Honors Education Around The World

This volume is constructed around several significant questions, relevant to every honors program and national perspective. These questions are: â oeHow do various nations view honors education?â , â oeHow do ideas about honors achievements compare internationally?â , â oeWho defines honors education in each nation and how similar are those definitions from place to place?â , and â oeWhat do nations consider most significant when an undergraduate is said to â oegraduate with honorsâ ?â The cross-disciplinary, intersecting epistemology of honors education stands out worldwide. No matter whether it is known as â oehonorsâ , â oehonoursâ or â oetalent-developmentâ , honors education is associated with a student-centric ethos of attainment-setting, and with comprehensive and often creative approaches to teaching and learning. Today, in our more globally connected world, there is good reason to closely and critically consider how an exploration of honors education worldwide can empower both educators and students to match personal and communal aspirations with educational outcomes.

This volume is constructed around several significant questions, relevant to every honors program and national perspective. These questions are: “How do various nations view honors education?”, “How do ideas about honors achievements compare internationally?”, “Who defines honors education in each nation and how similar are those definitions from place to place?”, and “What do nations consider most significant when an undergraduate is said to “graduate with honors”?” The cross-disciplinary, intersecting epistemology of honors education stands out worldwide. No matter whether it is known as “honors”, “honours” or “talent-development”, honors education is associated with a student-centric ethos of attainment-setting, and with comprehensive and often creative approaches to teaching and learning. Today, in our more globally connected world, there is good reason to closely and critically consider how an exploration of honors education worldwide can empower both educators and students to match personal and communal aspirations with educational outcomes.

This volume is constructed around several significant questions, relevant to every honors program and national perspective. These questions are: "How do various nations view honors education?", "How do ideas about honors achievements compare internationally?", "Who defines honors education in each nation and how similar are those definitions from place to place?", and "What do nations consider most significant when an undergraduate is said to "graduate with honors"?" The cross-disciplinary, intersecting epistemology of honors education stands out worldwide. No matter whether it is known as "honors", "honours" or "talent-development", honors education is associated with a student-centric ethos of attainment-setting, and with comprehensive and often creative approaches to teaching and learning. Today, in our more globally connected world, there is good reason to closely and critically consider how an exploration of honors education worldwide can empower both educators and students to match personal and communal aspirations with educational outcomes.

In education, sorting students according to attainment is common. Such sorting clearly sets up the potential for exclusion, based on the attainment ideals and on the modes of selection. Ideals of inclusion suggest diversity, and those of equity, by reference to impartiality, suggest freedom from bias. Honors education, which celebrates excellence, and references “honor” and all that word and concept infers, heightens and promotes the principled recognition of attainment, giving rise to questions of diversity, equity and inclusion. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), in its Ten Steps to Equity in Education, notes that inclusion is intertwined with fairness. How can honors education—and in the case of the discussions in this book, largely honors in US higher education—promote fairness, be diverse, and support equity? If it does not do so, how can it at all claim to be offering a principled version of what the National Collegiate Honors Council (USA) says are “opportunities for measurably broader, deeper, and more complex learning-centered and learner-directed experiences for its students”? In 2015, the National Society for Minorities in Honors (www.nsfmih.org) was launched in the USA to specifically explore, support and promote diversity, equity and inclusion in and across honors colleges and programs. The first annual NSFMIH conference was held at Oakland University, Michigan. This book began at that inaugural conference, and has been enhanced by enthusiastic contributions beyond that event as well.

This book examines the much-debated question of how to unleash the potential of young people with promising intellectual abilities and motivation. It looks at the increasingly important topic of excellence in education, and the shift in focus towards the provision of programs to support talented students in higher education. It provides a systematic overview of programs for talented students at northern European higher education institutions (HEIs). Starting in the Netherlands, where nearly all HEIs have developed honors programs over the past two decades, the book explores three clusters of countries: the Benelux, the Nordic and the German-speaking countries. For each of these countries, it discusses the local culture towards excellence, the structure of the education system, and the presence of honors programs. In total, the book reviews the special talent provisions for nearly four million students at 303 higher education institutions in eleven countries. In addition, it offers an analysis of the reasons to develop such programs, a look into the future of honors education and a practical list of suggestions for further research. The Sirius Program assigned Marca Wolfensberger to carry out this research.

How can we support, develop and maintain higher education programs that focus on high academic achievement, while at the same time allowing equitable access to, and progress in, higher learning? This volume focuses not only on a diverse population in higher education, but on creating and supporting a population fundamentally created in, and informed by, fairness. The nature of fairness, and its many dimensions, underpins the discussions here. By focusing on equity, the contributors to this book shine light on conditions and instances of inequity. They explore questions of enrollment in honors programs, and about advising honors students. They discuss people with disabilities in honors programs and colleges, and the general existence or non-existence of civility. They advocate for supporting a wide range of identities and goals, collaboration, and types and styles of pedagogy.. This book considers the role of honors education in enhancing the educational opportunities for all, and presents a call to action to those who seek to do that.

How does the pursuit of an undergraduate honors education support excellence, innovation and ingenuity? This book offers examples of these things as they occur in honors colleges and programs throughout the USA. However, it additionally throws light on questions of how education generally (and in this case, particularly higher education) impacts on what we can do to contribute to our pool of human knowledge, to support individual and social aspiration, to empower creativity and invention, and, indeed, to make positive individual and communal futures through education. In many ways, the writers here explore the contribution of honors education to the world beyond honors. Equally, they are investigating honors education, from the inside, and contemplating how they can make this aspect of education fundamentally a home of innovative and ingenious practices. The range of discussion in this book stretches from considering active engagement with the global to enhancing approaches to leadership and leadership cultivation, and from applying distinctive styles of thinking to embracing and developing outstanding types of community partnerships. The volume discusses what those in honors education are doing to live up to the promise the ideal of “honors” popularizes and is said to exemplify.