Proseminars
Proseminars are designed as one credit hour courses that are discussion intensive and are normally offered in an eight-week block. They are designed to provide honors students the opportunity for engagement with faculty and other honors students around issues essential for success at the University and in professional and civic life. Proseminars work alongside the honors seminar by providing students the opportunity to explore the contexts in which their learning and living is taking place.
Like the seminars, the proseminars build on each other. In the first year, honors students explore the near immediacy of their lives as students and they examine the value of education. In their second year, they pull back and examine the wide frame: the globalized world. If we are at the University, we are also in the world and connected to the whole. In their last two years, honors students examine the in between of near and far: the middle. The preeminent middle experience is the public sphere and our essential identity in the middle is that of citizenship. When we act as citizens, we are bridging our particular, private identities and our membership in the whole of humanity; we have to learn how to communicate, navigate and compromise as we are confronted by difference. The middle practice of citizenship is essential to democratic life; of learning how to act beyond our particular selves yet without the support of absolutes.
Overview
- One credit hour each
- Students will take one proseminar in the spring semester of each year, except for HONS 499, which is normally taken in the last semester of attendance
- Proseminar classes are smaller (fewer than 20 students) and are scheduled for eight-week periods
- The primary learning method is intensive conversation and discussion
- Success is measured, not necessarily by regular homework, but by in-class participation and engagement with ideas in a smaller setting with peers and faculty
HONS 100: On Education
Honors 100 is an examination of:
- The value of education
- The nature of liberal education
- Learner-directed and learner-centered pedagogy
- The necessity of a spirit of inquiry for success in all fields of work
This course provides students the opportunity to reflect on the nature of an honors education and to become familiar with some of the debates about the relations between learning, working and living.
HONS 200: Globalization
Honors 200 provides students the opportunity to reflect on the world, the processes that are shaping it and drawing us closer together, and to recognize the inherent linkages between the local and the global, between ourselves and the rest of the world. This wider frame is essential to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan sensibility, making us aware of the diversity of the human experience. However, it is also essential for practical reasons—our connections to others around the world condition our jobs, our health and our futures.
HONS 300: Special Topics
Honors 300 explores variable topics. The topic will change regularly and will be determined by a facilitated consultation between the faculty and the Honors Student Association. This approach allows our students to have a meaningful influence on the program by focusing on topics that, from their perspective, appear pressing and urgent. Starting in Spring 2022, the topic with be Social Justice.
HONS 499: Honors Capstone on Civic Life
As honors students approach graduation, they have had years to cultivate expertise in their own fields. Honors 499 explores how experts can most effectively communicate complex matters to a general audience in an accessible fashion. This ability to bring our specialized learning to the common ground of public life impresses upon students the need to implement and share their knowledge in their daily lives as professionals, leaders and citizens in order to empower those around them to get to the work of fixing the problems that confront us.
