Seminars
The heart of the Honors Program is five core seminar courses taken in each year of college. Each of these courses is designed to introduce students to a specific topic or way of thinking, while also developing foundational skills in writing, speaking and critical thinking.
Seminar topics build on one another in each semester, beginning in the first semester with an introduction to critical and reverential thought—to the asking and answering of questions by which humans create knowledge and interrogate self, society and world. In their second year, students are challenged to find patterns between disparate and distinct topics. The core seminars culminate in the junior and senior years with opportunities to explore real-world problems in society or the sciences. As students move through each year, the focus is on engaging in the process of active learning, while recognizing the strengths and limitations of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The goal is for students to see the value of both and begin to learn how to integrate multiple perspectives in order to solve problems.
Five Seminar Classes (15 total hours)
- Three credits each
- Students will normally take one seminar class each year
- Seminars are small, discussion-based courses.
- Students are expected to do assigned reading, research and other homework outside of class, and then in class, grapple aloud with the ideas they have encountered
- Students form claims and support their assertions, learning how to communicate effectively and disagree respectfully
HONS 120: Questions and the Spirit of Inquiry
All HONS 120 seminars address questions of abiding human concern:
- What is friendship?
- What does it mean to live well?
- What is wealth?
While exploring these “big questions,” students are introduced to the culture of Honors at SIUE, one that fosters inquiry, promotes the exploration of open-ended, often ambiguous questions, nurtures the capacity for self-examination, and turns for answers to our deep, shared, polyvalent human heritage.
HONS 121: Honors Rhetoric
Writing and speaking well play an essential role throughout the University, in our personal lives and in our professions. In this course, students study, develop and practice rhetoric, which is the art of persuasive and effective communication. Rhetoric applies not just to situations with arguments (like a courtroom) but also to those situations in which we are seeking to explain and to illuminate, where we seek to persuade people to accept our claims and arguments. However, rhetoric is richer than merely catering to an audience in trying to be persuasive. It is the act of creating a situation in which a speaker (or writer) can, with an audience, by defining and refining arguments, change the world, and in turn be changed.
HONS 121 gives students a chance to practice rhetoric in a safe and interesting way by pairing it with the HONS 120 course, tethering the skills of thinking and persuading to the questions and issues of the 120 course.
HONS 250: Patterns in Human Endeavors
The challenge in HONS 250 is for students to expand their perceptions of seemingly clear yet disparate concepts to discover and explore the links between those concepts. Whether exploring different types of knowledge, times, spaces or cultures, students will be challenged to identify, intuit and ultimately illuminate connections that may not be clearly obvious. The Honors 250 seminar introduces students to a tool (or tools) for recognizing and interpreting patterns.
HONS 320A: Interdisciplinary Problems in Society and Culture
HONS 320B: Interdisciplinary Problems in Science and Technology
These two seminars serve as a cap to the honors core classes. They are not linked, do not have to be taken in sequence (A before B), and in most cases will be taken in different semesters. The goal in these classes is to explore real-world problems that resist solutions from any one perspective. Instead, the seminars require students to use not only their developing disciplinary knowledge, but to expand on the critical thinking skills developed in the earlier honors core classes to integrate any perspectives that may lead to successful solutions. As such, they serve as a transition point and an integration point. They transition honors students toward worldly problems, in which our knowledge has to be applied. They serve as integration points by requiring honors students to combine their honors courses and their major coursework. They also encourage students to begin looking beyond their limited time at the University to their responsibility as leaders in their chosen fields and the wider world.
