The cornerstone of the L&S Honors Program are “Honors Only” seminars and faculty-led discussion sections, which promote active learning and community for Honors Program students. Offering Honors Only courses can help attract some of the university’s most intellectually curious and highly motivated undergraduates to explore your department and discipline. These courses are a joy to teach and can be deeply meaningful to the students.
What can make a course “Honors”?
- High value placed on inclusive discussion and meaningful student-faculty interactions
- Emphasis on the application(s) of course content, potentially including projects that take students outside of a classroom
- Focus on developing critical thinking and research skills, prioritizing primary texts, datasets, and academic papers over textbooks
- Topics, lessons, and projects are more student-driven than in a non-Honors course
- Additional insight into the instructor’s background, research interests, and expertise
Teaching Ideas
Activities
- Plan a class field trip and have students prepare the questions or activities to complete onsite or as a debrief
- Ask students to select topics that complement the standard syllabus and present and/or lead discussion about those topics
- Help students find and interview experts in the field
- Read foundational texts in your field and discuss the merits and limitations of earlier scholarship
- Encourage multiple modalities for synthesizing and presenting information; students can collaborate to create a website, record a podcast or video, or write and draw a comic
- Build in required interactions with campus resources such as the DesignLab, research librarians, and Writing Fellows (note that many Writing Fellows are Honors Program students!)
Topics
- We welcome course ideas from all L&S disciplines!
- Courses that carry L&S breadth credit are particularly welcome.
- Courses particularly sought by students are:
- Courses that carry biological/physical/natural science breadth and could appeal to non-science majors
- Courses with literature/humanities breadth that could appeal to non-humanities majors
- Social science breadth courses with content related to natural sciences, medicine, or legal studies, or communication
- Courses related to data and technology
Examples of Honors Seminars
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Botany 211: Science in a Changed Landscape – Wisconsin (Anne Pringle)
This course is intended for Honors undergraduate students with or without a background in science. The aim is to expose you to the changing uses of Wisconsin landscapes: as the home of native peoples; as a source of fur, lead and timber; as part of the new nation of the United States; and as a modern, vibrant collection of communities focused on enterprises as diverse as agriculture and education. We will ask: what roles did science play in shaping the landscape? What roles should it have played? What roles does science play in current land use? We will not be afraid to tackle controversy (genetically modified crops, the endangered species act, water use, global change), but we will remain committed to listening to, absorbing and respecting the diversity of experiences we bring to the classroom.
Legal Studies 430: Law and the Environment (Richard Keyser)
What role do ordinary people play in the management of natural resources and efforts to achieve sustainability? Where can I find the laws, judicial opinions, or rules that define how wolves or other endangered species are protected? What steps are local governments required to take to reduce phosphorus in our lakes? What toxics are disposed of near me? This class explores these questions in terms of environmental “governance,” the overall system and interactions among actors that determine how resources or aspects of the environment are managed. By focusing on law and legal history, this class introduces students to the historical background and current principles and practices of American laws, courts, government agencies, and NGOs, all of which play key roles in environmental governance.
Music 317: Musical Women in Europe and America: Creativity, Performance, Identity (Margaret Butler)
The course explores women’s musical activities and related issues by focusing on composers, performers, and audiences in a wide range of contexts, from Europe in the Medieval Era through 21st-century America. Themes include women’s roles in social, cultural, political, and economic spheres, and links between their activities in these milieus and those related to music. We will explore how women crafted their identities through their career choices, their responses to ideologies that influenced their participation, and their roles in performance, education, patronage, composition, and other musical activities. We will examine how modes of sociability, communication, and reception influenced and continue to shape women’s musical lives. This is an Honors Program course for the general student; no reading knowledge of music is required.
Political Science 182: Introduction to Comparative Politics (Honors) (Nils Ringe)
Introduction to Comparative Politics, one of the four sub-fields in Political Science, which involves the comparative analysis of political institutions, processes, and outcomes at the national level. Examines how to usefully compare politics in a variety of countries and makes comparisons explicit and systematic in order to determine how governments work, how power is organized and contested at the national level, and how people can participate and pursue their interests in different political settings. Includes key concepts, theories, methods, and country case studies. This is an Honors counterpart to the course Political Science 120.
You can read about faculty experiences teaching Honors Only discussions in recent issues of the annual Honors Challenge newsletter!
- 2020, page 8: Jonathan Martin teaches Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 101: Weather and Climate
- 2021, page 4: Jamie Henke teaches Music 151: Basic Concepts of Music Theory
General Structure
- A low-enrollment seminar or faculty-led discussion section (typically capped at 25 students or fewer)
- Enrollment limited to students declared in the Honors Program
- All students in an Honors section complete the same work; no way to opt out of Honors while in that section and no extra Honors assignments for certain students
Grading Policies
Guiding Principle
The Honors Program’s guiding principle for grading, affirmed by the Faculty Honors Committee, is that no student should be disadvantaged through having undertaken (or attempted) an Honors project.
Honors Only courses are NOT defined by being particularly accelerated or rigorous, and the overall workload should still align with the level and credits awarded for the course. Ideally, course content and pace supports meaningful depth of learning while also supporting students who may not have previous experience with the topic or discipline. Note that course requisites still apply.
In all cases, faculty are encouraged to clearly articulate grading policy in their syllabi and explain at the beginning of the semester.
Assignments
All students in the Honors section should be required to complete the same work and will be graded with the same (Honors) syllabus. Honors credit cannot be removed for individual students.
Honors Only discussion sections frequently have different assignments or assessments than the non-Honors sections of the course. Honors students may, for instance, complete a group project, a presentation, or community activity instead of (or in addition to) a standard writing assignment or test. Just as there is great flexibility in designing Honors assignments and courses, instructors are free to select the grading options and rubrics that best reflect their course activities and desired learning outcomes.
B or Better Rule
Students must earn a final grade of B or higher in an Honors course in order for the course credit to count towards an L&S Honors degree requirement. This is true for all types of Honors courses and for all L&S Honors degree tracks.
If a student completes an Honors Only course but earns a final grade below a B, DARS will not count the course credit toward Honors-specific requirements for that student. The transcript will still show that the student was in an Honors version of the course.
Contact Us
Honors staff are eager to support you at any stage of developing or teaching an Honors course. We would also love to hear and share your ideas of what has worked well while teaching an Honors course!
- Email us at honors@honors.ls.wisc.edu
Recent Alumni Perspectives
Abra Berkoff
I am incredibly grateful for my time in L&S Honors. One of the most valuable aspects of my Honors experience was having discussion each week with my professors. I appreciated getting to know my professors outside of lecture and delving deeper into the content they were very passionate and knowledgeable about.
Ananda Deacon
I liked the challenge my honors classes gave me, and it was refreshing to be around other students who actually appreciated that challenge too, and found the topics at hand as interesting as I did.
Andrew Pietroske
The Honors Program has allowed me to take a whole host of classes that I probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise; many in subjects that I never knew interested me. Working directly with professors also made a lot of the material that much more enjoyable.