Questions, Patterns and Problems
At SIUE, we have programs of study in traditional areas like the natural sciences, arts, humanities, communications, and social/behavioral sciences, as well as dynamic professional programs in business, engineering, nursing, education and pharmacy.
The University Honors Program complements these programs by offering the experience of a small, liberal arts college in the midst of a vibrant and growing University. Instead of the traditional University general education courses, honors students complete a smaller honors curriculum, composed of discussion-based courses taught by specially selected and dedicated faculty members from all areas of the University. The Honors Program offers the best of a mid-sized university and a small liberal arts college.
The honors curriculum allows students to explore ideas and topics at a depth unparalleled by most general education courses. Our curriculum is composed of 19 credit hours of coursework: five seminars (three credit hours each) and four proseminars (one credit hour each). The curriculum is designed to help prepare students for life—to think about and pursue worthy and humanly meaningful topics.
The seminars are sequenced: questions, patterns, and problems. We teach students in their first year how to ask questions of abiding human concern and provide them the critical tools by which we answer such questions—the rhetorical tools by which we turn opinions into justified, true knowledge. In their second year, students are trained to find patterns and given tools to interpret patterns. These thinking tools help honors students make connections across different areas of human knowledge. In their third and fourth years, while taking early honors coursework and increasingly advanced disciplinary or professional training, honors students are provided the opportunity to apply their learning and experience to pressing, contemporary problems. These last seminars force students to confront problems in both society and science that don’t have easy answers. In the face of great uncertainty, these ‘problem’ seminars provide the resistance that will force students to integrate their education and recognize that we find our way to meaningful lives by working to fix or heal the world.
Alongside the seminars, honors students are also taking a set of proseminars. Each of the proseminars is offered in an eight-week format and organized around discussion. Like the seminars, they are sequenced. The proseminars follow a ‘telescopic lens’ pattern in which the focus shifts: near, far, middle. In their first year, students take a seminar focused on the nature of education: why are we here, specifically, at the University; what is the value of education. An examination of the near. In their second year, they interrogate where they are: the interconnected, globalized world. An examination of the far. In the third and fourth years, the last two proseminars focus on problems and issues of the middle. In one, students explore a ‘special topic’—a question or concern that students have raised and asked the program to provide the opportunity to explore. In their final proseminar—the honors capstone course—students have the opportunity to practice citizenship by learning how to make their expert knowledge available to an audience of amateurs. Students end up between the local and the global, seeking to revitalize and sustain the public sphere that undergirds our democracy.
This sequential coursework allows our students to leave the honors program as accomplished and capable graduates with an exceptional edge in communicating, networking and critical thinking. They leave prepared for the work of healing the world and building the future, whether that is as a pharmacist or engineer, a teacher or an entrepreneur, a politician or nurse, a librarian or a doctor.
