In This Issue...
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NCHC23: Early Bird and Group Discounts
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2024 Dues Renewal
Exciting things are ahead for NCHC in 2024, and we want you to be a part of it!
If your honors budget is facing a use-it-or-lose-it situation as your fiscal year closes, consider getting a jump-start on your NCHC membership for 2024 with an advanced renewal!
If you would like an invoice for advanced membership renewal, simply reply to this message with your request and our office staff will generate and send an invoice to you. In the meantime, more information about the Institutional Membership dues structure can be found on our website.
As a reminder, current memberships do not expire until December 31, 2023.
Thank you for your dedication to NCHC, and for being a part of the national honors community!
NCHC23
Early Bird Registration Closes August 31!
Have you secured your best deal to attend NCHC23 in Chicago? Early Bird registration pricing and 10+ Student Group pricing ends August 31, in just a few short weeks! We can't wait to welcome you back together for a wonderful event this fall.
Don't forget: If you're a presenter at NCHC23, you must be registered AND paid by August 31 to secure your presentation in the schedule. If your plans have changed and you won't be presenting, please let us know as soon as possible by completing the Presenter Change Form.
Register Today!
NCHC23 Student Group Discount
Did you know? Institutions bringing 10+ students to the NCHC22 Conference in Dallas can get a significant discount on their group registration! Just complete a Group Registration Form with all the details for your 10+ student attendees, and return it to NCHC's National Office before the Early Bird registration deadline. NCHC Staff will complete your group registration and provide you with a bulk invoice for payment. Round up your traveling crew and register your group today!
This $350 Early Bird registration rate is open to those registering 10 or more undergraduate-level students currently enrolled in an NCHC Member institution. The Early Bird 10+ Student Group discount may only be used when registering the appropriate group size at once, and will not be applied and/or adjusted if your group ends up qualifying for the 10+ discounted rate after the initial registration. This $350 rate is valid until August 31, 2022, and will increase to the standard rate on September 1, 2022.
NCHC23
Join NCHC as we Celebrate in Chicago this November! We're giving away two more FREE REGISTRATIONS to #NCHC23, and all you have to do to enter is register! On August 1, the next name will be drawn from all registered attendees to receive a free conference registration.
Registrations must be received by 11:59pm CST on July 31 to be eligible to win. All registrations received by NCHC prior to August 1 are included as eligible for the drawing.
One more winner will be drawn on September 1; the earlier you register, the more chances you have to win!
PRESENTERS: Don't forget! All NCHC23 presenters must be registered and paid by August 31 to secure your place in the conference schedule.
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Join Beginning in Honors at NCHC23
For many years, attendees have come to the NCHC Annual Conference to take part in sessions that bring the best of honors education to the forefront. Content that focuses on innovative ideas, best practices, troubleshooting challenges, and guiding examples to develop flourishing honors experiences are routinely the most popular and most beneficial trainings that NCHC conference attendees experience.
As we come together to discuss "Revolutionary Honors" in 2023, those new to honors or early in their careers should consider taking part in the Beginning in Honors signature program track. Join a cohort of other directors that are just starting out in their roles in honors, and learn from some of the most seasoned honors directors in the nation. Beginning in Honors provides you the nuts-and-bolts information you need to grow your program and meet the needs of your honors students and faculty.
After BIH is complete, join in the New Directors Reception for some bonding time with your new colleagues!
RSVP for the Beginning in Honors track during your NCHC23 registration process. And if you are a First Time Attendee to the NCHC Conference, watch your inbox for more details about special activities!
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Call for Arts Master Classes
Welcome to the NCHC23 Chicago Arts Master Classes!
Arts master classes are performance workshops and clinics that allow for individual or group creative presentations, coached or facilitated by experts in the discipline. This year we are offering master classes in drama, film, micro fiction, and music.
Applicants for the music master class must submit a recorded audition piece.
Audiovisual (AV) technology is available for arts master classes. All AV requests must be made at the time of proposal submission. Late AV requests cannot be accommodated.
DRAMA: The drama master class will be facilitated by Donna Clevinger (Mississippi State University). Questions should be directed to dclevinger@honors.msstate.edu.
FILM: The film master class will be facilitated by Michele Forman (University of Alabama Birmingham). Questions should be directed to mforman@uab.edu.
MICROFICTION - New this year! The microfiction master class will be facilitated by Jennifer Cognard-Black (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). [We all know what short fiction is—but what is a microfiction? At its most basic, a microfiction is a story told in 280 words or less. Yet this form must also catch a reader’s breath, offering compelling characters, a central problem, efficient plots, and resonant endings. As the well-known microfictionist Jerome Stern has asked, “What can be done on a single typed page in this oldest of ways of telling? What bright shapes can it contain?"] Questions should be directed to jcognard@smcm.edu.
MUSIC: The music master class will be facilitated by Galit Gertsenzon (Ball State University), Bernardo Scarambone (Eastern Kentucky University), Larry Smith (Missouri Baptist University), and Rebecca Sorley (University of Indianapolis). Questions should be directed to ggertsenzon@bsu.edu.
Evaluation of applicants will begin on May 26, 2023, with participants being selected on a rolling basis through August 31, 2023. The earlier you apply, the greater your chance of acceptance and the more time you will have to arrange funding and transportation for the conference. Successful application by July 1, 2023, will ensure inclusion in the prepared conference materials.
General questions regarding the NCHC23 Arts master classes should be directed to Steven Edwards at sedwar@dcc.edu or (504) 234-4457.
Steven Edwards (Delgado Community College)
Coordinator, NCHC23 Arts Master Classes
Submit for the Arts Master Classes
Dates and Deadlines
Take note of these upcoming important dates for NCHC members!
| July 23-26 | NCHC New Directors Institute - Chicago, IL |
| July 26-28 | NCHC iSpark Institute - Chicago, IL |
| August 1 | Deadline for Monograph Abstracts - Contributions to an Edited Collection on Honors, Faculty Development, and Centers for Teaching and Learning |
| August 9 | Free Virtual RT: Teaching CRT: Pitfalls and Challenges |
| August 31 | NCHC23 Presenter Registration and Payment Deadline |
| NCHC23 Early Bird Pricing Ends | |
| September 1 | JNCHC Submissions Deadline |
| September 8 | Student of the Year Award Deadline |
| September 15 | UReCA Submissions Deadline - 2023 Issue |
Call for Monograph Papers
Contributions to an Edited Collection on Honors, Faculty Development, and Centers for Teaching and Learning
Overview:
This proposed collection outlines the strong connections between priorities in honors education and faculty development that focus on excellence in teaching and learning. Such connections suggest the value of strong working relationships between honors programs or colleges and centers for teaching and learning (CTLs).
While honors program and honors colleges focus heavily on developing students, they also serve to develop faculty. Designing and teaching honors courses can break faculty out of their disciplinary silos and comfort zones and encourage student-centered teaching, experiential learning, collaborative undergraduate research, alternative forms of assessment, and other dynamic forms of instruction. Teaching in honors is not a question, simply, of adding more work to a syllabus, changing grading criteria, or approaching class as if it is an advanced graduate seminar. To teach in honors well and authentically, faculty must revisit philosophy, methods, and assessment to make teaching and learning more active and inspiring.
Notably, these are often central charges also taken up by CTLs, underscoring how both honors and faculty development units or initiatives on a campus help faculty to engage students in different ways and enhance learning by implementing innovative pedagogical strategies; by ensuring an equitable, inclusive learning environment; and by providing the kind of relationship-rich, close mentoring that transforms high-achieving, motivated learners. The good news is that by forging an intentional relationship between honors and campus faculty development efforts, the enriched outcomes of such reinvigorated teaching spill over from honors courses to others when honors serves as an incubator for new curricular ideas and teaching approaches. Essentially, honors is faculty development that benefits the entire institution, and the lessons instructors learn from honors, CTLs, and other broad faculty development opportunities result in teaching improvements that deepen learning among all students. The even better news is that whether or not a formalized partnership exists between honors and faculty development, teaching in honors stimulates the kind of critical rethinking and adjusted pedagogical practices that improve instruction and student learning in distinct and transferable ways. Accordingly, we expect this volume will include a number of powerful testimonies that affirm honors and faculty development as nexus.
This collection seeks to bring honors deans, directors, staff, and faculty into conversation with directors, staff, faculty fellows, and graduate assistants who populate CTLs and work in faculty development areas. We hope to bring these two groups together to demonstrate opportunities for collaboration that allow both units to flourish more fully than they would separately and ultimately to serve their institutions more effectively by virtue of those partnerships.
Topics, Scope, Contributors:
Topics for contributions to this collection may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Presenting evidence of the effectiveness of faculty development programming for teaching in honors.
- Discussing the development of such programming and how it can serve as a model for other institutions.
- Detailing innovative partnerships between honors and CTLs or other faculty development initiatives on campus.
- Outlining collaborations between honors programs or colleges and CTLs that prioritize and/or advocate for scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and other teaching-focused research and publication opportunities.
- Examining ways in which various barriers have been identified and overcome in forging partnerships between honors and faculty development efforts.
- Illustrating collaboration, program design, and/or course design that may not have taken shape or would have taken shape very differently without strong relationships between CTLs and honors programs/colleges.
- Identifying ways in which CTL mentors and staff or other faculty development professionals can assist faculty to describe, analyze, and document the value of honors in teaching, scholarship, and service.
This volume is open to contributions from a wide swath of potential authors. We aim to represent 4-year, 2-year, public, and private institutions. Faculty, staff, and/or administrators who work in honors colleges and honors programs are welcome, as are drectors, staff, faculty fellows, graduate assistants, etc., from CTLs or comparable faculty development initiatives on campus.
We fully expect that the focus of this collection will adapt to reflect the knowledge, working history, values, and research interests of those who are interested in contributing. The description of the project outlined above is driven by our own experiences as a current director of a university CTL and an emeritus director of a center for faculty development programming at a small college. Both of us also have extensive experience as honors faculty and leaders. We invite suggestions and feedback that will expand the scope of this work so that it can have maximum impact on its future readership in honors, in faculty development communities, and in higher education in general.
Submissions and Timeline:
We’re open to short contributions that are primarily focused on application or discussion of what has worked in your honors programs/colleges and/or CTLs (roughly 1,000-1,500 words) or longer contributions that are more theoretical or research-based (roughly 4,000-7,000 words).
Submit 200-500 word abstracts to Victoria Bryan (Victoria-Bryan@utc.edu) and John Zubizarreta (jzubizarreta@columbiasc.edu) by August 1. Please indicate in your abstract if you’re planning a short, application-focused contribution or a longer contribution that is more theoretical in nature.
We would like to see full drafts of approved manuscripts by February 1, 2024.
Editors:
Dr. Victoria M. Bryan – Director of the Walker Center for Teaching and Learning (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), and former founding Dean of the Honors College at Cleveland State Community College (Cleveland, TN)
Dr. John Zubizarreta – Professor Emeritus of English, Director Emeritus of the Dr. John Zubizarreta Honors Program, and Past Director of Faculty Development (Columbia College, SC)
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Call for JNCHC Submissions
The next issue of JNCHC (deadline: September 1, 2023) invites research essays on any topic of interest to the honors community.
The issue will also include a Forum focused on the theme “Creating an Honors Faculty,” in which we invite honors educators to examine how honors faculty are defined, selected, recruited, retained, and rewarded. We invite essays of roughly 1000-2000 words that consider this theme in a practical and/or theoretical context.
The lead essay for the Forum is by Lynne C. Elkes of Loyola University Maryland. In “Creating and Celebrating Honors Faculty,” Elkes applauds the unique quality of honors educators, who approach their students and their work with a passion beyond what is expected of higher education in general. Teachers attracted to honors become part of a community of learners along with their students, contributing not just their academic expertise but their whole selves to their shared love of learning, going beyond any expected job requirements to partner with their students, to mentor them in their research, and to help them become better people as well as students. At the same time, honors programs tend to lack structure compared to typical academic disciplines, which have defined hierarchies and systems of rewards such as tenure, promotion, and salary protocols. Honors programs typically attract different kinds of faculty at different ranks and with different levels of job security, from tenured to contingent. This flexibility and ineffability—sometimes controlled chaos—can create authenticity, but it can also lead to abuse when faculty are taken for granted and expected to take on significant extra responsibilities without attendant expectations of reward. Elkes suggests that some standardization within the practices of hiring, retention, compensation, and job responsibilities could reduce this kind of abuse, acknowledge the special dedication of honors faculty, and evoke a higher level of respect not just for honors teachers but for the kind of devotion they commit to teaching and learning.
Contributors to the Forum on “Creating an Honors Faculty” may, but are not obliged to, respond directly to Elkes’s essay. Questions that Forum contributors might consider include:
- Is the loose structure and hierarchy of honors faculty a benefit, liability, and/or inevitability?
- How should honors faculty be selected, and who should select them?
- Is there any hard evidence for the assumption that honors faculty are exceptionally dedicated to teaching?
- Would a traditional academic reward system disrupt the passion and personal dedication we associate with teaching in honors?
- Does honors have—or can it create—a just and satisfying reward system different from that of a typical academic discipline?
- Can a different kind of reward system for honors faculty promote diversity, equity, and inclusion?
- How is an honors faculty created on your campus, and does it work?
- What character traits are essential for a good honors teacher?
- What academic credentials (if any) should be required to teach in honors?
Information about JNCHC—including the editorial policy, submission guidelines, guidelines for abstracts and keywords, and a style sheet—is available on the NCHC website.
Please send all submissions to Ada Long at adalong@uab.edu.
NCHC journals (JNCHC and HIP) and monographs are included in the following electronic databases: ERIC, EBSCO, Gale Cengage, and UNL Digital Commons. Both journals are listed in Cabell International's Directory of Publishing Opportunities.
NCHC Events: Virtual DEI Roundtables
Sign up for a free Virtual Roundtable in 2023 to dive deep with your NCHC Community!
These free virtual events are presented by sponsors or NCHC Committees, and available for all in the honors community to participate in! Add these to your calendar today:
- Teaching CRT: Pitfalls and Challenges
Wednesday, August 9 | 11:00am CST
NCHC Awards
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NCHC Student of the Year Award
(closes September 8)
The NCHC Student of the Year Award is presented to honors students who are student members of NCHC, have made an impact on their honors program, and who have participated in honors at the regional and/or national level. Nominated by their honors director, two students will be selected by the NCHC Student Affairs Committee: one from a 2-year institution, and one from a 4-year institution. $500 will be awarded to each winner, and also $500 to their respective honors program or college. Winners will be announced at the NCHC Annual Conference awards ceremony.
Nominate your outstanding students today!