Educational Administration and Supervision Commons^™

Beyond Formulas: A Collaboration Between Liberal Arts Honors Underclassmen And Senior Math Majors, Alissa S. Crans, Robert J. Rovetti

Honors in Practice Online Archive

“Congratulations! Sony Pictures producers have hired you as a scientific consultant to assist them in producing a remake of the classic film Gone With The Seabreeze, which chronicles the founding of the Westchester campus of Loyola University in 1929. The original film features shots of various old buildings that can still be found across campus today. The producers wish to recreate these shots, but need to know where to position the camera, which they have tasked you with finding.”

Thus began the month-long, collaborative project at Loyola Marymount University between the honors underclassmen in HNRS 140, On Motion and Mechanics, …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Honors in Practice Online Archive

John Zubizarreta of Columbia College leads off this volume of Honors in Practice with a revised version of his presidential address at the 2010 annual NCHC conference in Kansas City, Missouri. His speech, entitled “A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education,” was, in a characteristic honors mode, interactive. He asked the audience to participate with him in enacting the “challenge, risk, creativity, collaboration, reflection, inquiry, [and] community” of honors education. Zubizarreta, both in his speech and in this essay, describes and illustrates honors education, the NCHC, and its conferences as embodying the “rough magic” of Shakespeare’s Prospero.

Kateryna A. …

Rethinking Asian Studies In The Interdisciplinary Honors Setting, Adam D. Frank

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In an interdisciplinary honors setting, especially at colleges and universities with minimal Asian studies offerings, teaching interdisciplinary Asian studies courses can present a particularly difficult challenge. The problem, as Charles Holcombe notes, is that “Asia is simply too enormous, spanning the better part of the entire Old World, and too diverse, to serve as a very meaningful label” (9). Unless students already have a background in Asian studies, have studied Asian languages and cultures, or are themselves from Asian countries, they often lack the basic, macro-level knowledge of geography, history, and politics necessary to address complex issues, particularly Orientalist stereotypes …

The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, And Student Engagement, Elizabeth Bleicher

Honors in Practice Online Archive

For the past four fall semesters, I have taught a first-year honors seminar to help talented incoming students establish purpose in college, take responsibility for their own education, and make the transition to college-level thinking and writing. My strategy in accomplishing these goals is asking students to analyze the systems through which youth in the United States are processed into college students. We spend fifteen weeks studying intersections of youth and student cultures, college honors populations, and U.S. secondary and higher education systems. The objective is to empower class members to become intentional learners who understand the purpose of liberal …

Honors In Practice, Volume 7 (Complete Issue)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy
Submission Guidelines
Dedication to Vishnu Narain Bhatia
Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education • John Zubizarreta

ON COLLABORATIVE COURSE PROJECTS
Into the Afterlife and Back with Honors Students • Kateryna A R Schray
The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, and Student Engagement • Elizabeth Bleicher
Designing a Collaborative Blog about Student Success • Melissa L Johnson, Alexander S Plattner, and Lauren Hundley

ON CURRICULUM
Why Honors Students Still Need First-Year Composition • Annmarie Guzy
Rethinking Asian …

About The Authors

Honors in Practice Online Archive

No abstract provided.

Peer Review Across Disciplines: Improving Student Performance In The Honors Humanities Classroom, Julie M. Barst, April Brooks, Leda Cempellin, Barb Kleinjan

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The term “peer review” often elicits a negative response from teachers and students alike. The process involves numerous challenges; anyone who has used the technique knows that students often feel awkward giving feedback to their peers and even more uncomfortable accepting the advice of peers in a classroom setting. They hesitate to voice negatives about performance, possibly because they doubt their own reaction to the material presented or fear that, in retaliation, they will be rated poorly as well. In addition, when teachers fail to establish and communicate clearly defined expectations, student authors do not produce high-quality drafts, and student …

An Honors Alumni Mentor Program At Butler University, Jaclyn Dowd, Lisa Markus, Julie Schrader, Anne M. Wilson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Butler University is a comprehensive master’s university of approximately 4,000 undergraduate students with five colleges: the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the College of Education; the College of Business; the Jordan College of Fine Arts; and the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. The Butler University Honors Program is an interdisciplinary program open to undergraduates from all five colleges. Incoming students admitted to Butler who meet certain benchmark requirements (1320/30 or higher SAT/ACT or top five percent of graduating class) are invited to apply to our honors program. If students perform well in their first year at the university, …

Table Of Contents

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Vishnu Narain Bhatia

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education • John Zubizarreta

ON COLLABORATIVE COURSE PROJECTS

Into the Afterlife and Back with Honors Students • Kateryna A R Schray

The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, and Student Engagement • Elizabeth Bleicher

Designing a Collaborative Blog about Student Success • Melissa L Johnson, Alexander S Plattner, and Lauren Hundley

ON CURRICULUM

Why Honors Students Still Need First-Year Composition • Annmarie Guzy

Rethinking Asian Studies in the …

Why Honors Students Still Need First-Year Composition, Annmarie Guzy

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Let me be among the first to welcome you to the honors program at Regional Public University. During your orientation today, you will be registering for your fall semester courses, and as you browse through the class listings, let me strongly recommend that you include first-year Honors Composition in your schedule even if you have taken AP English Literature and Composition or English Language and Composition courses and exams.

According to the College Board, the company that administers the Advanced Placement program, enrollment in AP has increased dramatically over the past decade. As you can see in Table 1 below, …

Nchc Order Form

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NCHC PUBLICATION ORDER FORM

NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL MONOGRAPHS & JOURNALS

Into The Afterlife And Back With Honors Students, Kateryna Schray

Honors in Practice Online Archive

One of the best and funniest student evaluations I have ever received read: “if this professor taught a course on Hell and how to get there I would take it.” This generous compliment sounded like a good course idea, and a year or so later, Dr. Caroline Perkins and I successfully proposed an honors seminar called “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Literature and Culture.” Like other programs described in previous issues of Honors in Practice, the Marshall University Honors Program is built on team-taught interdisciplinary seminars— in this case Classics and English—and emphasizes student leadership and collaborative learning.

Presumably …

Self As Text: Adaptations Of Honors Practice, Michaela Ruppert Smith

Honors in Practice Online Archive

City as Text™, the experiential learning program developed by the NCHC Honors Semesters Committee, has been adopted and adapted by hundreds if not thousands of educational institutions throughout the United States and beyond. Having served on the Honors Semesters Committee, I exported this learning strategy to Switzerland when I took a teaching position in the International Baccalaureate Program of the Collège du Léman in Geneva. I adapted City as Text™ for multi-disciplinary college preparatory students in Europe, and that adaptation might now serve in turn as a model for experiential learning in honors programs and colleges back in the United …

Is Originality An Appropriate Requirement For Undergraduate Publication?, Nathan Hilberg

Honors in Practice Online Archive

As the faculty advisor for the Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review (PUR), a professionally refereed undergraduate journal devoted to publishing scholarly papers across the disciplines, I found the following passages from Ellen Buckner noteworthy: “It is assumed that the honors work is an original piece of scholarship and prepared according to accepted standards for a written paper . . . ” (149); and “the project’s scholarly accomplishment . . . ” should be conveyed in a summary or abstract (150). I agree that demonstrating scholarly accomplishment is a worthy goal of publishing academic work; I would also emphasize that scholarly accomplishment is …

Table Of Contents

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Editorial Policy . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . 5

Dedication to Donzell Lee . . . . . . . . . . 7

Editor’s Introduction (Ada Long) . . . . . . . . . . 9

Research Matters

Conducting Research in Honors (Emily C. Walshe) . . . . . . . . . . 17

Is Originality an Appropriate Requirement for Undergraduate Publication? (Nathan Hilberg) . . . . . . . . . . 57

Individual Achievement in …

Ad Tracking, Brand Equity Research, And . . . Your Honors Program?, William A. Ashton, Barbara Ashton, Renny Eapen, Erzulie Mars

Honors in Practice Online Archive

All honors programs face the problem of making their institution’s student body aware of the program’s existence, its eligibility requirements, curriculum, and benefits. Directors who are already comfortable with the number of the program’s members and applicants do not need to think much about awareness, publicity, and advertising. For example, the college’s admissions department assists many honors programs in their recruitment. However, some directors must think hard and carefully about campus-wide awareness. These directors will naturally consider some type of advertising method. However, both before and after turning to advertising, directors need to address two important questions. Before embarking on …

French À La Carte: Maintaining A Language Program On A Shoestring, Sheilagh Margaret Riordan

Honors in Practice Online Archive

While the size of our honors college environment is almost always a positive, its smallness has decided disadvantages when it comes to the study of less popular foreign languages. Fewer students, fewer subject offerings, and the absence of multiple sections all have a negative impact on language programs. Shrinking budgets have not helped matters. Despite these disadvantages, the French program at Florida Atlantic University’s Harriet Wilkes Honors College has steadily grown from a total number of sixteen students in fall 2005 to forty students (more than 10% of the student population) in the fall semester of 2009. To achieve this …

The Value Of Extending The Honors Contract Beyond One Semester: A Case Study With Smithsonian Dinosaurs, Alyce Dilauro, Teron Meyers, Laura Guertin

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Most honors programs offer multiple options for scholars to complete their honors credits each semester. Students may, for instance, take honors courses on campus or abroad, participate in honors independent study, or take upper-division courses as freshmen or sophomores. In some cases, especially if a scholar has a scheduling conflict between courses required for the major and honors courses, he or she may select to develop an honors contract, allowing the student to take a non-honors course and work with the faculty instructor to develop an honors experience in the course.

At our institution, honors students must complete a minimum …

About The Authors

Honors in Practice Online Archive

No abstract provided.

Student-Guided Thesis Support Groups, Jennifer Beard, Ryan D. Shelton, Amanda Stevens, George H. Swindell Iv, Raymond J. Green

Honors in Practice Online Archive

According to the Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors College, an honors thesis should be required of honors college students. The benefits of completing an honors thesis are numerous and include the opportunity to work one on one with a faculty mentor, to move one’s discipline forward, and to add an entry to one’s résumé. For the vast majority of students, the thesis will be the first occasion they have to work on an academic project that requires a large amount of independent thought and motivation. One role of faculty mentors is to help students through the process, but …

To Discuss Or Not To Discuss: Integrating Pedagogies For Honors And Mathematics, William Griffiths, Nancy Reichert, L. R. Ritter

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Classroom discussion has long been an important pedagogical tool in fields such as the social sciences and the humanities because it allows students to critically examine ideas about what it means to be a human living within communities of other humans. It allows students to formulate ideas and judgments and to reconsider these formulations as time passes and new information is revealed. Within the field of mathematics, however, professors typically rely on lectures to ensure coverage. While students are asked to think critically, they are likely asked to do so within the context of homework problems. The primary question we …

From The White House To Our House: The Story Of An Honors College Vegetable Garden, Michael Lund, Geoffrey Orth

Honors in Practice Online Archive

When Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine announced in December 2008 his “Renew Virginia” initiative for the Commonwealth, state agencies responded with their own programs “promoting renewable energy, creating green jobs, and encouraging preservation of the environment.” At Longwood University in Farmville, a state-assisted co-educational comprehensive institution, the Cormier Honors College for Citizen Scholars proposed a rooftop vegetable garden on its newly renovated honors residence hall to address these issues. The university’s signature “Citizen Leader” program would be enhanced by a working garden that demonstrates to those on campus and in the larger community the advantages of organic farming, composting, rain …

Studies In Cyberspace: Honors, Professional Teacher Development, Curricular Development, And Systemic Change In Louisiana, Brian C. Etheridge, Galen Turner, Heath Tims, Christian A. Duncan

Honors in Practice Online Archive

For years, honors programs and colleges have experienced well-documented difficulties in justifying and defending their budgets (and in some cases their existence). These challenges—some of which are discussed in the 2006 JNCHC “Forum on Honors Administration” and the 2009 JNCHC “Forum on Social Class and Honors”—have ranged from the philosophical (“honors programs are elitist”) to the pragmatic (“we have to take care of our own students first, so we can’t spare any faculty for an honors class”). Honors administrators have therefore developed an extensive and effective litany of benefits that emphasize how honors programs enhance the student experience, the health …

Honors In Practice, Volume 6 (Complete Issue)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

CONTENTS

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Donzell Lee

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

RESEARCH MATTERS

Conducting Research in Honors • Emily C Walshe

Is Originality an Appropriate Requirement for Undergraduate Publication? • Nathan Hilberg

Individual Achievement in an Honors Research Community: Teaching Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development • Kaitlin A Briggs

Student-Guided Thesis Support Groups • Jennifer Beard, Ryan D Shelton, Amanda Stevens, George H Swindell IV, and Raymond J Green

CURRICULUM MATTERS

More than a COIN Flip: Improving Honors Education with Real Time Simulations Based on Contemporary Events • Kurt Hackemer

To Discuss or …

Conducting Research In Honors, Emily C. Walshe

Honors in Practice Online Archive

There’s an old library story about oranges and peaches that goes like this: a guy bellies up to the reference desk looking for the book, The Oranges and Peaches. He’s in a hurry. The librarian searches the catalog—fruitlessly—for the title. The man is incredulous. “I have to read it by Monday! It’s a classic!” The librarian asks if he knows the author. He’s indignant. “Charles-something-orother!” With that, she goes to the shelves and plucks off Darwin’s On the Origins of Species. “Yep, that’s it,” he says, “now, do you have the movie?”

It is the happy job …

Service Learning And Skunkworks In A Senior Honors Colloquium, Michael Cundall

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In this essay I will describe a course and a service learning project related to a course that I had the good fortune to teach when I was new at a university and in an honors college. My point in describing how this course developed, including its structure and year-long project, is to demonstrate that pedagogical environments relatively free from constraints give rise to innovations and worthwhile educational experiences.

In the summer of 2008, I took up a new post as Assistant Director of the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University. The Louisiana Scholars’ College is a “fully-developed” college …

More Than A Coin Flip: Improving Honors Education With Real Time Simulations Based On Contemporary Events, Kurt Hackemer

Honors in Practice Online Archive

On October 7, 2001, in response to ongoing support for Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terror network responsible for the September 11 attacks in New York City, the United States and Great Britain attacked Taliban targets in Afghanistan with cruise missiles and airstrikes. Shortly thereafter, American ground forces were committed and played an important role in the ouster of the Taliban and the creation of a new Afghan government. America’s preoccupation with Iraq beginning in the spring of 2003 arguably allowed the Taliban enough time and space to rebuild and rearm, and by the summer of 2008 the Afghan …

Beyond The Great Books: Increasing The Flexibility, Scope, And Appeal Of An Honors Curriculum, Matthew C. Altman

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Two traditional models for honors programs are a chronological Great Books structure and a theme-based approach. Recently, the comparative virtues of these two models have been the subject of practical and theoretical analyses at Central Washington University (CWU), which is in the process of implementing a new honors curriculum to replace its longstanding Great Books program. The new curriculum consists of variable topics courses that satisfy general education requirements and contribute to an honors minor, as well as an upperdivision scholarship experience in which students complete advanced research with faculty mentors.

As our experience demonstrates, a Great Books-based curriculum has …

Students Engaging Students In The Honors Experience, Sara Brady, Hesham Elnagar, Shane Miller

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Student members of the NCHC Board of Directors often share information about successful student programs at their home institutions in order to promote student engagement in honors. We have found that a key component for student engagement is some type of “Honors Ambassadors” program to benefit not only honors students but also their programs and colleges. When the authors discussed honors ambassadors programs during the Students in Honors™ session at the 2008 and 2009 NCHC national conferences, numerous students expressed interest in learning more about such programs (NCHC Student Board). During these two conferences, students from Hillsborough Community College had …

Individual Achievement In An Honors Research Community: Teaching Vygotsky’S Zone Of Proximal Development, Kaitlin A. Briggs

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The years leading up to the 1917 Russian October Revolution must have been a dynamic environment for an emerging young intellectual living in Moscow. Eclipsed by such popular Western cultural representations as David Lean’s 1965 Academy Award winning film, Dr. Zhivago (based on Pasternak’s novel), this milieu included the writers Babel, Gorky, and Nabokov; the poets Mandel’shtam and Tsvetaeva; the composers Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky; the theater director and acting teacher Stanislavsky; and the artists Chagall and Kandinsky (Van Der Veer, 23–4). There we find situated a law student, also studying philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, who went on to become …