Disorientations and Disruptions: Innovating First-Year Honors Education through Collaborative Mapping Projects

A series of courses on the Evolution of Ideas introduces interdisciplinary study, develops collaborative discourse, and promotes a sense of community among first-year honors students. The curriculum encourages faculty to use a range of strategies to help students understand an idea and its history while also fostering awareness as to its social, political, economic, and broader contexts. Using the social history of maps as an example, the author demonstrates how disrupting students’ understanding of the map itself and, through creative group projects, disorienting emergent understanding of campus spaces, fosters a questioning atmosphere and makes room for growth. Through planned disorientation and disruption, the author observes, students are forced to ask questions about the wider worlds they inhabit and to interrogate social relations that maps typically hide