National Collegiate Honors Council
National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters
Date of this Version
2025
Document Type
Book Chapter
Citation
A chapter in Honoring the First-Year Seminar: Exploring High-Impact Learning Experiences for the First Year in Honors, pages 5-32
Lincoln, Nebraska: National Collegiate Honors Council, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-9450001-23-9
Abstract
Despite the challenges of a conversational approach to the FYS, the pedagogy has become engrained enough in the gateway seminar to the Westminster University Honors College that it would be hard to imagine adopting another strategy. Faculty tend to improve over time at leading such classrooms and regularly focus on the conversation-based features of their classes in their end-of-term self-reflections, as two teaching partners did in the following comments about the honors core course Global Welfare and Justice: “The strength of the class was the group dynamic and constellation of voices. It was an incredibly engaged class. Students challenged and built on each other’s comments in ways that led to rich analysis” (Etter and Weston). Alums, too, regularly return to campus, reporting the communication skills developed in Welcome to Thinking and other honors seminars as particularly formative and valuable. Even students considering the program understand the centering of student voices as fundamental; it always appears as one of the top five reasons prospective students apply to the honors college. For the fall 2018 and 2020 cohorts, the conversation-based pedagogy appeared as the second reason, and for the fall 2019, 2021, and 2022 cohorts it came in third. In fact, prospective students who visit Welcome to Thinking are most often struck by the apparent ease with which students engage in conversations about difficult texts and the inclusiveness of those discussions. We usually remind such visitors, however, that those confident displays reflect months of hard practice.
Ultimately, this conversation-based approach asks students to embrace “a life lived actively” (Rich 234) because that is the only way to fulfill our potential as individuals and as a society. As universities struggle to convince an increasingly skeptical public of the value of higher education, they might make more headway by demonstrating their ability to produce citizens skilled in making connections across differences and community building. If the next generation does not possess such competencies, we will most likely encounter, as Flammang warns us, a continued erosion of democracy and the emergence of even more authoritarian forms of government.
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Copyright 2025, NCHC and the authors. Used by permission