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Territorial Games: Honors, Outreach, And Collaboration, Andrew Martino

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay explores and expands the boundaries by which honors is defined and defines itself. By opening a path toward a more expansive and public perception of honors, the author argues for emphasis on the public good as a key element in honors discourse and the broader dissemination of its theories and practices. Drawing from characteristics of the public intellectual, the author encourages honors practitioners to resist hyper-professionalization and insularity in favor of more open and collaborative practices.

Honors In Practice, Volume 17 (2021)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Contents

Editorial Policy, Deadline, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Elaine Torda

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

Founders Award Acceptance Speech (18 December 2020) • Jeffrey A. Portnoy

Coordinating Multi-Campus Honors Programs and Colleges • Larry R. Andrews

From Program to College: The Vision and Curriculum Evolution of the Virginia Tech Honors College • Stephanie N. Lewis, Anne-Lise K. Velez, Desen S. Ozkan, Raymond C. Thomas, and Kimberly A. Carlson

The Role of Admissions Practices in Diversifying Honors Populations: A Case Study • Andrea Radasanu and Gregory Barker

A View of Health as a Human Right: A Snapshot from an Honors …

Dedication: Elaine Torda

Honors in Practice Online Archive

For all her contributions to the NCHC and to honors and also for steering the Ship of Honors in the Year of Covid, we gratefully dedicate this volume of Honors in Practice to Elaine Torda.

Meditations In An Emergency: Collaborating Online In Narratives Of Illness And Care, Jayda Coons

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This article describes a collaborative writing project involving narratives of health and caregiving. An interdisciplinary seminar titled “Narratives of Illness and Care” examines literary and medical narratives to better understand disease, therapeutic communication, empathy, and the social determinants of health. During the COVID-19 crisis, however, the instructor adapted course structure and curricular assignments to help students make meaningful connections with their immediate circumstance. The author reflects on the significance of the project during a time of global upheaval and suggests changes for future iterations.

Preparing For An Honors Capstone: Interdisciplinary Methods And Ethics In A Research Methods Course, Lauren Collins, Kylla Benes, Krista Manley

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Teaching interdisciplinary research methods to honors students across disciplines is complex. A pre-capstone seminar, The Art of Inquiry, centers ethical considerations within and beyond individual research interests, helping junior and senior students of all majors prepare for ethical, scholarly projects.

Learning In Teams During A Pandemic, Aaron D. Cobb

Honors in Practice Online Archive

As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts students’ sense of community and appreciation for in-person instruction, the author presents a pedagogical experiment involving several collaborative, team-based learning strategies to engage all learners, regardless of location. Students in a sophomore-level required seminar are tasked with various team-based assignments, including notetaking, critical essays, interviews, and reflective writing exercises. Outcomes suggest a framework for the creative use of teams and out-of-classroom collaboration, even in challenging contexts where disruption and displacement complicate both teaching and learning. Curricular objectives are described, and student feedback is summarized.

“Movies, Tv Shows, And Memes . . . Oh My!”: An Honors Education Through Popular Culture And Critical Pedagogy, Evan W. Faidley

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Entertainment media and popular culture often overdramatize the college experience. An honors colloquium engages students in scholarly research and discourse involving thematic elements of academic life in popular culture. An interdisciplinary approach to race, class, the professoriate, Greek life, and foreign experience is espoused. Through a lens of critical social theory, students deconstruct misinformed “stories most often told” to reconstruct more cogent understandings of college life and student experience. With a curriculum designed to advance social justice through equitizing education and amending cultural perceptions, this colloquium helps develop self-motivated, self-regulated, and engaged learners.

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This journal of the plague year has attracted a record number of submissions, creating the thickest volume of Honors in Practice since its inception in 2005. The inclusion of essays in response to a Call for Papers about COVID- 19 is no doubt responsible for some of this torrent of submissions, but research essays have also come in at a greater rate than before, not to mention the “Brief Ideas about What Works in Honors.” As you will see, the essays on the pandemic’s effects on honors mostly make the best of a fraught and frustrating year for honors administrators, …

Creativity In The Age Of Covid: Honors Comes “Home”, Ilene D. Lieberman

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This essay explores the conceptual and practical implications of an honors forum relating to artful expression and the phenomenon of sequester in place (SIP). As monthly general education offerings for first-year students, Honors Forums feature an array of thematic events associated with the freshman cohort. Noting challenges relating to remote instruction, social distancing, and general anxiety as well as the consequent effects on the typical first-year experience, the author, an art historian, presents a novel response to COVID constraints through communal, creative expression. A visual and textual curriculum helps bring students together, mitigate pandemic-related anxieties, and introduce the honors living-learning …

Developing And Encouraging The First-Year Undergraduate Researcher, Stacia Kock, Jennifer F. Nyland

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A simulated conference in first-year curriculum reinforces undergraduate research as beneficial to both honors and campus communities while fostering scholarly development and campus engagement among honors freshmen during the coronavirus crisis.

Forming Oral History Researchers: Diversifying And Innovating Honors Experiential Learning Across Campus, Myrriah Gómez, Anna M. Nogar

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This article presents a transdisciplinary, cross-campus collaboration among honors and non-honors students in the field of humanities. Trained in oral history methodologies and integrated as IRB-certified researchers into an ongoing (2018–present) project, a cohort of students (n = 34) participate in place-based, community-engaged learning and research involving Hispanic New Mexicans, known as Nuevomexicanas/os. Drawing on the tenets of experiential learning as a mode of honors discourse, the authors describe how this challenging ethnographic project serves to bring a diverse group of learners together while deepening interpersonal, intercultural, and interdisciplinary connections. Results indicate that students benefit from working with more diverse …

Close Reading Responses: A Streamlined Approach To Teaching Critical-Thinking Writing In Honors, Katie Quirk

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This study presents a scaffold approach to building critical academic writing skills among honors students. Faced with limited instructional time, a reading-intensive curriculum, and students in need of rigorous writing instruction, a scaffold model was developed to include a series of condensed writing assignments called “Close Reading Responses.” Coupled with rubrics and guided peer review, these assignments allow for repetitive critical practice at various stages along a trajectory toward the final paper. Results indicate that this incremental, explicit form of writing instruction allows students to hone critical-thinking skills in a condensed manner without demanding that they produce (and instructors read) …

“One Singular Sensation”: Integrating Personal Narratives Into The Honors Classroom, Marc Napolitano, Mimi Killinger

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Contemporary emphases on standardization, specialization, and selectivity in higher education alienate students and teachers from their own creativity, intellectual curiosity, and personal stories. This trend runs counter to the central focus of honors on fostering a diverse, scholarly learning environment. Authors suggest that integrating student personal narratives into honors curricula reinforces its values of multiplicity, inclusivity, and meaningful learning. Using metaphorical reference to the Broadway musical A Chorus Line as a unique lens into the pedagogical benefits of such integration, this essay provides ways of incorporating and sharing personal narratives in the classroom and offers strategies to ensure that all …

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.

Brain Activity And Experiential Learning, Paul Witkovsky

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The chapters in this book deal primarily with students’ learning experiences as documented through self-awareness, knowledge acquisition, and behavior. Language makes it possible to communicate these changes to others. This essay, in contrast, will examine learning from the perspective of brain function. The current framework of thinking among neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers is that the brain is fully responsible for our minds, and thus studying how the brain functions in molecular, cellular, and systems terms sheds light on all mental processes, including those that are the substrate of learning. A scientific understanding of brain function thus helps to explain the …

Integrating Dynamic Systems Theory And City As Text™ Framework: In-Depth Reflections On ‘Lens’, Ron Weerheijm, Patricia Vuijk, Bernice Braid

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

City as Text™ provides a semi-structured learning environment in which small groups of people are challenged to examine parts of a city through “mapping, observing, interpreting, analyzing, reflecting.” In 2014, I (Ron Weerheijm) attended a City as Text (CAT) Faculty Institute in Lyon. During an early session on the hills overlooking the eastern part of Lyon, our group observed a Basilique, the Notre Dame de Fourvière (1872–1884; interior finished 1964). Having a degree in architecture, I looked at this church from architectural and historical viewpoints. I was puzzled. In a quick scan, many different styles competed for my attention, hurting …

Fostering Music Performers In The 21st Century: A Contemporary Professional Perspective Toward A New Curricular Agenda For Graduate Study In Music, Andre Januario

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

What if the core curriculum for graduate students in music performance were designed to prepare students to succeed in the world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

This dissertation offers a hypothetical answer: a structured and systematic academic curricular framework for music graduate students of performance of concert music (especially those in terminal degrees, such as doctoral students), along with music instructors, professional music performers, school administrators, and college professors, seeking to prepare such students for achieving and maintaining a music career more in keeping with the current work environment, especially those skills demanded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the …

Racism In Education Remix, Kevin M. Donton

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Racism in Education has been a huge problem in the United States today, and it still is. The presence of racism in the education system is quite controversial and many people have strong opinions on it. Its roots date all the way back to slavery in the United States to the Brown vs. the Board of Education case to the Reagan Revolution to present day in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This topic has been a problem for a long time now and should be brought up more. Along with this information and as a reinterpretation, or …

Science In Early Childhood Education, Olivia Kocina

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Science is often limited or absent in an early education classroom. It is important to give children an outlet to experience science in the classroom or through lesson plans. Having science at an early age can provide children the opportunities to build up their reasoning, to question things about the world, and later in life to feel more confident in other STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) activities or areas. To address this need, I created a 3-day program for 3 to 5 year-olds at Little Learners of Aptos School in Aptos, California.

Increasing Kindness Among Kindergartners, Jenique Ruiz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

In most elementary school curriculum, prosocial skills, such as the concept of kindness, are absent. When young children have underdeveloped prosocial skills, social relationships and academic achievement may suffer. Children need these skills to successfully interact with their peers and to achieve academic goals. To address the lack of prosocial skills in the curriculum, I have created a three-part lesson about kindness for Kindergarten students at George C. Marshall Elementary School in Seaside, California.

Enhancing Emotional Regulation In First Graders, Clarissa Miller

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Emotional regulation is the ability to have control over one’s emotions; and typically develops in early childhood. Once children reach school age, they tend to be able to manage their emotions. When children are not able to regulate their emotions, they may have poorer social skills, and have challenges when learning in school. To help children further their emotional regulation skills, I have created a three-day lesson for a first grader class at Robert H. Down Elementary School in Pacific Grove, California.

The Grizzly, November 19, 2020, Simra Mariam, Griffin Banks, Edward Martinez, Claude Wolfer, Morgan Grabowski, Layla Halterman, Daniel Cohen, Ava Compagnoni, Rosalia Murphy

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Election Results are In! • Ursinus Students on In-Person Voting vs. Mail-in Ballots • Radio Plays a Success • Emily Gurganus: A Case of Voter Suppression? • Comparison Steals Your Happiness • Opinion: COVID-19, Climate Change, and Sacrifice; The Literature Storm to Come Post-COVID • Post-Election: How's Your Stress? • Men's Soccer Hopes for More

Volume Cxxxix, Number 8, November 13, 2020, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

The Grizzly, November 12, 2020, Simra Mariam, Ava Compagnoni, Morgan Grabowski, Layla Halterman, Griffin Banks, Maggie Frymoyer, Shelsea Deravil

Ursinus College Grizzly Newspaper, 1978 to Present

Ursinus Enters New Pre-Engineering Partnership • Creating Art in a New Way: Ursinus College Dance Company • Notable Alum Profile: Kim Guadagno • A Bear in the Woods • Opinion: Residence Life - Big Brother is Watching You; Outside Morning Noises Near North Hall are Obnoxious • Intramural Cornhole Makes Impression at UC • Students' Fantasy Football

A Whiteheadian Innervation Of The Soma: A New Vision For The Peripheral Nervous System, David Milliern

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This essay draws attention to two problems in neuroscience’s set of assumptions. These self-defeating assumptions include: 1) the assumption that what the nervous system, especially the brain, does is synthesize experience, while also assuming philosophical realism, and 2) the problem of biological signal transduction. In the latter, neuroscientists and philosophers of biology have left unaddressed the issue that the signal differences between the inside and outside of the organismic boundary are of distinct ontological types; and yet no concern has been expressed regarding how it is possible that an organism’s inner states could reflect the experiential content flowing from outside …