Editor’s Introduction

We begin this volume of Honors in Practice with Bonnie D. Irwin’s presidential address at the 2011 National Collegiate Honors Council conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Irwin develops a comparison between Scheherazade in 1001 Nights and the NCHC: like that fictional storyteller, the NCHC needs to assure the survival of honors by carefully shaping its narratives. The countervailing story of higher education is burdened with negative and dangerous reviews in today’s culture. By shaping a powerful and positive story of our own, Irwin argues, NCHC can not only energize honors programs and colleges but revitalize and enliven education generally. The essays included in this volume of HIP are the kinds of stories that Irwin encourages honors teachers and administrators to write. The first nine essays are accounts of innovative honors courses that engage students and faculty in new ways of seeing and structuring knowledge. The other seven essays tell stories about programmatic innovations that promise not only to strengthen honors education but, in many cases, to fan out into the institutions in which honors is housed, thus doing the revitalizing work that Irwin has encouraged