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 225-258
Lincoln, Nebraska: National Collegiate Honors Council, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-9450001-23-9
Abstract
Our decision at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL) to develop a peer mentor program in the Pierre Laclede Honors College (PLHC) First-year seminar (FYS) began in a spring 2014 campuswide FYS committee meeting. Having previously developed three essential cornerstones that all variations of the FYS on campus would need to include—campus connections, academic engagement, and development support—university leaders decided that best practices in FYS courses demanded the inclusion of peer mentors in all versions of the course. As honors faculty, we had frankly never contemplated this addition to our fully developed and successful academic FYS program. In fact, without such prompting from the university, the faculty members teaching the course would have undoubtedly questioned the need for mentors or perhaps even actively lobbied against the significant work and intrusion into class time that such an initiative could create. Because the faculty team realized that our continued independent control of the honors FYS and university funding to support its activities and events depended on our use of peer mentors, they agreed to fashion a role for peer mentors within our academic seminar FYS. Despite this challenging beginning, we now consider this peer mentor program one of the highlights of our FYS and a significant source of innovation, academic improvement, and community building within our honors college.
Comments
Copyright 2025, NCHC and the authors. Used by permission