Honors Program

The Bethany College Honors Program is a college-wide community of faculty and students engaged in the study of the tangible and imaginable worlds through the integration of the skills of multiple academic divisions and multiple modes of learning. By offering student-driven, innovative courses, honors dorm living, and unique opportunities outside the classroom to outstanding students, the Honors Program furthers creative thinking and intellectual independence and promotes a community of inquiry that thrives on the ideals of the liberal arts education.

Program Goals

The Honors Program is designed to provide highly-motivated students with a learning cohort to engage with faculty in the freedom and responsibility provided by the following Modes of Honors Learning recommended by the National Collegiate Honors Council:

Research and Creative Scholarship (“learning in depth”)

• Curricula are characterized by a Writing-Intensive emphasis on research writing in the humanities and social sciences, including data analysis in the social sciences, and on experimentation, measurement, data analysis, and interpretation in the natural sciences . The product is documented scholarship that leads to new integrations, new knowledge, or new understandings of creative products .
• Prepare students to write enhanced senior projects and applications for graduate programs and fellowships and scholarships .

Breadth and Enduring Questions (Multi-Divisional Learning)

• Honors core (HSEM) seminars confront students with alternative modes of inquiry, exploration, discovery, tolerance of ambiguity, and enduring questions . Coursework requires integrative learning: both local and global learning with connections across time, genre, and disciplines, not always in classroom situations .

• The products aggressively involve creative integrations of evidence from multiple divisions . Assessment of the products emphasizes process rather than product, focusing on metacognitive questions such as “how do you know?” Students are encouraged to dig deep without a prescribed result .

Service Learning and Leadership

• Courses integrate a single project or a series of collaborative projects that address real-world problems through which students acquire practical experience and skills in the topic and skills of the course .

Experiential Learning

• Courses emphasize exploration and/or discovery rather than acquisition of specific knowledge sets, sustain a focus on hands-on, usually supervised, practical engagement with usable outcomes .
• Courses focus on student-driven learning projects facilitated by faculty who provide no necessary, single conclusion to be drawn by all or many students .
• Courses require continuous reflective writing and oral presentation as the students articulate their discoveries and document their personal growth; this process may apply to all other modes described here .

Learning Communities

• A cohort of students living and/or working in close quarters and heavily engaged in campus and/or residence-centered activity with a strong integration of academic, social, and/or service activities, fostering a culture of thinking, growing, and inquiring that connects members to one another for the pursuit of common goals through interdependence and mutual obligation .