editor’s introduction

The last issue of JNCHC (spring/summer 2019) included a Forum on “Current Challenges to Honors Education.” The essays focused on challenges to honors while this issue’s Forum addresses challenges within honors, especially the challenges we present to our students in courses that are designed to complicate, interrogate, and often defy accepted practices and beliefs. The introduction of risk-taking takes this topic beyond the unthreatening and inviting terrain of challenge into a different territory. Virtually all honors programs and colleges advertise themselves as presenting challenges to their students, but few if any boast that they are risky. Jumping hurdles is a challenge: jumping when you don’t know what is on the other side is risky. Risk involves some possibility of danger, and to varying degrees the essays in this issue’s Forum address not just the challenge but the risk for students, educators, and programs in honors

Editor’s Introduction

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the National Collegiate Honors Council, JNCHC invited honors deans and directors to ask the president of their institution to submit an essay on the theme “The Value of Honors.” This special Forum was an opportunity for honors administrators to discuss honors with their presidents and an opportunity for presidents to reflect in writing on the value of honors at their institution and in the wider context of higher education

Editor’s introduction, vol. 17, no. 1

During the sixteen years since JNCHC came into being, research in honors has steadily shifted its focus and approach. In the early days, essays represented a wide variety of disciplines and, in order to qualify as research, needed only to root themselves in previous literature on a topic. As honors, along with the culture in which it is practiced, moved into the era of accountability and assessment, “research in honors” has increasingly come to mean quantitative studies rooted in the formats, methods, and terminology of the social sciences. The purpose of research in honors has also shifted, more subtly, from advancing an internal discourse that took the value of honors for granted to proving the value of honors through quantitative analysis. In the current climate, previous research in honors often ceases to seem like research at all as essays in this issue call for real or serious research on topics that have long been discussed in the honors literature. A look at the previous issue of JNCHC devoted to “Research in Honors” in the spring/summer of 2004 reveals a stark contrast with common assumptions about today’s scholarship in honors but also contains clear signs of the emerging change. The first three essays in that issue were republished from the Forum for Honors, the predecessor of JNCHC, and were written twenty years earlier, in 1984, by Sam Schuman, Ted Estess, and Robert Roemer. All three write from the perspective of the humanities and argue for quality of thought and writing as essential to honors scholarship along with a theoretical context that extends beyond an individual program. Schuman argues for what he calls “abstraction”: “the necessity that the content be ‘generalized and generalizable’ beyond a specific time and place.” Estess argues that an “otherconnecting” intellectual appeal is the ideal for any publication in an honors journal. Roemer summarizes these ideas in the importance of what he calls “the theoretical moment.

Editor\u27s Introduction (vol. 9, no. 1)

Even in these perplexing times, most citizens of the United States would agree that social injustices in this country need to be addressed and alleviated. Most would acknowledge the high rates of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, incarceration, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and bias in college admissions, for instance, that undermine the ideals essential to a thriving democracy. The challenge, though, is getting beneath these abstractions to a level of empathy that can bring about change. While the National Collegiate Honors Council has taken on this challenge in years past, the energy and commitment required to meet the challenge has generally waned as years have passed and as programmatic, institutional, and organizational issues directly related to honors education have taken precedence. Under the leadership of NCHC president Naomi Yavneh Klos of Loyola University New Orleans, a new agenda to address social injustices is now underway to make diversity and social justice a central focus of the organization, and so it is fitting that she opens this issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council with the lead essay for a Forum on “Honors and Social Justice.” A Call for Papers on the Forum topic went out via the NCHC website, listserv, and e-newsletter inviting members to contribute to the Forum. The Call included a link to Yavneh Klos’s essay, “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” with the following comments: Yavneh Klos asks readers to consider two questions: “first, how to engage our highest-ability and most motivated students in questions of justice; and second, how honors can be a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education.” She describes the ways her program has wedded traditional and experiential educational goals with justice education to fulfill the Jesuit honors mission to “embrace diversity; foster reflection and discernment; promote social justice and preferential care for the poor and the vulnerable; and bring ‘intellectual talents into service of the world’s great needs.’” Rejecting the notion that a student’s qualification for honors can easily be identified by test scores and high school GPA, she suggests ways that admissions policies and curriculum decisions can achieve equitable and inclusive excellence for the public good

Editor’s introduction, vol. 17, no. 1

During the sixteen years since JNCHC came into being, research in honors has steadily shifted its focus and approach. In the early days, essays represented a wide variety of disciplines and, in order to qualify as research, needed only to root themselves in previous literature on a topic. As honors, along with the culture in which it is practiced, moved into the era of accountability and assessment, “research in honors” has increasingly come to mean quantitative studies rooted in the formats, methods, and terminology of the social sciences. The purpose of research in honors has also shifted, more subtly, from advancing an internal discourse that took the value of honors for granted to proving the value of honors through quantitative analysis. In the current climate, previous research in honors often ceases to seem like research at all as essays in this issue call for real or serious research on topics that have long been discussed in the honors literature. A look at the previous issue of JNCHC devoted to “Research in Honors” in the spring/summer of 2004 reveals a stark contrast with common assumptions about today’s scholarship in honors but also contains clear signs of the emerging change. The first three essays in that issue were republished from the Forum for Honors, the predecessor of JNCHC, and were written twenty years earlier, in 1984, by Sam Schuman, Ted Estess, and Robert Roemer. All three write from the perspective of the humanities and argue for quality of thought and writing as essential to honors scholarship along with a theoretical context that extends beyond an individual program. Schuman argues for what he calls “abstraction”: “the necessity that the content be ‘generalized and generalizable’ beyond a specific time and place.” Estess argues that an “otherconnecting” intellectual appeal is the ideal for any publication in an honors journal. Roemer summarizes these ideas in the importance of what he calls “the theoretical moment.

Editor’s Introduction

The lead essay in this issue of Honors in Practice is one that most readers will want to keep close at hand. At the behest of the NCHC Publications Board, Emily C. Walshe of Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, has contributed “Conducting Research in Honors,” a set of clear, detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to do research in honors. While some readers will be familiar with this material already and others will struggle to keep up, the majority will find in this essay an invaluable tool and resource for doing research in general and honors research in particular. So go ahead and make room among the essential references on your bookshelf for this issue of HIP. While Walshe’s essay is targeted primarily at faculty in honors, the next three essays address particular issues related to student research. Nathan Hilberg, the faculty advisor for the Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review, answers the question “Is Originality an Appropriate Requirement for Undergraduate Publication?” He argues that, in evaluating undergraduate work and awarding institutional support, we need to distinguish between originality and “independent scholarly accomplishment.” This distinction, he writes, goes beyond semantics and influences important decisions about students and the work they do, with originality being an invalid and inappropriate criterion for evaluating undergraduate research. The other two essays that focus on student research provide suggestions about helping honors students complete their theses successfully. In “Individual Achievement in an Honors Research Community: Teaching Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development,” Kaitlin A. Briggs of the University of Southern Maine describes her strategies for developing a research community in her honors thesis workshop. Basing her ideas on the work of Lev Vygotsky, she contends that individual progress is necessarily rooted in the multiple perspectives of communal discourse. She both describes and models a process that prepares students to move forward from a research community to a successful honors thesis

Editor’s Introduction

John Zubizarreta of Columbia College leads off this volume of Honors in Practice with a revised version of his presidential address at the 2010 annual NCHC conference in Kansas City, Missouri. His speech, entitled “A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education,” was, in a characteristic honors mode, interactive. He asked the audience to participate with him in enacting the “challenge, risk, creativity, collaboration, reflection, inquiry, [and] community” of honors education. Zubizarreta, both in his speech and in this essay, describes and illustrates honors education, the NCHC, and its conferences as embodying the “rough magic” of Shakespeare’s Prospero. Kateryna A. R. Schray provides a fine example of rough magic in her essay “Into the Afterlife and Back with Honors Students,” which is the first of three essays in this volume that describe collaborative student projects in honors courses. Schray describes a team-taught honors seminar—Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Literature and Culture—at Marshall University. The primary focus of the essay is a series of collaborative projects in which, for instance, students designed stage sets for hell in a nursing home, prison, and big box store. Readers seeking new ideas for class projects in the arts and humanities will find imaginative ones here. Another unusual idea is the focus of “The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, and Student Engagement” by Elizabeth Bleicher of Ithaca College. Bleicher describes the content and context of a final class session in her first-year honors seminar, which is designed to acclimate new students to college life. In her honors version of the course, students anticipate and then, in the last class, accomplish both individual and collaborative evaluations of the course, knowing that their analyses, criticism, and recommendations will shape the course the next time it is taught. These students then stay connected to the class after it is over, helping the next batch of first-year students go through the same process

Editor’s Introduction

Faculty new to higher education have entered a world already circumscribed by assessment practices that may seem normal and transparent, but the increasing impacts of these practices have redefined the content as well as contours of teaching and learning in the three or more decades since they started to take hold. Administrations, boards of trustees, accrediting agencies, and legislatures have insisted on accountability without necessarily having experience in what is being accounted for and have fostered a distrust of faculty members as the authorities on their own practices. As a result, higher education has been undergoing the kind of cultural upheaval that took place in elementary and secondary education more than fifty years ago

Editor\u27s Introduction

The opening essay of this volume—“What Do We Belong to If We Belong to NCHC?”—manages to corral the spirit of the National Collegiate Honors Council without reducing it to a simple formula that would break it. In this slightly revised version of his 2016 presidential address at the Seattle conference in October, Jerry Herron of Wayne State University acknowledges the complex commitments and multiple roles that members bring to the conference as well as the rich variety of services they provide to each other within just a few days. He then takes his audience to “the quiet at the center of all that rackety good stuff.” What he finds there is “a sense of belonging—belonging to each other and to an idea—that makes this outfit of ours truly wonderful and unique.” Longtimers in the NCHC will know exactly what Herron is talking about; newcomers surely left the conference with a feel for it; and both groups will recognize the singularity of this feeling among the wide array of their other professional organizations: the feeling of “belonging to something that calls us out of ourselves.

Editor’s Introduction

This volume of Honors in Practice covers a spectrum from visionary to practical, providing an array of inspiration, insights, models, advice, and information in the service of honors education. At the same time, a recurrent motif in many of the essays is the conflict between safety and risk, structured achievement and challenging exploration. This motif, introduced in the first essay, threads it way through much of this volume of HIP so that, more than a collection of essays, it provides a discourse on the nature of honors education as a safe haven and a dangerous voyage. The volume begins with an essay that all teachers, students, and administrators in honors should read and reread when they need renewed inspiration for their chosen work. “‘In Landlessness Alone Resides the Highest Truth’; or, At Sea with Honors,” by Don Dingledine of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, is an eloquent, intricate, and ingenious essay that likens the risky adventure of honors education to the dangerous quest for truth undertaken by Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Honors programs, like the Pequod, propel students beyond the familiar lands of their majors and professional goals, sending them out to sea where, like Ishmael, they examine that big whale of Truth from all angles, traditions, and disciplines, always seeking but never quite grasping the unknown and the unknowable. Dingledine describes models of honors education that exemplify the highest ideals of community, interdisciplinarity, integrity, and truth-seeking, connecting these ideals to our individual and collective survival. He inspires us to practice and cherish honors “not by clinging to the ‘slavish shore’ but by heading out to sea.