Hearts and Minds: Honors Programs in North American Christian Institutions

Abstract

For readers of this journal outside North America, the very concept of “honors education” may be confusing (since the word honours features in British and Commonwealth degree titles) or obscure (bringing to mind associations with aristocratic privilege or elitist competition). But in the United States the development of honors programs in colleges, and later honors colleges within universities, has been an important and growing trend of the last fifty years. Intended to recruit students of high intellectual aptitude, to serve their special needs, and to raise the academic profile of the host institution, honors programs have proliferated from a handful in the 1940s to more than 600, as catalogued in the most recent edition of Peterson's Guide to Honors Programs and Colleges (Digby, 2005). Even though the phrase “honors education” may have a peculiarly North American ring, the issues raised for those who teach highly talented university students are the same for Christian educators around the world, and very little has been published on the topic. With these essays we aim to identify some of the issues that are particularly relevant to Christian higher education for “honors” students, to explore how different theological traditions offer different pedagogical resources for teaching the gifted, and to describe some successful paradigms for cultivating hearts and minds toward service in the kingdom of God.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Aydelotte

(1924). Honors courses in American colleges and universities. Washington, DC: National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aydelotte

(1944). Breaking the academic lockstep: The development of honors work in American colleges and universities. New York: Harper.

Baigent

(2006). Focus on learning? Reflections on and reform of a programme for visiting students in the University of Oxford Portfolio submitted for the University of Oxford's Postgraduate Diploma in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Callahan

C. M.

(2001). Fourth down and inches. The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, 12 (3), 148–156.

Calvin College. (2004). Expanded statement of mission. Retrieved June 22, 2010, from http://www.calvin.edu/admin/provost/documents/esm.pdf

Campbell

R. J.

, Eyre

, Muijs

R. D.

, Neelands

J. G. A.

, & Robinson

(2004). The English model of gifted and talented education. National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth Occasional Papers, 8.

Chang

E. C.

(Ed.). (2001). Optimism and pessimism: Implications for theory, research, and practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Digby

(Ed.). (2005). Peterson's guide to honors programs and colleges (4th ed.). Lawrenceville, NJ: Thomson Peterson.

Gardner

(1993). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: Basic Books.

10.

Lane

(2006). The impact of K-12 gifted programs on postsecondary honors programming. Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, 7 (1), 63–73.

11.

Lee

S.-Y.

, & Olszewski-Kubilius

(2006). The emotional intelligence, moral judgment, and leadership of academically gifted adolescents. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 30 (1), 29–67.

12.

Marton

, & Säljö

(2005). Approaches to learning. In & Marton

, Hounsell

, & Entwistle

(Eds.), The experience of learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education (3rd Internet ed., pp. 39–58). Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. Retrieved June 22, 2010, from http://www.tla.ed.acuk/resources/EoL.html

13.

Mazzoli

, Campbell

R. J.

, & Muijs

R. D.

(2006). What's so different about gifted and talented students? National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth Occasional Papers, 14.

14.

National Collegiate Honors Council. (n.d.). About NCHC. Retrieved July 8, 2010, from http://www.nchchonors.org/aboutnchc.shtml

15.

Renzulli

J. S.

(1999). What is this thing called giftedness, and how do we develop it? A twenty-five year perspective. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 23 (1), 3–54. A version of this article is available online at http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/sem/semartl4.html

16.

Renzulli

J. S.

(2002). Expanding the conception of giftedness to include co-cognitive traits and to promote social capital. Phi Delta Kappan, 84 (1), 33–58.

17.

Renzulli

J. S.

, & Sytsma Reed

R. E.

(2008). Intelligences outside the normal curve: Co-cognitive traits that contribute to giftedness. In Plucker

& C. Callahan. (Eds.), Critical issues and practices in gifted education: What the research says (pp. 303–319). Waco, TX: Prufrock.

18.

Rinn

A. N.

(2003). Rhodes Scholarships, Frank Aydelotte, and collegiate honors education. The Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, 4 (1), 27–39.

19.

Rinn

A. N.

(2006). Major forerunners to honors education at the collegiate level. The Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, 7 (2), 63–81.

20.

Rinn

A. N.

(2007). Effects of programmatic selectivity on the academic achievement, academic self-concepts, and aspirations of gifted college students. Gifted Child Quarterly, 51 (3), 232–245.

21.

Schwehn

(1993). Exiles from Eden: Religion and the academic vocation in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

22.

Sternberg

R. J.

, & Davidson

J. E.

(Eds.). (1986). Conceptions of giftedness. New York: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Strand

(2006). Identifying gifted students. National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth Occasional Papers, 10.