Liberal Studies Commons^™

Keeping The Program Alive: Internationalizing Honors Through Post-Travel Programming, Kevin W. Dean, Michael B. Jendzurski

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Every December, the world turns its eyes to Norway for the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized as the “world’s most important, visible and prestigious prize,” according to Fredrik S. Heffermehl (xi). Since its inauguration in 1901, a pantheon of impressive individuals and organizations has assumed the title of Nobel Peace Laureate. Yet Alfred Nobel harbored a concern as he established the prize in his will: he wanted the prize to be a new beginning for its recipients, not an end to their stories. Nobel wrote, “I wish to help the dreamers, as they find it difficult to get …

Internationalizing With Intention: A Case Study Of The Mahurin Honors College, Craig Cobane, Audra Jennings

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As an honors college in a predominantly rural, lower-socioeconomic, and conservative region of the country and in a state ranking third-lowest in the nation for the percentage of its residents holding valid U.S. passports (ChartsBin), internationalization required intention at Western Kentucky University (WKU). For most of its history, WKU had a small, underdeveloped honors program. In the early 2000s, it had fewer than two hundred active students, and only approximately ten students per year graduated from honors. Moreover, WKU had a modest education abroad office, and a small number of students went abroad each year. Of the students who did …

Transformative Learning Abroad For Honors Students: Leveraging High-Impact Practices At Global Partner Institutions, Craig Wallace

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The substantial increase in student participation in learning abroad and the proliferation of program types have greatly changed the international education landscape in the United States and beyond, providing new opportunities for global outreach and collaboration. Creative global partnerships can help students overcome longstanding barriers to studying abroad and provide students with opportunities to enhance their undergraduate education by stacking the high-impact practice of study abroad with other transformative high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and service learning, which are defining elements of an honors experience. Given the potential for transformation as a result of learning abroad, honors educators and …

“Let’S Get A Coffee!”: A Transformative International Honors Partnership, Leslie Kaplan, Sophia Zevgoli, Andres Gallo

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Advocates of study abroad have emphasized that semester- and year-long programs offer greater opportunities than short-term programs for students to enhance their personal, academic, and professional development (Dwyer). But can carefully constructed short-term study abroad experiences, which are increasingly popular choices for undergraduates, have similar effects? One study suggests they can achieve important outcomes, such as encouraging tolerance for ambiguity, appreciation for diversity, and openness to experience (Shadowen et al.). Another study shows that even shortterm exposure to other cultures can enhance creativity (Leung et al.), and a third demonstrates that creative problem solving was improved by cultural study in …

Intercultural Conversations: Honors-Led Partnerships To Engage International Students On Campus, Robert J. Pampel

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At a time when many universities are interested both in enrollment growth and the prestige of academic selectivity, international student recruitment and honors education emerge as popular strategic initiatives on college campuses. An influx of international students can enhance campus culture, fill enrollment gaps, and increase tuition revenue. Meanwhile, a selective undergraduate honors community serves as an exemplar of scholarship and distinction, which may attract academically talented students to the institution. On the surface, these trends appear unrelated. Lee notes, however, that international students are often motivated by institutional prestige and reputation when deciding to study in the United States …

Balancing International Aspirations With Honors Expectations: Expanding Honors To A Branch Campus In Florence, Italy, James G. Snyder, Vanessa Nichol-Peters

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Education abroad has the potential to leave a deep and transformative impact on the lives of honors students. That education abroad and a broader focus on the larger world beyond the boundaries of campuses comprises a core value of many honors programs and colleges comes as no surprise. In addition to providing a rigorous education and undergraduate research opportunities, many honors programs aspire to making their students more cosmopolitan in their worldview. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explains that cosmopolitanism blends two important values: it stretches us “beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and …

The Fulbright International Education Administrators Seminars: Pathways To International Partnerships, Rochelle Gregory, Kyle C. Kopko, M. Grant Norton

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

While the benefits of studying abroad are well documented (e.g., Braskamp et al.; Lewis and Niesenbaum; Ludlum et al.; McCabe; Williams), honors administrators face significant challenges in internationalizing their honors programs and colleges. The U.S. Fulbright Commission, by partnering with commissions in France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Taiwan to host programs for international education administrators from around the United States each year, is addressing the challenges of internationalizing American higher education. According to the Institute of International Education, the seminar in Germany in 1984–1985 was the first of its kind. Other seminars were added in 1986 (Japan), 1999 …

The Honors Thesis For Health Sciences Students: A Service Abroad Model, Misty Guy, Heidi Evans Knowles, Stephanie Cook, Zane Cooley, Ellen Buckner

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Despite advances in health care sciences and increased awareness of health disparities, unnecessary gaps in outcomes among vulnerable populations and a lack of adequate solutions to combat common diseases worldwide continue. Those deficiencies and the blurring of international borders have led to an increased need for health care professionals to understand health and the factors that influence it on a global scale (Wernli et al.). Nurses comprise the largest group of direct patient care providers in the world and have historically played an essential role in promoting health and improving patient outcomes regardless of the setting. The multifaceted and ever-changing …

“Same Same, But Different”: Trans-Nationalizing Honors In A U.S. Branch Campus, Jesse Gerlach Ulmer

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In July of 2013, I was appointed to lead the Honors Program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in Doha, Qatar (VCU Qatar), a branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. I attended my first National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference the following November. The location was New Orleans, Louisiana, a twentysomething hour flight from Doha, Qatar’s capital city. My goal was simple: to engage with honors directors like myself who were running honors programs outside the United States. Jet-lagged beyond belief, I stumbled through the conference in a stupefied, nine-hour time difference haze, rarely straying …

Drawing On Gifts Of International Students To Develop International Partnerships, Kevin W. Dean

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

It was Tuesday of the first week of classes for the fall 2012 term. At two o’clock in the afternoon, swamped with student petitions to register for classes and balancing myriad administrative issues, I found a young man with an unfamiliar accent standing on my office threshold. “I don’t have an appointment, but might you have a moment? My name is Carl. This is my second day in the states from Norway, and I heard about the honors program and would like to join.” A few days exist in an educator’s life that one can consider change moments, and that …

Assessing Honors Internationalization: A Case Study Of Lloyd International Honors College At Unc Greensboro, Chris J. Kirkman, Omar H. Ali

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Lloyd International Honors College (LIHC) of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC Greensboro) is a useful example of the reimagining of a traditional honors program into an honors college with an international focus.1 The process of becoming an internationally focused honors college, which began in 2006, was part of the university’s strategic goal of internationalizing its curriculum, student body, faculty, and culture. It has involved an extended process of program development; campus-wide partnership building, specifically in conjunction with the university’s International Programs Center (IPC) and Global Engagement Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP); and iterative assessment. This chapter outlines the …

Introduction To Internationalizing Honors (2020), Mary Kay Mulvaney, Kim Klein

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The world of higher education in the twenty-first century recognizes the necessity, not merely the desirability, of educating our students as global citizens. According to the American Council on Education’s Center for Internationalization and Globalization Engagement (CIGE), campus efforts toward internationalization are increasing: approximately half of all institutions now include a global studies component in their general education requirements, roughly half specify internationalization as one of their top five institutional strategic priorities, and nearly two-thirds have identified an international or global outcome as one of the student learning outcomes applicable to the entire student body (Mapping Internationalization). While including an …

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 (Complete)

Honors in Practice Online Archive

2019 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS-- Radical Honors: Pedagogical Troublemaking as a Model for Institutional Change Richard Badenhausen

ESSAYS-- Music in the Holocaust as an Honors Colloquium Galit Gertsenzon

Brave New Worlds: Transcending the Humanities/STEM Divide through Creative Writing Adam Watkins and Zahra Tehrani

Humanities-Driven STEM—Using History as a Foundation for STEM Education in Honors John Carrell, Hannah Keaty, and Aliza Wong

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, and Phoenix Little

Teaching Critical University Studies: A First-Year Seminar to …

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 …

Honoring The Whole Person: Indigenous Wisdom And University Honors Programs, Joseph Gazing Wolf

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As part of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (2022) collection of essays about the value of honors to its graduates (1967–2019), the author reflects on the personal and professional impacts of the honors experience.

Growing up in “Garbage City” on the outskirts of Cairo left little hope for a better life. Members of indigenous communities of Upper Egypt had been forcibly relocated to this landfill by the Egyptian government decades before my birth. These tribal communities were known in Egyptian culture as “the black savages” and “the trashy ones.” My parents were compassionate people of little means, and although rummaging …

Claiming Debate’S Value For Honors Student Learning, Megan Snider Bailey

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One reason that honors faculty often engage students in seminar discussions is to keep debate’s features of competition, argument, and discord at bay. Intentionally structured academic debate represents a transdisciplinary pedagogy capable of cultivating ethical and empathetic citizenship through critical and creative thinking. The author uses such debate in a seminar curriculum to engage multiple sides of a single, complex sociopolitical issue with students of different disciplinary backgrounds, thereby fostering new understandings of beliefs: what is believed, why it is believed, and how one might live in accord with one’s beliefs as an ethical citizen. Through research, writing, and oral …