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Honors Living-Learning Communities: A Model Of Success And Collaboration, Eric Daffron, Christopher Holland

Honors in Practice Online Archive

All too often on college campuses, academic affairs and student affairs work in near isolation from each other. In their traditional roles, academic affairs promotes students’ learning in the classroom while student affairs cares for students’ personal development outside the classroom. Yet, if higher education aspires to graduate students who can meet the challenges of the modern world, then universities have an obligation to launch collaborative projects that bring together the disparate facets of students’ lives. Living-learning communities, a model for collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs, can meet that goal (Schroeder & Mabel, 1994).

Honors Ambassadors: A Framework For Enhancing Student And Program Development, Kristy Burton, Erin Wheeler Mckenzie, Patrick Damo

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Many honors programs struggle with how to attract the best and brightest students, primarily because the students we seek often have multiple lucrative offers from highly rated institutions. At Miami University, we found ourselves in the unfortunate position of losing top-tier students to competitor programs in the region and state and thus needing to take action. Our first step was to take a critical look at the scope and type of communication we were having with prospective students. What we found was that although we offer an excellent honors program with learning opportunities that are equivalent to or perhaps better …

Paths To Knowledge As A Foundational Course In An Honors Program, Mark Vitha, Arthur Sanders, Colin Cairns, David Skidmore, Clive Elliot, William Lewis

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In this article we describe an honors course titled “Paths to Knowledge,” which was created to provide students with an understanding of the ways different disciplines create and evaluate knowledge. This is the only specific course within our honors curriculum that is required of all honors students. After seeing it evolve over several years, multiple instructors, and a variety of approaches to the theme, we believe that Paths to Knowledge may be a good model for a foundational course within an honors program.

Editorial, Volume 5 - 2009, Ada Long, Dail Mullins

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Table of Contents:

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Earl and Maggie Brown

Editor’s Introduction by Ada Long

Stability in the Context of Change by Hallie E. Savage

Ending in Honors by Samuel Schuman

People Who Think Otherwise by Kevin Donovan

Implementing Honors Faculty Status: An Adventure in Academic Politics by Jesse Peters

Building an Honors Development Board by Scott Carnicom and Philip M. Mathis

Honors Ex Machina: Changing Perceptions of Honors through Horizontal Integration, A Case Study by Timothy L. Hulsey

Separate but Equal: Will it Work for Professional Honors Programs? by Beata M. Jones and Peggy W. Watson …

Bridging The Divides: Using A Collaborative Honors Research Experience To Link Academic Learning To Civic Issues, Alix Dowling Fink, M. Leigh Lunsford

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The National Science Education Standards assert the vital importance of the inquiry process: “Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the central strategy for teaching science” (National Research Council 1996). Yet students in U.S. high schools have highly variable laboratory experiences, and attempts at inquiry-oriented learning are often “cookbook” activities isolated from the larger flow of science and mathematics learning (Singer et al. 2006). In the higher education environment, it is similarly uncommon for students, particularly first-year students in science and statistics classes for non-majors, to have the opportunity to practice authentic research from formulation of a research …

Honoring Experiential Education, Debra Holman, Tony Smith, Evan Welch

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In the Center for Honors, Scholars and Leadership at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC), we are actively pursuing expansion of our experiential-education offerings and are working collaboratively with a variety of community partners and key campus offices to develop, track, and promote opportunities for students. Our efforts focus on providing honors and leadership students with a variety of experiential-education placements and giving students across the campus opportunities to engage more fully in service, internships, and research. Central to our efforts is a philosophy that all students can choose to exercise honor in their academic careers not solely through outstanding …

Stability In The Context Of Change, Hallie Savage

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Last year at this time, I began to think about what I might adopt as a presidential theme. What could NCHC reasonably accomplish in 2008? If you recall, at that time we hired Liz Beck as Interim Executive Director, and one month before the conference we hired Cindy Hill. Major changes were inevitable in our organization. I began my presidency with a goal to work with the Board of Directors to establish stability in the face of these organizational changes. The goal of stability was in response to the need for a national office that would provide the resources for …

Enhancing Environmental Literacy And Global Learning Among Honors Students, Liza Davis

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In 2005, the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation (NEETF) released a summary of a decade’s worth of research into environmental literacy among Americans, collected in collaboration with Roper Reports. The report included some disturbing statistics: 45 million Americans think the ocean is a fresh-water source, for example, and only 12% of those surveyed were able to pass a basic quiz on energy awareness. As the report’s author laments, “Our years of data from Roper surveys show a persistent pattern of environmental ignorance even among the most educated and influential members of society” (Coyle v). Like most Americans, honors students …

An Honors Director’S Credo, Angela Salas

Honors in Practice Online Archive

“Finis Origine Pendet” wrote Manlius: the end depends upon the beginning. True enough. But what if we looked at a desired end to work backward and see what steps we might take to get to that place? What do we want for our children, for our students, and for the graduates of our schools? What do hope to see when we look across our desks at job applicants? What do we watch for on television when candidates for office are explaining their reasons for wanting to serve and what they intend to accomplish if elected? What do we want for …

Combining Chemistry And College Writing: A New Model For An Honors Undergraduate Chemistry Course, Donna Chamely-Wilk, Jeffrey Galin, Krista Kasdorf, Jerome Haky

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Faculty in the Departments of Chemistry and English at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) have designed and implemented an innovative, writing intensive, advanced, second-semester chemistry course combined with a laboratory component that satisfies both second semester General Chemistry and College Writing criteria. This unusual configuration differs from typical honors chemistry courses because of its “writing to learn” approach to teaching indepth scientific content, the nature of research, and research methods. The opportunity to develop this course emerged from a collaborative relationship between our institution’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and our chemistry department.

Honors Ex Machina: Changing Perceptions Of Honors Through Horizontal Integration, A Case Study, Timothy Hulsey

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Honors programs and colleges face numerous pressures from raising money to managing growth to developing and maintaining curricula. None of these challenges, however, are unique to honors. What has, unfortunately, proven to be unique to honors has been the continuing question of relevance. Over the years, “making honors relevant” has been an ongoing part of the national honors discussion.

In the fall/winter 2007 volume of the JNCHC, Ira Cohen used a Robert Burns poem to remind us that others often do not see honors as we see ourselves: “The observation by Burns clearly applies to honors: the viewpoint of those …

People Who Think Otherwise, Kevin Donovan

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The theme of my address is simple: welcome to a community of people who think otherwise. First, recognize that you are a community. That may be hard to see at first sight: you come from a wide range of various backgrounds, from big cities and small country towns, from affluent and financially struggling families, from a variety of races and creeds. However, you have much in common with each other, beginning with the talent and record of achievement that got you here. Possessing intelligence and curiosity about the world, you are also likely at one time or another to feel …

Dealing With Subjective And Objective Issues In Honors Education, Michael Giazzoni, Nathan Hilberg

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Professionals working in higher education who are concerned with social justice need to consider questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Even though some assessments are objective and some subjective, neither kind of assessment is guaranteed to separate out the effects of socioeconomic benefits from student ability. Honors programs and colleges should therefore concern themselves with the problem of awarding membership based on test criteria because the benefits inherent to honors programs could end up being given more often to those families with extra means and therefore the ability to provide opportunities like private tutoring and test preparation classes. Such actions can …

On Class And Class, Joan Digby

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

We have a long history in America of pretending that there is no class structure. If you ask students to identify their family by class, they all say “middle-class.” I, however, teach on the “Gold Coast” of Long Island where the Fricks, Vanderbilts, and Morgans owned big properties and yachts. There is no question that they never thought of themselves as middle-class. Indeed, Joan Harrison, my colleague in the Photography Department, just produced a wonderful photo-history of a city near campus—Images of America: Glen Cove (Arcadia Publishing, 2008)—showing a distribution of population from the robber barons to waves of Italian …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2009

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

CONTENTS

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

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

Dedication to Mitch Pruitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

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

FORUM ON “SOCIAL CLASS AND HONORS” …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The Forum that opens this issue of JNCHC is devoted to the topic “Social Class and Honors” and appears in the midst of economic and social turmoil unlike any since honors education started gaining momentum in the 1960s. As a prelude to the Forum, the time seems right to exercise some editorial prerogative and address potential implications that the financial meltdown might have for honors programs and colleges.

Dedication: Mitch Pruitt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The managing editor of a journal or monograph typically remains invisible to all but the journal editors. Since readers and authors rarely get to appreciate the work they do, we are especially pleased to honor the outstanding work of Mitch Pruitt and to express our appreciation on behalf of the National Collegiate Honors Council.

Honors Is Elitist, And What’S Wrong With That?, Norm Weiner

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Like many other concepts in the sociological literature, social class is easier to discuss than to define. Nonetheless, define it we must in order to have some common ground for discussing it and for explaining it to our students. Aquick scan of basic textbooks, those defenders of sociology’s virtues, gives us a definition something like this: “A social class is a group of people [in sociology, it’s always safe to start this way] who share the same level of income and education and therefore share roughly the same norms, values, and lifestyle.” To be perfectly clear about this, sociologists aren’t …

Elitism Misunderstood: In Defense Of Equal Opportunity, Anne N. Rinn, Craig T. Cobane

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

At one time or another, we have all dealt with colleagues who expressed doubts about dedicating resources to honors students. They argue that gifted and high-achieving students do not need or deserve additional resources to pursue their educational goals; they will do just fine on their own. Critics of honors often comment that money spent on honors students, who will graduate anyway, should be invested in helping students with traditionally low retention rates; these latter students are the ones who need the resources. At some time in the discussion, such critics typically say that honors education is inherently “elitist” because …

Honors Needs Diversity More Than The Diverse Need Honors, William A. Ashton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Awareness of and sensitivity to social class, economic class, ethnicity and gender have been important goals of the academy and of honors for the past few decades. During this time the academy, which has always been the domain primarily of the middle and upper class, has reached out to help those whom they call “the disadvantaged.” Typically, academics see such attempts at outreach as acts of generosity or social consciousness, a kind of noblesse oblige. The truth is that attracting students from different social classes as well as ethnicities and nationalities brings at least as much benefit to the college …

Predicting Retention In Honors Programs, Kyle Mckay

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

A number of challenges exist in providing the honors experience. Programs must compete for resources, coordinate departments, design dynamic curricula, and work toward changing goals. Among the many challenges, one of the hardest begins before students even enter the program. Honors admissions must select the students who will likely succeed in the program. After admissions, programs must then ensure that the program design encourages academic achievement and persistence in honors. To accomplish the goals and overcome the challenges of honors, a better understanding of the predictors of success is necessary. Using a logit regression model, my study will add evidence …

Nchc Order Form

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

NATIONAL COLLEGIATE HONORS COUNCIL MONOGRAPHS & JOURNALS

Honors And Class, Bernice Braid

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Since the l980s a steady stream of scholarly works has examined stratification along class lines in American education. A recent work on this subject is Tearing Down the Gates, by Peter Sacks, which won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award in January 2009. It draws a detailed portrait of changes in demographics over the past thirty years or so. His time line allows him to pinpoint a growing polarization that shows a severely reduced college population of students from low-income families, displaced by an enormous increase in students from affluent families on our college campuses. As his subtitle indicates, …

List Of Journal Themes 2000-2009

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

 Liberal Learning In the New Century Vol. 1 No. 1 (2000) (the only issue not available digitally)

 Science in Honors Vol. 1 No. 2 (2000)

 Educational Transitions with Special Forum On Honors Education Vol. 2 No. 1 (2001)

 Honors and the Creative Arts Vol. 2 No. 2 (2001)

 Liberal Learning Vol. 3 No. 1 (2002)

 Technology in Honors Vol. 3 No. 2 (2002)

 Students and Teachers in Honors Vol. 4 No. 1 (2003)

 Multiperspectivism In Honors Education Vol. 4 No. 2 (2003)

 Research in Honors Vol. 5 No. 1 (2004)

 …

Does Broad-Based Merit Aid Affect Socioeconomic Diversity In Honors?, Lisa Defrank-Cole, Rose Cole, Keith Garbutt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The honors college at West Virginia University (WVU) has seen an influx of high-achieving West Virginia students since 2001, when the PROMISE Scholarship was implemented. The PROMISE Scholarship is a merit-based financial aid award for West Virginia residents. If a student qualifies by achieving a certain GPA and ACT/SAT score, he or she receives a scholarship that covers the full cost of tuition at any state college or university in West Virginia. West Virginia University has benefited greatly from the PROMISE Scholarship. About half of all PROMISE Scholars attend West Virginia University (Higher Education Policy Commission, 2007), and many are …

About The Authors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

William A. Ashton

Bernice Braid

Craig T. Cobane

Rose Cole

Lisa DeFrank-Cole

Linda Frost

Keith Garbutt

Michael Giazzoni

Annmarie Guzy

Nathan Hilberg

Kyle McKay

Charlotte Pressler

Anne N. Rinn

Robert Spurrier

Norm Weiner

Editorial Matter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Front Cover

EDITORIAL POLICY

DEADLINES

JOURNAL EDITORS

EDITORIAL BOARD

CONTENTS

CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Class, Honors, And Eastern Kentucky: Why We Still Need To Try To Change The World, Linda Frost

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Norm Wiener’s piece “Honors Is Elitist, and What’s Wrong with That?” couldn’t have come at more opportune moment for me. Having recently accepted the directorship of a well-respected program founded by the legendary Dr. Bonnie Gray and seated in one of the poorest regions of the nation—Appalachia where, as Philip Cohen sang in “No Christmas in Kentucky,” “the trees don’t twinkle when you’re hungry”—I’ve been thinking a lot about class and honors lately. Eastern Kentucky is a place marked by tobacco barns, mountaintop-removal coal mining, infamous mining strikes (Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s film about one of those, …

The Two-Year College Honors Program And The Forbidden Topics Of Class And Cultural Capital, Charlotte Pressler

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

From my position as honors director at a two-year college in rural Florida, in the citrus and cow-hunter country south of I-4 and north of Okeechobee, Norm Weiner’s positing of honors education as a way to give students a chance to climb the class ladder seems persuasive. Honors education can, and does, help our students fulfill their middle-class aspirations. Yet much still remains to unpack in this middle-class-ness, especially in its connection to education. This territory is uncomfortable to Americans, for whom, as Weiner writes, “a basic . . . value is equality” and for whom the notion of social …

A Blue-Collar Honors Story, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Honors is Elitist, and What’s Wrong with That?” Norm Weiner contemplates definitions and perceptions of elitism, looking specifically at the intersection of academic elitism and socioeconomic elitism in honors education and arguing that honors programs at state schools or smaller private schools are successful at assisting students who are intellectually gifted but economically disadvantaged to “step up the social ladder” toward middleclass careers and values. My own personal and educational experiences exemplify this sentiment, and I sometimes feel as if I could be the poster child for socioeconomic ascendance through honors education—except for the fact that, despite the improvement …