Honors at FSCJ

Continuity and Innovation in Honors College Curricula is the second volume in the edited series Honors Education in Transition, which examines the proliferation of honors programs and colleges in American higher education. While honors education has become ubiquitous in American higher education, this transformation has happened without systematic attempts to align what honors means across institutions, and absent a universally agreed upon definitions of what honors is and what it might aspire to be in the future. This generates possibility and flexibility, while also creating rather serious challenges. This book examines dynamic attempts to think creatively about curriculum, a hallmark of honors in higher education. The authors document and discuss innovative attempts ranging from service-learning to international education to innovative ways to blend disciplinary models of pedagogy with honors teaching. Throughout, their investigations are grounded in the present while turning a keen and perceptive eye to the future.

How does the pursuit of an undergraduate honors education support excellence, innovation and ingenuity? This book offers examples of these things as they occur in honors colleges and programs throughout the USA. However, it additionally throws light on questions of how education generally (and in this case, particularly higher education) impacts on what we can do to contribute to our pool of human knowledge, to support individual and social aspiration, to empower creativity and invention, and, indeed, to make positive individual and communal futures through education. In many ways, the writers here explore the contribution of honors education to the world beyond honors. Equally, they are investigating honors education, from the inside, and contemplating how they can make this aspect of education fundamentally a home of innovative and ingenious practices. The range of discussion in this book stretches from considering active engagement with the global to enhancing approaches to leadership and leadership cultivation, and from applying distinctive styles of thinking to embracing and developing outstanding types of community partnerships. The volume discusses what those in honors education are doing to live up to the promise the ideal of “honors” popularizes and is said to exemplify.

In education, sorting students according to attainment is common. Such sorting clearly sets up the potential for exclusion, based on the attainment ideals and on the modes of selection. Ideals of inclusion suggest diversity, and those of equity, by reference to impartiality, suggest freedom from bias. Honors education, which celebrates excellence, and references “honor” and all that word and concept infers, heightens and promotes the principled recognition of attainment, giving rise to questions of diversity, equity and inclusion. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), in its Ten Steps to Equity in Education, notes that inclusion is intertwined with fairness. How can honors education—and in the case of the discussions in this book, largely honors in US higher education—promote fairness, be diverse, and support equity? If it does not do so, how can it at all claim to be offering a principled version of what the National Collegiate Honors Council (USA) says are “opportunities for measurably broader, deeper, and more complex learning-centered and learner-directed experiences for its students”?In 2015, the National Society for Minorities in Honors (www.nsfmih.org) was launched in the USA to specifically explore, support and promote diversity, equity and inclusion in and across honors colleges and programs. The first annual NSFMIH conference was held at Oakland University, Michigan. This book began at that inaugural conference, and has been enhanced by enthusiastic contributions beyond that event as well.

Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education is the first volume in an edited series examining the proliferation of honors programs and colleges in American higher education. While honors education has become ubiquitous in American higher education, this transformation has happened without systematic attempts to align what honors means across institutions, and absent a universally agreed upon definitions of what honors is and what it might aspire to be in the future. This generates possibility and flexibility, while also creating rather serious challenges. The contributors document the decades-long structural transformations that led to the rise of honors education while also providing perspective on the present and future challenges in honors education. The chapters address such issues as ensuring equity in honors, how we ought to think about student success and frame this for external stakeholders, and how the diffusion of honors-inspired pedagogies elsewhere in the university forces us to rethink our mission and our day-to-day practice. Throughout, their investigations are grounded in the present while turning a keen and perceptive eye to the future.

Structural Challenges and the Future of Honors Education is the third volume in an edited series examining the proliferation of honors programs and colleges in American higher education. While honors education has become ubiquitous in American higher education, this transformation has happened without systematic attempts to align what honors means across institutions, and absent a universally agreed upon definitions of what honors is and what it might aspire to be in the future. This generates possibility and flexibility, while also creating rather serious challenges. Many such challenges are structural: perpetual budgetary constraints, changing expectations about the role of high education and the return it ought to provide to the student, and the changing technological landscape of higher education and society more generally. The contributors here examine the structural challenges honors education currently faces and those forces it is likely to confront in the future, offering insights about how honors might respond creatively to these present and future challenges."

At a time in American history when football ruled the American campus and fraternities dominated student life, Frank Aydelotte, through his determination to specialize exclusively in initiating an Honors program of study, accomplished a feat virtually unknown in American higher education. That is, he succeeded in shaping one regional, run of the mill, Quaker school - Swarthmore College - into an intellectually-charged, academically-focused institution able to command national respectability, prestige, and financial support and commit itself to intellectual life at a time when higher education in the United States met with pressures against such change. Under Aydelotte's leadership, Swarthmore was able to hold out in a period of tremendous expansion of higher education and staggering growth of intercollegiate athletics, "student activities," and vocational education. While oxymoronic in the early 20th century to suggest to mainstream America that a college would define itself by a commitment to the life of the mind, Aydelotte did just that, indelibly shaping the culture of Swarthmore in a manner so deep-seated as to persist to the present day. The ways in which Swarthmore changed as a college under Aydelotte's leadership shed light on how change occurs and persists in higher education and how change on a single campus can bring about wide-spread educational reform that affects a nation. Frank Aydelotte returned from his time in England as a Rhodes Scholar fully committed to affording to America's highest achieving college students the educational experiences that had shaped him while abroad. A complicated combination of idealism and elitism, mixed with a deep reformer's drive to spread the Oxford gospel in America, led to his focus on pedagogy when he returned to the US. Aydelotte undertook concrete and highly strategic steps toward the long-term goal of introducing to American higher education Oxford-like methods aimed at empowering intellectually-oriented students to excel far beyond the barriers present in American education that resulted from high achievers being held back by the "pace of the average." This mission became his personal crusade for the rest of his life and played out most vividly on the campus of tiny Swarthmore College where he served as president from 1921 to 1940.

A comprehensive summary of best practices in ethics development on campus, providing a variety of practical ways to promote formation of ethics and character among college students and young adults. We are all called upon to make ethical decisions every day--ones regarding being honest with others, not cheating in order to save effort or get ahead, or avoiding involvement in situations that will result in injury to ourselves or others--in short, choosing whether or not to do the "right thing" in all types of situations. On every relational level and throughout an unlimited range of everyday choices and actions, ethical issues come into play. This is especially true for students and young adults. Graduating with Honor: Best Practices to Promote Ethics Development in College Students offers best practices for ethical formation on campus, covering subjects such as how to create an organizational culture of ethics; ethical decision-making situations and circumstances on- and off-campus, curricular and extracurricular; specific developmental goals and challenges in the college setting; ethical principles for decision making; and how faith communities can serve the promotion of student ethics. The book also provides multiple resources and examples of successful efforts to mediate unethical behavior by colleges, supplies a theoretical foundation for ethical formation in college, and outlines what colleges, parents, and students themselves can do to nurture ethical development during the college years. Provides best practices on how university students can develop ethical decision-making skills and explains how the college environment can be an excellent place to nurture the development of an ethical imperative in young adults Presents an effective and practical model for personal ethical decision-making that encourages individuals of any age to be thoughtful, intentional, and more likely to maintain one's moral integrity, best interests, and personal sense of honor Documents how a thoughtful approach to the formation of ethics and character during college can impact significant social issues, such as sexual assaults, problematic drinking, cheating on tests, and discrimination, both on-campus and in the general population