National Collegiate Honors Council

 

Date of this Version

2011

Citation

Published in Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Vol. 12, No.1 (Spring/Summer 2011). ISSN 1559-0151.

Comments

Copyright © 2011 by the National Collegiate Honors Council.

Abstract

In 2008 the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council published a series of essays which editor Ada Long described as a “rich and varied conversation about the culture of honors” (10). The contributors, mostly honors administrators, included Charlie Slavin, Dean of the University of Maine Honors College, whose lead article provided “one cornerstone . . . that is common to the culture of honors: taking intellectual risks” (15). George Mariz echoed Slavin in his claim that honors “is, above all, a culture of intellectual effort” (24). He posits that, “while [it] is catholic and inclusive, it is also discriminating and critical” (24). Jim Ford writes that another cornerstone of honors culture includes students with “a passion for knowledge and for wisdom” (28) while Paul Strong stresses the importance of shared identities, camaraderie, and a healthy dose of humor complementing the serious nature of the honors endeavor.

How this culture is actually created in the classroom was the starting point of research undertaken at the behest of our dean by a group of students and faculty in the honors college at the University of Maine. While the administrators of honors programs have a sense of what they think characterizes an honors culture, our questions were how faculty and students understand and implement this culture in a classroom; how honors models and pedagogies play out; and what factors exert more influence than others in achieving the honors culture to which we aspire. In a program such as ours, with faculty coming from a number of disciplinary homes and schools of thought, we wanted to know how the culture of honors is cultivated in practice. As Charlie Slavin is fond of saying, “some people get honors and some don’t.”

Our study is a preliminary one only, a point to keep in mind throughout the discussion. A much larger research project would be necessary to draw broad conclusions, but this study sheds some light on the nature of honors culture from the perspective of faculty and students and, as such, is a worthwhile contribution to that “rich and varied conversation” described by Long. Our research focused on the first course that incoming students take in honors (HON 111) and included observations of only the first five weeks in two of the sixteen sections of the course offered in the fall 2009 semester. Using non-participant observation in the classrooms and surveys of students and faculty, we sought to understand how a random group of individuals brought together in a section of HON 111 emerges as a class with a shared identity and purpose.

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