Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education : Present Successes and Future Challenges in Honors Education

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.

Robert W. Glover, PhD, is an assistant professor of honors and political science at the University of Maine. His research focuses on democratic engagement, public policy, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Katherine M. O’Flaherty, PhD, is an honors faculty fellow in the Honors College at Arizona State University. She is an historian who currently researches student engagement and pedagogy and assessment in higher education.