A cohort of five students and one faculty member share ways in which their Bulgarian study abroad experience (2024) built upon an existing international partnership and, in so doing, aligned with the tenets of, and goals for, "neighborhoods" as described by Dr. Ada Long (1945-2024). The authors describe lessons learned through the unique…

This study presents a scaffold approach to building critical academic writing skills among honors students. Faced with limited instructional time, a reading-intensive curriculum, and students in need of rigorous writing instruction, a scaffold model was developed to include a series of condensed writing assignments called "Close Reading…

The COVID pandemic has exacerbated structural, demographic, and financial challenges faced by American higher education institutions and their honors programs and colleges. Likewise, the Black Lives Matter movement has made plain the inequities in the higher education sector. The new "normal" post-COVID will challenge honors…

Moved by the lived experience of an honors student, authors describe a three-year Honors and Eating Concerns Research Collaborative (2019-2022), which examines the relationship between perfectionism and eating concerns among honors students. Under faculty advisement, first- and second-year honors psychology majors (n = 5) participated in the…

"Honors Work: Seeing Gaps, Combining Gifts, Focusing on Wider Human Needs" describes the authors' collaborative work with high school girls to bring Canadian activist Leigh Boyle and "The Lipstick Project" story to Maine in April, 2017. "The Lipstick Project," which Boyle founded and directs, is a women-run volunteer…

At the end of a two-year Honors Civilizations sequence based on a Great Books curriculum, students at the University of Maine write a reflective essay that describes their personal and intellectual journey with the texts they have encountered over the previous four semesters. Students can describe a theme or narrative that has emerged in their…

Blogging is an excellent way to implement students bringing their further insights to their classmates following an exciting class discussion, continuing an exchange of ideas and providing students with another tool to improve their writing skills. Student class blogging offers many benefits--for student and instructor alike--compared to assigning…

Like many other universities of its kind, the University of Maine (UMaine) has a centralized body, the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR), charged with engaging motivated students in independent learning and in the creation of new knowledge. UMaine furthermore has an honors college that is likewise committed to fostering undergraduate…

This article describes the experiences of four honors mothers as they offer sage advice. They argue convincingly that they are motivated, focused students who bring rich diversity to college programs. They further report disturbing marginalization and isolation that could be ameliorated with support and increased sensitivity on the part of…

Chronologically presented courses that span centuries often catalyze unwitting buy-in to unexamined narratives of progress. While useful for helping students make connections between the human past, present, and future, Great Books honors curricula like the one used at the University of Maine have a few inherent problems that require careful…

This article explores the multiple educational uses of the question, "what do you mean by_____?" as an interlocutor's conversational gesture during classroom discussion, as a text-based prompt for both encoding/writing and decoding/reading, and as a rhetorical device for an effective oral presentation. Kaitlin Briggs explains that the…

New England University (NEU) provides a case study of the risk that change might undermine an existing university asset in the context of growth in honors; it is a story about the efforts of faculty, students, and staff committed to evoking and sustaining excellence in one honors program to respond to the vision of a new president who placed…