Citizenship and related values are common elements in the missions of honors programs. Our goal was to design a junior honors seminar with an intentional focus on developing citizenship, civic identity, and civic virtues through engagement with the challenging history of our city, Montgomery, Alabama. The course employed four evidence-based…

Dr. Ada Long (1945-2024) advocated for equal access to quality education. Authors suggest that her reflections on neighborhoods, community, and intentional inclusion were not one-off musings but rather indicative of how she saw her responsibility as an educator. Drawing on Long's establishment of a lecture series that brought faculty into a local…

By incorporating visual mapping into students' thinking and writing processes, a narrative assignment in geo-literacy creates a reflective and agency-based learning experience for student writers in a first-year honors seminar.

One reason that honors faculty often engage students in seminar discussions is to keep debate's features of competition, argument, and discord at bay. Intentionally structured academic debate represents a transdisciplinary pedagogy capable of cultivating ethical and empathetic citizenship through critical and creative thinking. The author uses…

When I was appointed fellowships advisor at UAB back in the late 1990s and before the formation of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors, as a first order of business I spoke with the university's few former winners and finalists about their experiences applying for nationally competitive scholarships. One such former applicant, now an…

Annmarie Guzy teaches honors composition at the University of South Alabama. This essay discusses her observation that students who took her class were more likely to complete the honors program, which led to her wondering what elements of her course might give students an edge in honors program completion. As an English professor with training in…

For decades, research has shown that higher levels of education correspond to increased interest in politics and civic engagement. Despite the vast amount of scholarly attention, why this link exists is still disputed. One theory about the connection is the civic education hypothesis, which claims that the causal link between education and civic…

Annmarie Guzy, an expert with almost three decades of experience in post-secondary honors education, responds to Jerry Herron's essay, "Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy," which argues that "a well-conceived admissions policy tells us much more than whom to recruit; it becomes the basis for a…

On Thursday, April 27, 2011, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of Alabama struck in the form of ferocious tornadoes touching down in various parts of the state. The dollar amount of the property damage was in the billions. Lives were lost and thousands of survivors' lives were seriously and in many cases forever disrupted. A few…

In "Costs and Benefits in the Economy of Honors," Richard Badenhausen identifies several pressing issues regarding the economic status of honors in the current financial climate of higher education, including the role of faculty in addressing those issues. In her response to Badenhausen's essay, Annmarie Guzy, a faculty member at the…

Coupling the scholarly activities of the chemistry research faculty with that of the first-year honors general chemistry laboratory has resulted in additional research experience for undergraduate students and a rise of productivity within the chemistry department. For seven years, first-year university honors students enrolled in the honors…