Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education
Edited by Robert Grover, Katherine O'Flaherty
Publication date:
16 August 2016Length of book:
126 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781475818260
Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education is the first volume in an edited series examining the proliferation of honors programs and colleges in American higher education. While honors education has become ubiquitous in American higher education, this transformation has happened without systematic attempts to align what honors means across institutions, and absent a universally agreed upon definitions of what honors is and what it might aspire to be in the future. This generates possibility and flexibility, while also creating rather serious challenges.
The contributors document the decades-long structural transformations that led to the rise of honors education while also providing perspective on the present and future challenges in honors education. The chapters address such issues as ensuring equity in honors, how we ought to think about student success and frame this for external stakeholders, and how the diffusion of honors-inspired pedagogies elsewhere in the university forces us to rethink our mission and our day-to-day practice. Throughout, their investigations are grounded in the present while turning a keen and perceptive eye to the future.
The contributors document the decades-long structural transformations that led to the rise of honors education while also providing perspective on the present and future challenges in honors education. The chapters address such issues as ensuring equity in honors, how we ought to think about student success and frame this for external stakeholders, and how the diffusion of honors-inspired pedagogies elsewhere in the university forces us to rethink our mission and our day-to-day practice. Throughout, their investigations are grounded in the present while turning a keen and perceptive eye to the future.
Given the many challenges facing higher education today, it is not surprising that honors leaders are wrestling with a wide range of issues at their institutions, including some challenges that are unique to creating a compelling honors experience for all learners. Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education is a timely publication and brings to light some of the most pressing issues while also providing relevant, historical context for these issues. The challenges identified in this inaugural issue (equity in the world of honors, the value of the honors education, and the role of traditional, honors pedagogical approaches in the future of an honors education) are each deserving of an entire volume. However, the approach taken to highlight these issues using on-point chapters has resulted in an accessible and useful volume, which informs honors leaders as they make strategic choices and investments for their programs and colleges.