The author describes how using free internet extensions allowed for the continuation of a media-based honors course during the COVID-19 crisis.
Weekly, self-evaluative briefs are used to assess students' general wellbeing during the coronavirus crisis. Authors discuss the efficacy of personalized check-ins and remote, interpersonal rapport, suggesting a positive impact on student learning outcomes.
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.
Nearly two hundred students, faculty, staff, and community members gather in a series of events to read and respond to poetry written by incarcerated authors. The program engages inmates in poetic self-expression, reflection, and personal growth while challenging honors students to consider what they have learned in literature classes in a broader context of incarceration. Monthly write-nights via Zoom and Miro prove rich and cathartic during the coronavirus crisis.
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 many aspects of online, asynchronous teaching serve honors programs well. Faculty wishing to provide an online honors experience as rich and nuanced as the traditional model must understand that online teaching has its own added value, far more sophisticated than merely face-to-face instruction delivered remotely. The author argues that honors programs should be crucibles for innovation, not archives of the obsolete, and asks honors faculty to invite students into these brave, new, virtual worlds.
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.
An honors practitioner describes various challenges in onboarding and training a new academic advisor during the coronavirus crisis. Virtual interaction and multitasking skills prove fruitful for training in best practices while also bringing experienced and first-year students together in unexpected ways. The author cites several improvements in advisement, observing how remote technologies also allow for certain privacies and discretion.
: 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 of students and their learning .
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 framework for developing innovative thinking, an entrepreneurial mindset, and community engagement among first-year students—a design that, the authors conclude, has not only developed in students specific, non-academic skills (such as resiliency and creative self-confidence) but effectively doubled the size (as mandated by the university) of the first-year class . Implications for future iterations are considered, calling for strengthening administrative support, increasing academic/community partnership, and sustaining funding beyond the first year .
: 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, lectures, field trips, and independent studies . Challenges and strategies for teaching music to non-majors are discussed .
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 and discovery . Challenges and implications for future development beyond first-year experience
“Honors Work: Seeing Gaps, Combining Gifts, Focusing on Wider Human Needs” describes the authors’ collaborative work with high school girls to bring Canadian activist Leigh Boyle and “The Lipstick Project” story to Maine in April, 2017 . “The Lipstick Project,” which Boyle founded and directs, is a women-run volunteer organization based in Vancouver that provides free, professional spa care services to terminally ill patients . The authors contend that their collective efforts with the high school girls to organize “The Lipstick Project” events in Maine brought together a number of community constituencies in important ways, reflecting qualities and values central to honors education . The authors cite the writings of the late Samuel Schuman, a widely involved and highly respected honors administrator and teacher, for their characterization of honors education as, at its best, engaged, imaginative, and socially conscious . The authors note
In spring 2018, two honors colleges—Indiana State University (ISU) and University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout)— came together to create a cross-institutional collaboration blurring the boundaries between campuses . This project connected first-year honors students with the core curriculum of two geographically separated honors colleges . Building on their studies of Classical mythology, ISU honors students in Classical Cultures of Greece and Rome reviewed, advised, and critiqued screenplays composed by UW-Stout students in Honors English, leading to the production of short films presented at ISU’s Spring Classics Fest and UW-Stout’s
