Honors Curriculum

Learning Objectives

Students who successfully complete their program in the Honors College will:

1. Be able to clearly and thoughtfully articulate their own understanding of what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life, expressing their ideas and questions by drawing on some of the foundational texts that inform, illuminate, provoke, or challenge their understanding of themselves and the world.
2. Become exceptional in the arts of communication, both oral and written. Students will not only develop excellent habits of mind; they will also develop excellent habits of interpersonal communication so that they can clearly express their ideas and values to others, especially those who may strongly disagree with them. Students will learn to navigate spaces of civil and thoughtful disagreement about the good life and society.
3. Examine, discuss, and write about foundational texts in a manner that reflects deep, sustained, and serious reflection upon them. Students will become more thoughtful, self-aware, and intellectually and ethically responsible about matters of existential import to humanity. Students will be able to give persuasive reasons in support of their interpretation of texts and be able to construct and defend valid arguments in support of an ethical or political position.

Honors Core (12 hours)

Honors students take one Honors seminar each semester for four semesters. In each seminar, students trace the development of our collective understanding of what makes for a good human being and citizen. The Honors courses are sequenced so that students read and assess past thinkers in their own right, as well as consider how subsequent thinkers use, abuse, enlist, and/or reject thinkers who came before them. Honors professors encourage students to think hard about difficult ideas, to ask unsettling questions, to defend what they say with good reasons, and to write well. By engaging great thinkers who have come before us in this way, Honors students come to better understand themselves and the world in which we live.

• HON 2123 Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem (3 credit hours, Block I)
• HON 2143 The Long Middle Ages (3 credit hours, Block II)
• HON 2223 The Birth of Modernity (3 credit hours, Block I)
• HON 2243 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (3 credit hours, Block II)

Honors Courses (15 hours)

Honors students take an additional 15 credit hours of coursework approved by the Honors College. This coursework should deepen a student’s engagement with classic texts and/or serve to bridge what a student learns in Honors with the content and methods of another discipline. This requirement can be satisfied by one of three ways, singly or in combination:

1. Courses offered by the Honors College: Classic text seminars focusing on one subject area (e.g., history), theme (e.g., the good life), genre (e.g,, tragedy), etc.
2. Courses offered by other colleges in collaboration with the Honors College: These courses will align with one or more elements of regular Honors, e.g., emphasizing discussion and inquiry, tackling key questions concerning the foundations of the subject matter of the course, and/or integrating classic texts. Because these courses are offered by other colleges, when possible, they may satisfy requirements within specific majors, but this is not guaranteed for any specific course.
3. Different, Honors-aligned requirements for individual students within a regular non-Honors course. This can be requested by the student and requires the approval of the course instructor and the Honors Dean’s Office.

Exceptions to the above may be granted at the discretion of the Dean’s Office.

Honors Senior Thesis (3 credit hours)

After completing the Honors Core, students must design and implement an Honors Senior Thesis. The Honors Senior Thesis is an opportunity to design independent work that will complement a student’s growing mastery in their major and/or enable them to explore questions and ideas that pique their interest.

Figuring out just what sort of endeavors will best serve the student’s intellectual and educational aspirations is part of the challenge of the Senior Thesis. Each Honors student must find a faculty member willing to serve as the primary advisor of their Honors Senior Thesis (they may enlist the help of other faculty, but one faculty member serves as their advisor). Together with the advisor, the student should identify strengths and weaknesses and articulate interest areas and questions around which the Honors Senior Thesis might be designed.

The Honors Senior Thesis requirement is satisfied by one or more courses amounting to three credit hours (e.g., HON 4111 Senior Thesis Proposal , HON 4121 Senior Thesis I , HON 4131 Senior Thesis II ). Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the Dean’s Office.

Total: 30 hours

Contact

If you have questions about the Honors Program, please contact Dr. Jennifer Frey, Dean of the Honors College, at honors@utulsa.edu.