Embracing New Opportunities in and beyond First-Year Honors Composition

Authors describe course-embedded research experiences at a diverse, rural, regional university. Emphasizing the capacity for conventional teaching and learning in first-year honors composition, these experiences provide relationshiprich education through faculty and peer mentorships. Positing that first-year honors composition is undervalued as a means for establishing programmatic foundations that resonate with students throughout their honors experience, the authors reinforce its importance as a place for disciplinary research and thus for opportunities in mentoring. By addressing an urgent need for mentoring underrepresented students, the authors consider how a research-based first-year honors composition course might help such students make meaningful disciplinary connections. A curricular overview is provided, with references to impact studies on mentorship, persistence, and student success beyond first-year courses and general educational curricula, setting the stage for sustained, whole-college mentorship in the honors experience

Honors Colleges as Levers of Educational Equity

While higher education is widely imagined as a tool for social mobility, the realities of enrollment, retention, and professional trajectories betray the conservative mechanisms through which higher education too often reproduces the status quo of inequality. Honors colleges can and should strive to act as levers of equity in this scenario of entrenchment, but the nature of this project varies depending on the institution’s own class position vis-à-vis its students. Elite, highly selective institutions may advocate for enrollment strategies that target student populations that do not typically attend those institutions, but other institutions likely already enroll such students in large numbers. These “lower tier” institutions, such as community colleges and regional universities, have a responsibility to act as “stewards of place” through “clear and ongoing commitments to the local K-12 school systems where they reside,” as well as to providing “access to regional students via bridge programs, admissions and financial aid,” especially including “access for local first generation and underrepresented students” (Saltmarsh et al.). Such institutions have the capacity to make a significant impact on students’ personal and professional trajectories, and honors colleges at these institutions are uniquely positioned to serve as levers of equity in higher education

Writing centers and learning commons: staying centered while sharing common ground

Includes bibliographical references and index.Writing Centers and Learning Commons presents program administrators, directors, staff, and tutors with a resource of theoretical rationales, experiential journeys, and go-to practical designs and strategies for the many questions involved when writing centers find themselves operating in shared environments.--Provided by publisher.Introduction: the politics and pedagogy of sharing common ground / Steven J. Corbett, Teagan E. Decker, and Maria Soriano Young, with contributions from Hillory Oakes, Elizabeth Busekrus, Alexis Hart, Robyn Rohde, Cassandra Book, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Alice Batt, and Michele Ostrow -- The spatial landscape of the learning commons: a political shift to the (writing) center / Elizabeth Busekrus, Alexis Hart, and Robyn Rohde -- Questioning the "streamlining" narrative: writing centers' role in new learning commons / Cassandra Book -- On shopping malls and farmers' markets: an argument for writing center spaces in the university and the community / Helen Raica-Klotz and Christopher Giroux -- Scientific writing as multiliteracy: a study of disciplinarity limitations in writing centers and learning commons / Robby Nadler, Kristen Miller, and Charles A. Braman -- Trade-offs, not takeovers: a learning center/writing center collaboration for tutor training / Virginia Crank -- New paradigms in shared space: 2015 Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association Conference keynote address and postscript / Nathalie Singh-Corcoran -- Integrating writing and research centers: student, writing tutor, and research consultant perspectives / David Stock and Suzanne Julian -- "Experts among us": exploring the recursive space of research and writing collaborations through tutor training / Celeste Del Russo -- The tales we tell: applying peripheral vision to build a successful learning commons partnership / Alice Batt and Michele Ostrow -- Breaking the silos / Patricia Egbert -- Sharing "common" ground within a success center: welcomed changes, uncomfortable changes, and promising compromises / Kathleen Richards -- Conclusion: toward sharing the common ground of student success / Maria Soriano Young, Teagan E. Decker, and Steven J. Corbett