June 13–16, 2022, the Honors Program will offer an Honors Teaching Workshop which will meet from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (or longer if participants would like) each of these days. This workshop is for anyone who is interested in teaching Honors courses in the future and would like to be part of a community working through some of the most recent work on most effective practices for student learning.  The workshop is limited to 10 participants who will receive stipends for their time.

The purpose of this workshop is multifold.  Primarily, to encourage and prepare participants to teach more courses that will count for Honors.  Additonally, to create a community of instructors and to further each participant’s thinking about pedagogy as informed by some of the most recent (as well as some of the classic) work in the field.

Honors courses at Drake are not exclusively for Honors students and many are cross-listed within departments (and thus count toward major/minor/concentration requirements).  The defining characteristics of Honors courses are

(i) Discussion dependent: in the classroom, students are primary contributors to each other’s learning

(ii) Broadly interdisciplinary: putting into conversation disciplines which are not routinely in conversation with each other – ideally, the arts, humanities, social science and natural/physical sciences are included along with attention to professional fields.  The ideal rarely happens but the goal is to accustom students to working with different disciplines even those where they are not experts and to accustom students to talking with people who do not have shared vocabularies

(iii) Capped at 20: to make healthy discussion routinely possible

(iv) Writing intensive: critical thinking and communication skills are fundamental to learners growth and we know that routine writing improves both of these.

Another unofficial common characteristic of Honors Courses is that the instructor is a co-learner with the students. Of course, the instructor is a more experienced learner and has expertise that shouldn’t be ignored, but instructors visibly participating in the practice of learning is identified by many Honors students as important to them.

Prior to the workshop, I will send out a list of possible books to read together and ask participants to identify which books they’d like to work through together.  The Honors Program will purchase for participants books that are not available electronically through Cowles.

Please email Jennifer McCrickerd (Jennifer.mccrickerd@drake.edu), director of the Honors Program, and Charlene Skidmore (Charlene.skidmore@drake.edu), assistant director of the Honors Program, to express interest or ask any questions you may have.

— Renée Cramer, Deputy Provost