A literary dictionary assignment provides honors students with an understanding of the ways knowledge shifts and changes over time as well as an opportunity to create knowledge rather than just recall correct answers.

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…

What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students who conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as "doing more" (more exercises to gain psychological benefits and more work to gain higher GPAs), the authors of this paper piloted a new course in philosophy and religious studies.…

This essay describes a student-designed framework implemented by an honors program because of budget constraints. The framework's implementation, involving structured student leadership, feedback integration, and curricular adaptations, is detailed along with an exploration of the positive consequences of implementing a student-designed approach…

A series of courses on the Evolution of Ideas introduces interdisciplinary study, develops collaborative discourse, and promotes a sense of community among first-year honors students. The curriculum encourages faculty to use a range of strategies to help students understand an idea and its history while also fostering awareness as to its social,…

Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

In a plenary address at the 2023 NCHC annual conference in Chicago, the former Vice Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee issued a challenge for honors students and educators to use their voices and positions of local leadership to promote peace. The call for peace advocacy extended in Chicago resonated with the large audience, as leadership…

This essay documents approaches to growing honors affiliate faculties through community and university partnerships. The need for new strategies to prepare non-traditional faculties is shown by evidence that the student population is changing and by the critical responsibility honors programs have in the mentorship of diverse students.…

Jeffrey A. Portnoy offers some history of the journals and monographs published by the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) as well as insights into the work done by NCHC's Publications Board and its editors. He provides several morals or lessons based on his leadership roles and long career in honors education. [This article presents a…

Precipitated by a surge in enrollment, authors describe the three-phase revision (2017-2021) of a first-year peer mentoring program in honors. Grounded in student input and leadership, large-scale programmatic changes involve curriculum expansion, student leadership development, and co-curricular experiential support. Program objectives,…

While the conversation in honors about the mental health of students has persisted for over two decades, authors identify a marked increase in the need for student mental health support since the first Generation Z students entered college in 2015. A review of literature in honors indicates upticks in discourse relating to mental health (tn = 66)…

For more than half a century, the honors community has debated the role of standards. This comprehensive overview of those discussions--the first ever--traces the evolution of how honors education has defined itself from its early years right up until the 2022 adoption of the National Collegiate Honors Council's new "NCHC Shared Principles…

An interdisciplinary honors course titled "Minds, Machines, and Meaning" incorporates the notion of the algorithmic imaginary, which explains how people make use of algorithms to create new information infrastructures and communities and how these algorithms shape us in turn. Describing a culminating writing assignment in speculative…

This essay explores the conceptual and practical implications of an honors forum relating to artful expression and the phenomenon of sequester in place (SIP). As monthly general education offerings for first-year students, Honors Forums feature an array of thematic events associated with the freshman cohort. Noting challenges relating to remote…

Service-learning curriculum is grounded in a critical, asset-based framework of community engagement to guide honors students beyond a mere acquisition of skills toward understanding how participatory and democratic processes increase social equity and justice. An innovative, collaborative community arts program is described.