaching is really a part of “The New Model Education,” as Gary Bell argues (57), can it be done on a shoestring budget? The Rogers State University Honors Program began in the fall of 2005 with an extremely tight budget and no money for compensating faculty. Despite this challenge, we …

Preparing A Master Plan For An Honors College, John R. Vile

Honors in Practice Online Archive

My experience as an honors dean, like my previous experience as a departmental chair, is that it is easier to spend time putting out fires than engaging in long-term planning. The myriad daily tasks tempt administrators to succumb to the “the tyranny of the now.” We almost always have classes to schedule and teach, books and articles to write and edit, students to advise, scholarship applications to proof, theses to read, special events to publicize, committee meetings to attend, building tours and speeches to give, students to recruit, conferences to attend, and numerous other worthy tasks that call for immediate …

Dedication: Vishnu Narain Bhatia (1924-2003)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Vishnu (Vic) Narain Bhatia was one of the founders of the National Collegiate Honors Council in the early 1960s, and his influence was prominent in the organization for the next three decades.

Born in Lucknow, India, and having received his BS in Pharmacy from Banaras Hindu University, he immigrated to the United States in 1947. After earning his MS and PhD in pharmacy at the University of Iowa, he was offered a faculty position in the College of Pharmacy at Washington State University in 1952, and he remained on the faculty there for forty-seven years. He became Associate Chair of …

Some Multidisciplinary Practices, Kathleen Black

Honors in Practice Online Archive

From the beginning of the Northwestern College Honors Program in 2002, we have operated with several underlying principles, three of which relate to our goal of being multidisciplinary. Based upon our recognition of multiple intelligences and our acknowledgment of scholarship in all academic disciplines, we have made it our goal that a single definition of either intelligence or giftedness should not suffice as a strategic design concept for the program or as a selection criterion for the students who participate in it.

In creating our program, the Faculty Honors Program Committee decided that our honors program would not include only …

Understanding And Defining Addiction In An Honors Context, Sarah W. Feldstein Ewing, Bevin Ehn

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Exploration and development of identity, autonomy, sexuality, academic functioning, and peer relationships are important age-appropriate tasks of adolescence and emerging adulthood (Baer & Peterson; Cicchetti & Rogosch; Erikson). During college, this developmental stage may manifest as questioning prior beliefs and assumptions and exploring fresh philosophies and behaviors (Schulenberg & Maggs). Many emerging adults try out what they believe are different facets of adult life. Some of the requisite experimentation may include risk-taking behavior, including experimentation with alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana (Baer & Peterson; Shedler & Block; Winters). College provides opportunities to experiment with potentially addictive substances at peer-run social events …

The Neptune Academy: Honors Students Give Back, Douglas Corbitt, Allison Wallace, Corey Womack, Patrick Russell

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In August of 2008, two faculty members of the University of Central Arkansas Honors College were charged by their dean, Rick Scott, with designing a summer academy for local teens deemed to be at academic risk. The central goal of the program would be to offer selected honors college upperclassmen—beneficiaries of full-ride scholarships, compelling interdisciplinary seminars, and close faculty mentoring—an opportunity to share with struggling youngsters their pre-professional training as well as their own gifts of character and personality. Our hope was that the experience might serve as a meaningful intervention in the lives of adolescent students.

What resulted from …