HONORS 210G: Honors Intermediate Seminar

The Honors College Intermediate Seminar shares the attributes of university-wide intermediate seminars in its attention to developing analytical reading and writing skills, cultivating critical thinking, guiding students to learn how to synthesize material from two or more sources to support an argument, and leading them to understand and practice that writing is a process of revision, with each draft helping the student to gain increasing confidence and ability to articulate and express an idea and its development, culminating in a sustained presentation of a logically constructed enlargement. Self-assessment is a crucial aspect of the Honors College IS, as it is of the university-wide IS, and instructors are encouraged to develop self-assessment tools so that students may evaluate their growth as writers and also learn to recognize their strengths and areas for improvement. The Honors College Intermediate Seminar also requires students to use technology, for example, to access electronic databases for secondary material or construct a powerpoint slideshow for an in-class presentation. The Honors Intermediate Seminar exhibits a central feature of the Honors curriculum: interdisciplinary for content and pedagogy. Thus, and Honors intermediate seminar includes materials from different disciplines (the intermediate seminar on "collecting" for example, draws on readings from psychology, sociology, and history; the intermediate seminar on "Baseball" includes perspectives and analyses of the game from biology, physics, and history). Students are taught how to engage texts and data/information from multiple disciplines, and through the IS pedagogy, they are equipped with the skills to synthesize their understanding of concepts across disparate disciplines. Instruction might also include field trips to significant sites so that students can acquire hands-on experience with relevant materials and interact with practitioners in their work locations. Assignments are designed