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Fifteen University of Maine students visited Kansas City, Mo. from Oct. 20-24 for the 45th Annual Conference of the National Collegiate Honors Council. The conference’s theme was “Rhythms and Currents,” which drew on Kansas City’s jazz history to suggest the need for improvisation in honors education to enrich the student experience.
All 15 students are members of the UMaine Honors College and were invited to attend the conference in order to present original research. Seven members of UMaine faculty and staff also attended the conference to facilitate presentations on successful aspects of the UMaine Honors College as well as to gain insight into what has worked at other Honors colleges nationwide.
Kalie Hess, a third-year anthropology student, was part of a large presenting group. “The Book of Choice: University of Maine Honors Read” detailed the process a group of returning honors students enrolled in the Honors Read tutorial go through in order to select the Honors Read for the next group of incoming freshmen.
The Honors Read is the book incoming UMaine Honors first-years receive at summer orientation to read before their first class meeting. In years past, the Honors Read has been “The Survival of the Birch Bark Canoe” by John McPhee, “The Zimbardo Experiment” by Philip Zimbardo and “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi.
“I almost wish every honors student could have seen our presentation so they could understand the factors involved in choosing the Honors Read book,” Hess said.
“We met and formulated our ideas and our presentation by creating a thesis for our group and dividing it up among faculty and students,” she said.
Hess’ group also included students Hogan Marquis and Matt Cavanaugh; Mimi Killinger, UMaine’s Rezendes preceptor for the arts; and Charlie Slavin, dean of the Honors College.
“The set-up of my presentation was a discussion, so we bounced around a lot of ideas about how to encourage discussion in the classroom. We think student-led discussion is more effective than faculty-led discussion,” Hess said.
“We talked about a way of looking at the whole honors discussion of the classroom as a multifaceted subject, including the difficulties in text selection, the diversity of the people in the class and the mere fact that you’re in the classroom so you may be more limited in what you say,” Hess said.
“We presented to an all-women’s college from South Carolina called Columbia College,” Cavanaugh, a fourth-year political science student, said, “where we have a whole course going through all the books, they only read the one book and have a one-day discussion. I talked about the structure. Marquis talked about how one of the strengths of the class was the diversity of the students.”
The panel-style discussion was only one option for presentations at the conference. Six students put together posters describing their original research to present at one of the conference’s poster sessions. Reminiscent of a middle school science fair, posters were arranged in two concentric circles so anyone interested could easily see the poster and discuss the research with the student.
Julie Herbert, a fourth-year history student, assembled some of her research into a poster titled “Turning Indian: A Study of Mary Jemison and the White Captive Experience during the Revolutionary War Period.” Herbert also attended last year’s NCHC conference, which was held in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a great opportunity because every year is different,” Herbert said. “Every year a different city hosts it and it allows for a variety of experiences for students going for their first time or their third year. It gives you a chance to go to a place you might never ever visit otherwise.”
Herbert said she knew what to expect last year when the conference was held in Washington, D.C. because she spent two semesters interning there in the national archives, but Kansas City was a completely new experience.
“The city is bizarre. It’s filled with ornate opera houses and quirky restaurants with many murals. My favorite place was the Kansas City Public Library because of the large book mural on the outside of the parking garage,” Herbert said. “It’s ironic that it encapsulated part of the honors curriculum.”
Herbert said the mural included Plato’s “The Republic,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Lao Tze’s “Dao De Jing,” all of which are standard reading in the four core semesters of the honors curriculum.
The conference also offered plenary speakers who addressed one of the hotel’s largest ballrooms packed with guests.
Hess said her favorite plenary speaker was Aron Ralston, who spoke about his experience in April 2003 when he became trapped between a boulder and a cliff during a hiking trip in a remote area of Utah and had to sever his own arm in order to free himself. Ralston spoke to conference guests on Saturday afternoon after many of the student-led sessions and poster presentations were over and stayed to sign copies of his book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.”
“He was the most real speaker I ever heard,” Hess said. “He didn’t try to dress it up. He was down to earth.”
Hess said listening to Ralston’s presentation impacted her because he spoke about constantly evaluating one’s own life in order to determine whether a person is using his or her time on earth effectively.
“Family, friends; that’s what you should be worried about,” said Hess. “He highlighted what we should really be thinking about in our lives.”
Between sessions, students had time to explore Kansas City. The conference was held at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown, which is situated in the city’s Power and Light District. Development of the nine-block district began in 2005 as a revitalization project designed to promote entertainment and shopping in the area. At night, the district is lit with neon signs at every turn, lending the district a rainbow glow.
“It was certainly good to meet people from all over the country, but what I enjoyed most was getting out and going to the rodeo,” Cavanaugh said. “It was definitely an experience.”
“When I got there, I realized I hadn’t got the memo. Everyone was wearing a button-down shirt and a cowboy hat, a big belt buckle and their shirts tucked into jeans. We went into the stadium and I realized that it would be everything I expected when they opened with a defiant prayer,” he said.
The rodeo included an indoor pyrotechnic show, bull riding, barrel racing, bronco riding and a concert by Craig Morgan. Dirt was brought in to cover the floor of the arena, and a John Deere tractor was used to smooth the dirt. Cowgirls paraded around the arena with flags advertising the rodeo’s sponsors between competitions.
“They had the rodeo clown making fun of Obama, which was what I expected from the area,” Cavanaugh said. “I spent most of the time trying to figure out the scoring.”
Students also visited the Harry S. Truman presidential library, the Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame, the American Jazz Museum, the Money Museum and the Kansas City Zoo.
“I think these trips are a really great chance to see part of the country. It’s completely paid for. It’s worthwhile for school,” Cavanaugh said. A grant from Betsy and Bill Leitch covers the cost of transportation and housing for UMaine students who are selected to attend the conference, but the students have to pay for their own meals and entrance fees to attractions.
“You’re traveling to another place and representing the school,” Cavanaugh said, describing part of his motivation to apply for a spot on the conference trip. “Rather than go on a trip that had no academic purpose, we were able to go and be academic but at the same time have fun.”
That balance of academic purpose and fun also attracted Killinger to the conference because she was “interacting with members of the honors community in a different capacity” than the standard level of interaction in a classroom or lecture hall.
“My favorite moment was listening to a terrific talk on holistic development of students by a former director of the UMaine Honors College,” Killinger said. The talk was delivered by Sam Schuman, who was the director of the UMaine Honors College from 1977-1981 and who currently is the chancellor of the University of Minnesota.
“I think forming an intellectual community that’s small and diverse in a large state university is beneficial to students in that they get to interact with each other in different ways. They get to interact with difficult text and ask hard questions about the development of human beings and civilizations,” Killinger said.
Next year’s NCHC conference, “Stewards of our Colliding Worlds: Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities,” will be held in Phoenix, Ariz. According to the 2010 NCHC conference guide, the 2011 conference “will meet to affirm that honors education is about more than mere ‘book learning’: it also entails stewardship, a combination of responsibility and leadership that meets the needs of the present without sacrificing the needs of the future.”
Students in the Honors College who are interested in presenting at the 2011 conference should contact either Ben Wooden or Jonathan Erde, the Honors College’s associates. Their office is on the second floor of Holmes Hall.
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