Why are you in college? What do you want to learn? How will being a university Honors student be different from ‘going to school’? This course aims to help students grapple with these questions through shared readings, expert presentations, and on-site visits. Texts and discussions encourage students to articulate their own assumptions about the purpose of education, the nature of effective teaching, and how their individual learning may relate to social benefits. Students are urged to consider how they understand themselves, the broader world, and their engagement with the learning process in order to prepare for a lifetime of learning and leading. (1.5 credits; offered in fall and spring semesters)
Learning Objectives
Analyze own past experiences of schooling and education
Identify competing educational ideals, their underlying premises and assumptions
Assess others’ writings, ideas, and arguments in an analytic and rational manner
Discover the range of educational opportunities available at IU
Formulate intentional intellectual goals for the next four years
Recognize the purpose of reflection and critical thinking as life-long learners
“This course promoted critical thinking in everything that we did. Never have I been so required to dive into a discussion and connect my learning with the world around me.”
HHC-H 202 Knowledge Production and the University
Universities collect, preserve, and produce knowledge to address the universe of problems. Students in this seminar explore one such problem to learn how new knowledge is produced, research findings are disseminated, and research is conducted.
Students will gain further insights into the breadth and depth of expertise available at Indiana University but also learn to consider how knowledge is generated: how does each discipline frame questions? What kinds of evidence does it draw on, and what is its standard of proof? Given the variety of disciplinary norms, how should we distinguish truth from fiction? (1.5 credits; offered both semesters)
Learning objectives. Students who successfully complete this course will:
demonstrate intellectual curiosity
examine issues from multiple perspectives
collaborate to devise effective research strategies and conduct necessary inquiry
locate and evaluate data and informational sources
formulate their own, evidence-informed opinions about matters of fact
communicate their findings in multiple formats to an array of audiences
manage their own work
Faculty Fellows/Instructors
Janine Giordano Drake (Clinical Associate Professor of History) researches and writes about American religious, social, and political history. Her first book, The Gospel of Church was recently published by Oxford University Press. In addition to her own teaching and scholarship, she works closely with high-school history teachers across Indiana as part of the Advanced College Program.
Mark Baildon (Visiting Associate Professor, School of Education) is a specialist in international education and curriculum design. He has taught in Israel, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
Jonathan Elmer (Professor of English) is a specialist in American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Poe, Melville, Dickinson, etc.) and a world-class jazz trombonist. He has formerly served as director of the College Arts and Humanities Institute and as Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His latest book, In Poe's Wake: Travels in the Graphic and Atmospheric will be published by the University of Chicago Press in June 2024.
Jacob Emery (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies) has published over twenty articles on Russian fiction, Nabokov, Marxism, and science fiction. He has also co-authored a fantasy novel (A Clockwork River, 2021) with his sister and has won awards for his teaching and graduate mentorship.
Dr. Frohardt-Lane (Senior Lecturer, Hutton Honors College)--is an environmental historian of the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has written on urban environmental history (especially in the context of Detroit and Birmingham, Alabama) and on lead poisoning, and has taught classes on the homefront in World War II, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and Prisons and Punishment in US History. A former park ranger, she is a keen hiker and cyclist.
Ben Kravitz (Associate Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) studies climate modeling and climate engineering. Author or co-author of more than a hundred articles, he has served as chair of the Research Affairs Committee of the Bloomington Faculty and on the Executive Board of the local chapter of the AAUP. Before coming to Indiana University in 2019, he held post-doc positions at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Caterina Scalvedi (Visiting Lecturer, Hutton Honors College and the Institute for European Studies) is a historian of twentieth-century European empires. She has a special interest in the history of public education, especially in colonial settings
Jim Shanahan (Professor, IU Media School) studies the effects of mass media and science journalism on public opinion. Before coming to Bloomington as the Founding Dean of the Media School in 2015, he had faculty appointments at Cornell and Boston University. He is also a keen photographer and pianist.
Rebecca Spang (Distinguished Professor of History) currently serves as the Dean (interim) of the Hutton Honors College. A historian of money, revolutions, and restaurants, she formerly served as Director of LAMP, the Liberal Arts and Management Program at Indiana University. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow (2022) and a National New America Fellow (2023) and has held visiting appointments at the University of Minnesota, Tübingen University, and the Yale School of Management.
Gabrielle Stecher (Lecturer, English) is a Victorianist by training who wrote her PhD (University of Georgia, 2022) on nineteenth-century "encounters" with the Ancient Near East in the British Museum. She is a keen advocate for and practitioner of digital literacy and multimedia scholarship and retains a strong interest in women's creative activity of all kinds. Much more on her website!
"Truly, this was my favorite class this semester. I looked forward to it each week and I wouldn't change a thing."
