Blogging to Develop Honors Students’ Writing

After an exciting class discussion, you might want students to write conventional papers directed at you and focused ultimately on a grade, or you might prefer that they bring their further insights to their classmates, continuing and enriching the ongoing class collaboration. Blogging is an excellent way to implement the second option, continuing an exchange of ideas and providing students with another tool to improve their writing skills. Student class blogging offers many benefits—for student and instructor alike—compared to assigning conventional papers directed only at the instructor. The collaborative writing and peer editing inherent in blogging offer challenges as well as benefits, so guidance in facilitating a meaningful exchange as well as navigating the nuts-and-bolts technicalities may be useful to honors faculty who are establishing a class blog. Ideas for class exercises, assignments, and evaluative expectations co-designed by an instructor and a team of honors students may also help bring out maximum creativity and collegiality in the honors blog

A Landscape of Conflict: Three Stories of the Faroe Conversions

Page range: 345-38

Against Teleology in an Honors Great Books Curriculum

Chronologically presented courses that span centuries often catalyze unwitting buy-in to unexamined narratives of progress. While useful for helping students make connections between the human past, present, and future, Great Books honors curricula like the one used at the University of Maine have a few inherent problems that require careful navigation. Both students and faculty tend to discard—or misinterpret—the values, cultural products, and successes of older cultures in favor of newer ones. Instead of valuing the uniqueness of a foreign place and time, we often emphasize transformation for the sake of narrative coherence in a program that needs focus to bring heterogeneous elements together. At times, such a curriculum seems to imply that previous civilizations came into being only to create modern culture as we know it, a fallacy that can have a negative impact on students’ learning and the general tenor of cultural and historical sensitivity in an honors college. As an honors faculty member trained as a medievalist, I have developed strategies for avoiding a teleological approach to the Great Books curriculum, offering several exercises and resources to help teachers and students avoid the pitfalls of an unexamined teleological approach. These curricular supplements and exercises call out implicit teleological narratives at important junctures, staging interventions in our linear process of thinking, learning, and teaching

The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature : from Fen to Greenwood

Arguing that outlaw narratives become particularly popular and poignant at moments of national ecological and political crisis, Sarah Harlan-Haughey examines the figure of the outlaw in Anglo-Saxon poetry and Old English exile lyrics such as Beowulf, works dealing with the life and actions of Hereward, the Anglo-Norman romance of Fulk Fitz Waryn, the Robin Hood ballads, and the Tale of Gamelyn. Although the outlaw\u27s wilderness shelter changed dramatically from the menacing fens and forests of Anglo-Saxon England to the bright, known, and mapped greenwood of the late outlaw romances and ballads, Harlan-Haughey observes that the outlaw remained strongly animalistic, other, and liminal. His brutality points to a deep literary ambivalence towards wilderness and the animal, at the same time that figures such as the Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter Hereward, the brutal yet courtly Gamelyn, and Robin Hood often represent a lost England imagined as pristine and forested. In analyzing outlaw literature as a form of nature writing, Harlan-Haughey suggests that it often reveals more about medieval anxieties respecting humanity\u27s place in nature than it does about the political realities of the period.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/1277/thumbnail.jp

Blogging to Develop Honors Students’ Writing

After an exciting class discussion, you might want students to write conventional papers directed at you and focused ultimately on a grade, or you might prefer that they bring their further insights to their classmates, continuing and enriching the ongoing class collaboration. Blogging is an excellent way to implement the second option, continuing an exchange of ideas and providing students with another tool to improve their writing skills. Student class blogging offers many benefits—for student and instructor alike—compared to assigning conventional papers directed only at the instructor. The collaborative writing and peer editing inherent in blogging offer challenges as well as benefits, so guidance in facilitating a meaningful exchange as well as navigating the nuts-and-bolts technicalities may be useful to honors faculty who are establishing a class blog. Ideas for class exercises, assignments, and evaluative expectations co-designed by an instructor and a team of honors students may also help bring out maximum creativity and collegiality in the honors blog

The Genesis of an Honors Faculty: Collective Reflections on a Process of Change

In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson introduced the concept of “preceptors” at Princeton University (Office of the Dean of the College). At the University of Maine a century later, we have adapted Wilson’s concept by hiring faculty members who lead small-group discussions in our interdisciplinary, two-year, four-course core Civilizations sequence, which is a requirement for all first- and second-year honors students. Like Wilson, we hope to “import into the great university the methods and personal contact between teacher and pupil which are characteristic of the small college, and so gain the advantages of both” (Leitch). During the 2010–2011 academic year, the University of Maine Honors College tripled its number of salaried preceptors, expanding from two to six. With that expansion came new challenges: an innovative, albeit periodically strained, collaboration with the UMaine College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and four of its departments; an experimental and precarious foray into non-tenure-track interdisciplinary academia with fresh consideration for undergraduate research; and an evolving sense of what it means to be honors faculty members—or, more broadly, academics—at a twenty-first-century university rife with change. Various perspectives illustrate the difficulties and possibilities endemic to this faculty formation and collectively belie the assumption that faculty members necessarily best cohere around a single discipline and familiar professional constructs. We suggest that a university today, as it has done in the past, can and should coalesce around and be invigorated by untried models and pioneering colleges whose faculty members are willing and eager to take risks. Administrators and search committees at other institutions, as well as prospective honors faculty members, may be able to learn from our experience at the University of Maine. To this end, we share multiple perspectives on our new preceptor positions by the dean of the UMaine Honors College (Charlie Slavin); two honors faculty members (Mark Haggerty & Mimi Killinger) who served on the search committees; and the four new hires (Rob Glover, Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Jordan LaBouff, and Justin Martin). Our seven personal narratives each engage thematically with several central issues: newness and institutional resistance, identity formation, interdisciplinarity, and faculty retention. We try to be as honest as possible as we present our individual assessments of the initiative so far. We believe that a discussion of such thorny issues as nontenure- track appointments and the creation ex nihilo of a new kind of position will enable other institutions to make informed decisions as they consider implementing such a model