Liberal Studies Commons^™

A View Of Health As A Human Right: A Snapshot From An Honors Program, Peter Longo, Satoshi Machida, John Falconer

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This study examines implications of a rights-based perspective among honors students through the lens of healthcare. Students (n = 71) surveyed in April 2019 were asked to consider issues relating to health entitlement and government responsibility. Perspectives on local, regional, national, and global access to health care; state and national government fiscal responsibility; and rights-based approaches to health entitlement were elicited. Data indicate a propensity for understanding health as a human right among honors students. Probit regressions show a more inclusive stance on healthcare policy and a general preference toward a universal healthcare system. Acknowledging that innovative curricula can help …

“To Seek A Newer World”: Honors In Virtual Reality, Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Honors education was never intended to be a virtual offering; it takes intimate, three-dimensional, communal, and intellectual interaction among faculty and students to tackle wicked problems. The COVID-19 crisis forced honors educators into an extreme reboot, extracting courses from comfortable working spaces and relocating them to strange new platforms for remote, computer-mediated instruction. For many faculty, the 2020 pandemic introduced online instruction for the first time. Toward this end, many novices were able to brilliantly reimagine and re-engineer their courses while others struggled. In this essay, the author points out that higher education has always adapted new technologies, asserting that …

First-Generation College Student Network, Ashleen Williams, Ainsley Ash

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors describe the college’s First-Gen Student Network, a cohort of faculty, students, and practitioners committed to equity, access, and success of firstgeneration learners. Optional biweekly meetings address a range of topics, including financial aid and opportunities for employment.

The Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi often prides itself on being the edge of the knife in conversations about equity and access, yet such conversations only work in honors when we commit tangible actions and resources to generate positive outcomes. Over the last couple of years, we have recognized a group that was consistently forgotten in our …

Virtual Honors Forum, Bruce Thompson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This article describes how one honors leadership team adapted a traditional in-person Forum to a digital platform during the coronavirus crisis. Integrating a variety of asynchronous and synchronous remote technologies created a positive virtual learning experience for honors practitioners and students.

One of the hallmark experiences of honors learning at Frederick Community College (FCC) in Frederick, MD, is participating in the Honors Forum each semester. The Forum is a mini-conference on campus in which students are required to participate whether enrolled in an honors class or attempting to complete an honors contract. There is a registration desk where presenters, faculty …

Modeling Vulnerabilities In The Research Process, Rebecca Summer

Honors in Practice Online Archive

When honors faculty share experiences from their own research, students learn that making mistakes and trying again is an important part of the learning process.

For all our emphasis on independent student inquiry in honors curricula, students get limited examples of the inevitable bumps in the road of advanced research. In our courses, we typically assign published works, which means that the research students read about is complete, polished, and deemed successful by the broader scholarly community. What students do not encounter in these models of successful research are the many uncertainties, missteps, and revisions along the way. Students are …

Putting Community Voice And Knowledge At The Center, Lynn Sondag

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Service-learning curriculum is grounded in a critical, asset-based framework of community engagement to guide honors students beyond a mere acquisition of skills toward understanding how participatory and democratic processes increase social equity and justice. An innovative, collaborative community arts program is described.

Mental Health Matters: College Student Mental Health In The Twenty-First Century, Gary H. Bischof, Alexander J. Hamilton, Adrian J. Hernandez

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Authors present the content, delivery, and benefits of a one-semester honors college lecture series on college student mental health.

The Campus Improvement Project: A High-Impact Practice To Stimulate Honors Community And Empower Student Leadership On Campus, Steve Garrison, Cody Parish

Honors in Practice Online Archive

First-year students are challenged to complete a Campus Improvement Project to first identify a problem on campus and then propose a solution. Students develop basic research skills and a sense of belonging to their university and honors community while simultaneously maturing as leaders.

What Works In Honors: Discovering “London As A Detective Story”, Kelsey L. Bennett, Nicole Becwar

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An honors program director and university archivist/librarian team up to offer a two-week study abroad course that blends itinerant offerings of City as Text™ with fixed support for first-time student encounters with archival collections at the British Library and the National Archives.

Intellectual Risk, Ashleen Williams

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Intellectual risk works, but it requires creating the space to fail in honors.

Using The Online Forum For Honors Learning, John Zubizarreta

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An online forum in which students share not only what content they have learned but more importantly how, when, and why they have learned provides a safe, open, generative space for learning beyond the limitations of the classroom. Suggestions for its effective use and integration are provided.

Best Practices In Honors Pedagogy: Teaching Innovation And Community Engagement Through Design Thinking, Beth H. Chaney, Tim W. Christensen, Alleah Crawford, Katherine Ford, W. Wayne Godwin, Gerald Weckesser, Todd Fraley, Phoenix Little

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Honors colleges aim to provide unique first-year experiences that promote life skills and emphasize process over product in an interdisciplinary setting that builds community. A two-semester, five-semester-hour course sequence with colloquia tackles these challenges by introducing an entrepreneurial mindset that pushes students toward innovative understanding and building of community. The first iteration includes an introduction to design thinking; identification of wicked problems; collection of data using immersion experiences, interviews, and literature review; and experiments (n = 35) in project-based entrepreneurial methodologies using Lean LaunchPad. The second iteration involves assessment, applied qualitative analysis, out-of-class learning, and peer mentoring. Results provide a …

2019 Presidential Address: Radical Honors: Pedagogical Troublemaking As A Model For Institutional Change, Richard Badenhausen

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This presidential speech to attendees of the 2019 NCHC annual conference in New Orleans resituates honors education as a site of deeply radical practices and provides a call to action to honors educators both to own the transgressiveness of our pedagogical approaches and to extend that troublemaking project to processes beyond the classroom, processes like honors recruitment and admissions, faculty appointments, co-curricular programming, and assessment, among others. Given the academy’s traditional resistance to change, an opportunity exists for those in the honors community to step forward and radically alter the structures and practices of higher education, all in the service …

Undergraduate Research Seminars At Your Humanities Center, Anne Dotter

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Communal, collegial spaces for undergraduates to share their research enrich student experience and academic development in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

A Dialogical Exercise For Honors Students, J. Robert Baker

Honors in Practice Online Archive

To expand students’ abilities to think critically, honors instructors ask them to step aside from their objections to a passage in The Handbook of Epictetus to consider how that passage makes sense to Epictetus.

A Potential For Improving Honors Retention With Degree Planning, Teddi S. Deka

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Students who begin in honors do not always complete program requirements. As an investigation into student retention, the author introduces a degree-planning workshop into a freshman seminar. The study involves two groups of students from different incoming classes: one (2018) participating in their degree-planning through the workshop and the other (2015) not. Students (n = 150) were compared against three retention criteria based on successive enrollment and withdrawal. Chi-square analyses reveal significant differences only for program withdrawal, indicating that those completing the workshop were less likely to be removed from the program due to lack of progress. The workshop group …

Music In The Holocaust As An Honors Colloquium, Galit Gertsenzon

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Forbidden Sounds: The Music of the Holocaust considers the historical events of the Holocaust in the context of music. The honors course explores diverse roles that music played during the years 1933–1945, including the Nazi use of music as a means for censorship and discrimination; music performance and creation in various Jewish ghettos and concentration camps in Europe; and ways that composers, performers, and audiences used music for emotional and physical survival and for spiritual resistance during World War II and after. The author provides a rich and varied curriculum, culminating with student performances and a series of public concerts, …

Engaging And Contributing Professionally In A Global Sustainability Honors Course, Jeffrey Lamp, John Korstad

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Science and Global Sustainability provides honors students with opportunities to engage with field professionals working toward sustainability and to participate in the production of various academic publications across disciplines. Interconnected concerns of social, environmental, and economic factors are considered when assessing the sustainability of any plan of action in the world. Opportunities for mentorship in multiple professional contexts are discussed.

Humanities-Driven Stem— Using History As A Foundation For Stem Education In Honors, John Carrell, Hannah Keaty, Aliza Wong

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Humanities have traditionally played a limited role in STEM education, yet their natural connections may be used to enrich academic understanding and student experience. Authors explore their mutuality by presenting an interdisciplinary curriculum, Humanities-Driven STEM (HDSTEM). Unlike other iterations of blended disciplines, HDSTEM provides students with abilities and knowledge to go beyond the acquisition of soft skills toward humanistic, often artistic, creative problem-solving and innovative thinking. A pilot HDSTEM course offered through the first-year experience program is described. Authors outline its development, implementation, outcomes, and evaluation, positing humanities at the forefront as the impetus and lens for contextualizing STEM research …

Honors In Practice, Volume 16, Editorial Matter

Honors in Practice Online Archive

indexing statement

editorial board

contents

Editorial Policy, Deadline, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Steven T. Engel

Editor’s Introduction -- Ada Long

About the Authors

NCHC Publication Descriptions and Order Form

Contracts For Honors Credit: Balancing Access, Equity, And Opportunities For Authentic Learning, Patrick Bahls

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Research indicates that a majority of honors students across the country are able to earn honors credit through the fulfillment of honors contracts. These learning contracts grant honors credit to students who perform additional work in non-honors-designated sections of other courses. Despite their popularity, little has been written on the design and delivery of honors contracts. An inaugural annual honors contract system is presented, involving student reflections on contract fulfillment and programmatic assessment of learning outcomes. Students (n = 38) demonstrate an understanding of interdisciplinarity, alternative ways of knowing and being, and intellectual humility while faculty (n = 28) indicate …

Beyond Bookkeeping: Developing Intellectual Skills In Honors Accounting Courses, L. Benjamin Boyar

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Critical thinking skills are sharpened in an introductory accounting course requiring students to think and write about contemporary issues connected to their discipline. Students are tasked to explicate opinions involving shareholders and stakeholders as expressed in a New York Times editorial by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer and to present an argumentative essay that demonstrates practical disciplinary competencies and understanding of procedural knowledge. The challenges and rewards of teaching writing in technical disciplines are discussed.

Teaching Critical University Studies: A First-Year Seminar To Cultivate Intentional Learners, Elizabeth Bleicher

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The first-year seminar Why Are We Here? Student Culture and the Problem of College (WAWH) helps high-achieving students become motivated agents in their education by changing attitudes toward themselves, college, and their roles as students. The author presents the intentional design, execution, analysis, and results of the WAWH seminar, a curriculum that combines content and methods from the discipline of Critical University Studies, layered high-impact practices, studentcurated and student-led discussions, and explicit instruction on metacognition in teaching and learning. The decennial study (2008–2018) involves eighteen sections and over 300 students, all with similar written assignments, reflections, and final course evaluations. …

Breaking The Rules: Bringing Calculus Into The Humanities Classroom, Brent M. Blackwell

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Calculus in an honors humanities course offers students of different learning styles, interests, and aptitudes an opportunity to understand and appreciate the full range of the humanities, including natural science and mathematics. Students investigate the intellectual history and development of the calculus by reading work by and about Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton. Without having to understand any of the mathematics, students explore the rich intellectual debates that characterize the late seventeenth century and in so doing help bridge the traditional STEM-non-STEM divide that exists today.

National Security Council Role-Playing Simulation, Steve Elliott-Gower

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The first-year seminar Global Challenges fosters critical thinking by tasking honors students (n = 16) with role-playing in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Model Diplomacy program. Curricular objectives and assignments are presented.

Emphasizing Co-Curricular Experiences To Address Increasing Honors Enrollment And Diminishing Resources, Jason T. Hilton

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A program giving equal emphasis to honors coursework and targeted co-curricular experience provides one solution for a public university facing both increases in enrollment and decreases in financial resources. Undergraduate research, study abroad, and campus leadership provide high-impact experiences to students for honors credit. Measurable outcomes are presented.

On Being An Honors Dean, Andrew Martino

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The author reflects on the challenges of transitioning from faculty to firsttime dean of an honors college.

Office Hours: An Honors First-Year Experience Assignment, Cathlena Martin

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An assignment tasks students with scheduling, preparing for, and reflecting on the experience of meeting with a professor during office hours. Student expectations and experiences are presented.

The Commonplace Book Project, Kate Krueger

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A writing requirement for first-year honors students (n ≈ 250) provides a flexible format that combines primary texts, analytical skills, and personal reflection.

Brave New Worlds: Transcending The Humanities/Stem Divide Through Creative Writing, Adam Watkins, Zahra Tehrani

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Creative writing offers a critical and innovative form of inquiry promoting integrative learning that transcends disciplinary barriers. Authors first provide an overview of the scholarship on creative writing pedagogy, its unique capacity to engage a range of knowledge domains, and its significance for honors education. They then offer primary examples of incorporating creative writing projects into two honors classes that bridge STEM fields and the humanities. Analyses of student reflections (n = 35) in relation to learning outcomes strongly suggest that creative writing helps students explore course concepts through several ways of knowing—critical, situational, and affective—while fostering new perspectives on …