Editor’s Introduction

Authors

Ada Long, University at Alabama at BirminghamFollow

Date of this Version

Fall 2018

Citation

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council 19.2 (Fall/Winter 2018) ISBN 978-1-945001-01-7 ISSN 1559-0151

Comments

© Copyright 2018 by the National Collegiate Honors Council

Abstract

Honors educators are used to organizing and teaching interdisciplinary courses and so are familiar with the paradox that faculty in different academic departments are typically unaware of what goes on in disciplines other than their own despite quickly recognizing that they have mutual interests, methodologies, and challenges. They inevitably learn about and from the work of colleagues in different fields, discovering opportunities to strengthen their scholarly and pedagogical work. They typically want and ask to teach other interdisciplinary courses and wonder why they haven’t thought to do so before. The same paradox exists in the scholarship on gifted and honors education. The two fields each have a long history of tackling many of the same challenges and coming up with creative solutions that would be invaluable to each other. While some theorists and practitioners of honors education have a history of working with their counterparts in gifted education, most are peripherally—if at all—aware of the field of gifted education even though some of the problems that perplex honors teachers have long been studied and understood by professionals in gifted education. Now, at last, formal connections between the two fields are becoming primary to the agenda of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) as it undertakes serious collaboration with the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC).