A History and Context for the Scholarly Study of First-year Honors Composition

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Ask any composition instructor who is familiar with the canon of composition theory and pedagogy to teach a two-course composition sequence in any freshman writing program, and that instructor could reasonably expect to teach expository prose in the first course and research-based argumentation in the second.  The same instructor could be asked to teach a basic writing course, and if she is not already familiar with the wealth of available resources, she could locate them relatively easily.  Ask the instructor to teach a first-year honors composition course, however, and she would find no centralized resource for teaching such a course.  She may not know, either, that different FYHC courses serve different student populations: some courses are affiliated with honors programs and colleges and are designed to instruct honors students in those programs, while other courses are open to any student who has a certain test score or admission essay score, and so forth.  With the launch of this journal, we begin to establish the study of FYHC as a legitimate line of scholarly inquiry, and in building this foundation, it would be useful to identify important intersections between theoretical and pedagogical approaches in both composition instruction and honors education.  A brief review of the history of the honors movement in the United States shows useful parallels with the development of composition studies, specifically developments during the twentieth century that parallel events in the honors movement.  While this is of particular importance for “composition-in-honors” courses, the correlations can be applied to pedagogical approaches for all types of honors composition courses.

In order to examine the development of FYHC courses, we must look to the beginning of the honors movement for its germinal justifications of this separate educational track.  The first version of modern honors education was instituted in 1830 at Oxford and Cambridge Universities with the creation of separate pass and honors degrees, the latter requiring a program of study that was both quantitatively and qualitatively more substantial than that pursued by the average student.  A version of Oxford’s pass-honors program was then adopted at Harvard, which Joseph Cohen colorfully describes in The Superior Student in American Higher Education:
President Charles Eliot’s expansion of the elective system at Harvard from 1872 to 1897 was the first revolutionary change from the then almost universally narrow and prescribed curriculum.  It was conceived as a liberating reform in keeping with nineteenth-century democracy, and it spread throughout the country.  It led to endless controversy with academic conservatives, who fought its consequences of dilution and indiscriminate incorporation of courses.  It was the harbinger of both good and ill.  Out of the later efforts to remedy the transformation of many large institutions, private and public, into shopping centers for a huge variety of packaged courses came some of the first efforts at creative reconstruction.  (13-14)
Then, as Timm Richard Rinehart notes in “The Role of Curricular and Instructional Innovation in the Past, Present, and Future of Honors Programs in American Higher Education,” Wesleyan College (1873) and the University of Michigan (1883) also began “[h]onors recognition at graduation, based on a thesis, an approved arrangement of courses, and a more flexible, individualized academic program” (15).  Rinehart suggests that the catalyst for the spread of the honors movement in America, though, may have been the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship, since Rhodes Scholars pursued academic careers through professorships and administrative positions and subsequently implemented the Oxford pass-honors system in their own institutions (15).

Frank Aydelotte

Compositionists may be interested to know that the scholar cited as one of the founders of the modern honors movement, Frank Aydelotte, was in fact a compositionist himself whose thinking was shaped by the aforementioned Oxford pass-honors system and Rhodes Scholarship program.  Aydelotte earned his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and taught for some time before returning to school to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, where he taught composition.  He became dissatisfied, however, with the Harvard system of composition instruction, so he returned to Indiana University and reformed the school’s composition program before moving on to a professorship in the MIT writing program.  In The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History, John C. Brereton counts Aydelotte among the “intellectual conservatives who knew the current composition scene firsthand and who published significant writing textbooks” (23) and among those who “made their mark in administration” (25).  He had also spent time at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, an experience that influenced his later research into honors education and his advocacy of Oxford’s pass-honors system. He became president of Swarthmore in 1921, and after leaving that position in 1939, he directed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Before he began to focus his professional pursuits more exclusively on honors education, Aydelotte was an advocate for reformation in composition pedagogy.  In 1917, he published The Oxford Stamp and Other Essays: Articles from the Educational Creed of an American Oxonian, which included the essay “The History of English as a College Subject in the United States.”   In the first half of the essay, he discusses the well-known composition work of Blair, Campbell, Whateley, Bain, and others; in the second half, he addresses the displacement of the classics by English literature.  Overall, his main argument is that “the root of our troubles in English is that we have inherited an attitude toward the subject which has led us, both in literature and composition, to emphasize technique rather than thought” (310).  This argument sounds familiar to contemporary compositionists: ninety years later, we continue to debate issues of style versus substance, of organization and fluency, and of critical thinking.  Additional arguments, such as the following statement regarding what we identify today as critical thinking skills, sound as if they could have been published in a contemporary essay:
Since 1890 composition teaching has advanced rapidly from theory to practice.  But the practice is really based on the old theory.  Textbooks on writing have been less and less used or have become more and more useful manuals needed by writers (advice on hard points of grammar, punctuation, usage, and arrangement of material, more or less like the indispensable “style books” issued by publishing houses), but the themes have continued to be written for the sake of practice rather than for the sake of saying something.  Students are advised to write, write, write, when the advice they need is think, think, think.  (306)

In the contemporary first-year composition classroom, instructors continue to struggle toward a balance in writing and thinking in course objectives.  The opportunities for reflection, professional exploration, and development of mature reasoning and argumentation skills through carefully crafted writing assignments are noble goals for the composition course, but how can students communicate these ideas effectively when they have not yet mastered basic grammatical and mechanical skills?  Therefore, students today are still required to build their writing skills through frequent and varied exercises--Aydelotte’s “write, write, write”—but composition scholars and instructors are working to make these assignments more meaningful to students by eliminating tired topics and exercises to be parroted and replacing them with current professional and social concerns, contemporary genres (for example, essays to be formatted as newsletters), and pedagogical approaches, such as building critical thinking skills through an evaluation of professional web sites to discern which is the most informative and valid for a given topic.  In this way, contemporary composition instructors work to develop both writing skills and critical thinking skills in their students in accord with Aydelotte’s concern that students need to “think, think, think” (306).
    
Aydelotte’s interest in honors education came into full focus at Swarthmore College.  In 1922, he established one of the first, relatively formalized honors programs, which emphasized upper-division course offerings to complement and build upon the pass-honors differentiation.  He published a pioneering report in 1925, Honors Courses in American Colleges and Universities, in which he catalogued honors programs and their offerings from across the nation.  His most important contribution to honors education, however, came in 1944 when he published the first book devoted entirely to honors programs, Breaking the Academic Lockstep: The Development of Honors Work in American Colleges and Universities.  In the late 1930s, he undertook an ambitious survey of honors programs at 130 colleges and universities.  With funding from the Carnegie Corporation, he and thirty-five volunteer faculty members traveled the country to interview faculty and to review honors programs in depth, and their findings constitute the bulk of the book. 
His program reviews certainly established a foundation upon which many more universities built their own honors programs, but another major benefit of this book is Aydelotte’s justification of honors education at the university level.  Although his 1944 publication date may incline objectors to perceive the material as dated, Aydelotte’s arguments remain as relevant to contemporary honors education as his earlier observations on the state of composition studies are in that field.  For example, in referring to the book’s title, he states:

The most persistent objection to this breaking of the academic lock step, to giving abler students harder work, is our academic interpretation or misinterpretation of the idea of democracy.  If all men are born free and equal why should some be given a better education than others?  The word “better” begs the question.  The best education for any individual is that which will develop his powers to the utmost and best fit him to realize his own ideal of the good life.  (128)
While Aydelotte’s work broke professional ground for honors education, it was by no means the last word on the subject, and it had its share of shortcomings.  At this stage, none of these programs was fully developed, as the few available honors courses were usually mere substitutions for other upper-level courses available only to juniors and seniors, and the programs themselves had fairly small enrollment.  Since these early programs were usually located in small, private East Coast colleges, these institutions could more easily implement curricular change, logistically speaking, than larger schools and public schools; they might also have been more willing to do so considering the more “select” student bodies they served, students who, for professional or academic advancement, might be more willing to accept additional academic challenges.   Taking honors education and program development into a broader realm called for another pioneering researcher.

Joseph Cohen

Of special importance to instructors of FYHC courses, another pioneer of the honors movement brought honors coursework to the freshman and sophomore levels.  Joseph Cohen successfully took the modern honors movement into the realm of the large, public university by creating the Honors Council at the University of Colorado in 1928, adding freshman and sophomore courses to the honors program, budgeting provisions for an honors library and program newsletter, and creating the permanent position of honors director.  Cohen kept the Honors Council alive during World War II, which caused the demise of many honors programs and brought about an accompanying lull in publication about honors education.  Aydelotte retired, and Cohen came to the forefront of the honors movement, “emerg[ing] as the postwar catalyst for the development of an organized, nationwide honors program movement” (Rinehart 18).  The launch of Sputnik in 1956 fostered a resurgence of interest in honors education as Cold War concerns caused Americans to rethink their positions on “elitist” education in relation to preparation for competition with other countries.
    
One of Cohen’s major contributions to university-level honors education is The Superior Student in American Higher Education (1966), for which he served both as the editor and as a contributor.  This book builds upon Aydelotte’s Breaking the Academic Lockstep, updating the history of honors education since Aydelotte’s work, including chapters on the history of the honors movement; characteristics of the superior student; types of programs at liberal arts colleges, universities, small private colleges, and secondary schools; a representative case study; and types of evaluation in honors programs.  Cohen also identifies contemporary problems that had developed since Aydelotte’s work.  For example, Cold War-era competition between the United States and the Soviet Union spurred legislators and educators to increase academic standards, especially in the natural and applied sciences, and honors programs at all levels developed or expanded to address these needs.  Such expansion, however, also sharpened the trade school versus liberal arts debate regarding whether honors programs should include work in professional specializations or focus on providing an enriched arts and humanities experience for students in all fields.  Also, many schools were adopting open admissions policies, so in the wake of changing academic standards, honors programs may have been perceived as old-fashioned, undemocratic, and elitist.  Similar to Aydelotte’s arguments, Cohen’s call to view honors programs as nuclei for institutional change and improvement is still relevant forty years later.  In the face of shrinking budgets, growing enrollments in the wake of the open admissions policies of the 1960s, and increasing demands for higher standards at all educational levels to compete with international academic performance, institutions can look to their honors programs not only as development centers for challenging, stimulating curricula but also as recruitment tools for exceptional students and faculty alike.
    
Overall, one of the most beneficial components of The Superior Student for honors educators is an extensive list of major features that all honors programs should have.  This list proposes specific features beyond those identified by Aydelotte, demonstrating the growth and focus which the honors movement had experienced in the intervening twenty years.  Although the list has since been updated by the National Collegiate Honors Council, the current standard-bearing organization for postsecondary honors education, Cohen’s initial list established a framework which could provide a more unified sense of the purpose of honors education nationwide.
    
Cohen’s other major contribution to the honors movement began in 1957 when he helped to found the Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student (ICSS), which, according to Cohen, “was to operate independently and act as a clearinghouse for information on honors activities across the nation” (qtd. in Rinehart 18).  As the first organized professional forum for honors educators, ICSS supported the honors movement by (1) promoting the importance of developing more comprehensive four-year programs that would encompass both general and departmental honors coursework, including admitting students to the program as freshmen (Ray Asbury, “A History of the Honors Movement Part Two: The History of ICSS,” 8); (2) introducing a newsletter, The Superior Student, which served from 1958-1964 as the first printed forum for honors education; and (3) supporting Cohen’s extensive travel to advance interest in honors education.  Having fostered and financed the growth of honors programs and the professional connections for participating faculty and administrators, ICSS members believed that the honors movement had reached adulthood and considered their mission fulfilled, disbanding in 1965 and publishing their aforementioned The Superior Student in American Higher Education in 1966.

National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC)

Acknowledging the continued need for an organized professional voice in higher education, honors educators met in 1966 to form the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), which is currently the major professional forum for honors education.  Building upon the foundation established by Aydelotte, Cohen, and the ICSS, NCHC provides a network for honors administrators and educators to discuss their curricular and extracurricular developments and to voice their concerns about honors education with the strength of a national professional organization.  Currently, NCHC has approximately 800 member programs at two-year, four-year, and graduate degree-granting institutions as of May 2005.
    
To support these member programs, NCHC provides several important opportunities for scholarly and professional development in honors education, including an annual national conference; two double-blind peer-reviewed journals, Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council and Honors in Practice; regional and state associations; and sponsorship of special projects such as interinstitutional honors semesters and satellite seminars.  These services, especially the annual conferences and the refereed scholarly journals, are important tools for maintaining the professionalism of honors education.  Not only do they keep honors administrators and educators around the country connected, a network begun by Aydelotte, but they also provide opportunities for professional development that are acknowledged by professional disciplines and accepted by university committees as valid venues for professional and scholarly development of individual participants and of honors education in general.  Thus, such opportunities encourage administrator and faculty participation in honors education through availability of professional activity and acknowledgment.

As noted earlier, Aydelotte conducted two major surveys in honors education: a general review of honors programs in 1925, Honors Courses in American Colleges and Universities, and a more extensive survey conducted with a group of colleagues in 1939, which resulted in the 1944 publication of Breaking the Academic Lockstep.  For honors education, these milestone surveys seemed monumental in their scope; for English studies, however, particularly for the burgeoning composition specialization, surveys were hardly uncommon during this time period. 

The Survey Era in Composition
    
In Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin calls attention to several early surveys of composition courses, beginning with H. Robinson Shipherd’s 1926 survey of required freshman composition courses at 75 schools.  Statistics considered included geographic region, school and course enrollment, frequency and length of writing assignments, and types of required readings.  Berlin also highlights Warner Taylor’s more extensive 1927-28 survey of composition at 225 schools, which supported and expanded upon Shipherd’s study.  Findings in these studies bear a striking resemblance to contemporary first-year composition instruction: most courses were required for first-year students, were taught by graduate assistants and instructors rather than professional faculty, were composed of three hour-long sessions, and included a rhetoric textbook, a handbook, and a collection of essays (Berlin 61-63).  Another survey published in College English in 1942 demonstrated just how entrenched the contemporary features of the freshman composition course had already become, such as forms of discourse, essay anthologies, ability sectioning, conferences, and writing labs (Berlin 64-65).
    
In drawing parallels to the honors education movement, the tradition of ability grouping is worth a closer look.  Taylor’s survey indicated that ability grouping was one of freshman composition’s newest features, in which departments used placement tests to group students into advanced, regular, and remedial or “sub-freshman” tracks, the last of which often carried no credit (64).  Berlin then traces ability grouping through several additional reports, including Norman Whitney’s “Ability Grouping at Syracuse” (English Journal, 1924) and “Ability Grouping Plus” (EJ, 1928), English Journal’s “English A-1 at Harvard” (1932), and various program descriptions from such universities as Illinois, Minnesota, and North Carolina (66-69).  Berlin attributes the growth of ability grouping to the influence of Dewey’s progressive education movement, encouraging different types of students to strive toward a college education but also enabling them to explore intellectual challenges and develop individual skills at different paces.  Furthermore, and of importance to FYHC proponents, researchers above often noted intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for those students who achieved advanced status or who progressed through regular sections more quickly, such as decreased class hours for the same amount of credit, decreased frequency of assignments, decreased requirements for instructor conferences, and increased choice and variety of assignment themes.  Contemporary FYHC could take direct advantage of ability grouping to accelerate students’ essential writing instruction and thus allow them to progress more quickly to advanced writing and research tasks in their electives and their major programs.  As demonstrated in Guzy’s Honors Composition: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practices, published through the NCHC Monograph Series, many honors programs still use ability grouping in FYHC composition courses to provide foundational instruction for later honors thesis and publication projects.

As traditional features of both composition programs and honors programs became increasingly entrenched, each field faced a serious developmental change after World War II, which naturally influenced all of higher education, especially through the growing general education movement.  This movement began after World War I to help those who wanted to pursue increased opportunities in professional education to achieve a balanced education and a sense of citizenship.   While post-war scholarship on honors education seemed to be in a holding pattern, its last major contribution being Breaking the Academic Lockstep, composition instruction saw the advent of two crucial elements toward increased professionalization: the communications course and the first official Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1949.

The Cold War and the Open Admissions Policy

As post-war euphoria gave way to Cold War paranoia, the drive toward international competition and national excellence caused explosive educational developments throughout all levels and in all fields, but especially in science and technology.  The launch of Sputnik in 1956 became a catalyst in this explosion, and 1958 saw the passage of the National Defense Education Act.  In composition studies, Berlin identifies this period with the resurgence of the professional study of rhetoric and the advent of cognitive and psychological research in composing processes.  In The Making of Knowledge in Composition, Stephen North argues that although CCCC had been established in 1949, the early 1960s were the critical period of research and development for composition studies, when the field turned away from the dominance of progressive education’s focus on the self-realization of the student and toward long-term academic and professional goals (9).  He marks 1963 as the birth of composition with a capital “C” because of the publication of Albert Kitzhaber’s Themes, Theories, and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College, which was the first book-length study of college writing, and his CCCC address of that year, entitled “4C and Freshman English.”  At this important turning point, the foundations having been laid, composition scholars answered Kitzhaber’s challenge and moved beyond simple surveys and “hallway discussions” of pedagogical issues into thoughtful, probing qualitative and quantitative studies of instructional practice and student writing performance.

In the 1960s, both composition and honors came to face another major academic challenge: the open admissions policy.  Introduced at the City University of New York in 1970, this policy dramatically changed the characteristics of incoming freshman populations at many schools, not only in socioeconomic demographics but also in basic preparedness for post-secondary academic pursuits.  This movement naturally influenced departments campus-wide, but writing programs faced a particularly important challenge: while ability tracking had existed in various forms for decades, this influx introduced a mass of students who were not even able to perform to standard in the lower freshman composition tiers.  Composition instructors struggled to incorporate different types of readings and assignments and different approaches to instruction and evaluation into these classes in hopes of reaching these students, and as they came together to address these issues, composition’s specialization of basic writing was born.
    
Basic writing as a field not only entailed such classroom-specific problems as those mentioned above, but it also raised uncomfortable questions about inequities in elementary, secondary, and higher education related to race, gender, and/or socioeconomic status.  In addition to struggling to catch up to minimal college-level writing standards, basic writers also contended with the stigma of testing and labeling; for example, in light of the influence of behavioral and cognitive psychology in composition theory around that period, the term “remedial” writing implied, however subtly, that the basic writer’s problem was a psychological one that could be “diagnosed” and “remedied” in a writing “lab.”  Whether the label is “basic” or “remedial” or “marginal” or “nontraditional” or “developmental,” students and instructors alike must deal with the emotional, academic, and even financial problems associated with such instruction.  Basic writing as a specialization has since become professionalized within composition studies, with its own journal and many scholarly works, including two that are considered key texts in composition studies overall, Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors & Expectations and Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary.

Perils of Ability Grouping in Both “Margins”
    
Basic writing is an integral part of contemporary composition studies, as instructors continue to develop more effective curricular materials and instructional approaches, to explore the effects of labeling and ability grouping on these students, and to present their information in publications and conference publications.  One might argue, however, that honors students and other exceptional student writers are also “nontraditional,” that they are performing in the other margin, as it were.  For example, while basic writers face certain challenges in a regular first-year composition course, so do many above-average writers.  They can become frustrated by and resentful about completing exercises and writing essays they have already mastered in high school, and they can feel burdened by a heavy leadership role in class discussion and peer critiquing, becoming less a student and more an instructor and editor for their peers and encountering subsequent resentment from them.  On the other hand, some FYHC sections are only slightly more challenging than regular sections, requiring merely more readings and longer papers on the same generic topics, while others are testing grounds for materials to be adapted for use in regular sections, in which case students are treated like guinea pigs for the writing program’s experimentation.  These examples only begin to address important issues in writing difference and ability grouping in first-year honors composition; however, unlike basic writing, discussion of first-year honors composition is essentially nonexistent in composition journals and conferences.  
    
Perhaps a more appropriate venue for discussing FYHC is honors education; even there, though, scholarly, research-based discussion of composition courses and projects is not readily available.  While the NCHC acts as a clearinghouse for information and distributes guidelines for establishing, maintaining, and assessing honors programs in general, more detailed information about specific, varied curricular and instructional approaches to honors composition has only recently begun to be addressed in published form, with the exception of Kenneth Bruffee’s 1994 Forum for Honors article on senior theses.  What we need to develop, then, is scholarly research on FYHC that, like research on basic writing, addresses not only curricular and instructional approaches but also the politics of labeling, ability grouping, and differentiated identification and evaluation criteria.

First-Year Honors Composition: The Power of Language and Critical Thinking

Reviewing these brief twentieth-century histories of honors education and composition instruction at the college level, we can identify simultaneous developments in each field resulting from universal influences in American education.  A more specific way for connecting significant work in these two areas is to discuss each field’s common focus on developing students’ critical thinking skills and the roles language and language instruction play in this development.
    
Language and thinking are inextricably linked.  Language is not merely a tool with which we express our ideas; language is an integral part of shaping our ideas before we even speak them or put them to paper.  We think using language, and then as we speak or write, the act of choosing words by which we will share our thoughts with others shapes our ideas even further.  In Invention as a Social Act, Karen Burke LeFevre reviews studies by linguists and psychologists and argues that

rhetorical invention is better understood as a social act, in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something [. . .].  [O]ne invents largely by means of language and other symbol systems, which are socially created and shared.  (1-2)

We must use a shared language, then, to communicate with others, and in communicating our ideas, the very language we use shapes the world around us.
    
Instruction in language use, therefore, and specifically in writing skill, is one of the most important tools we can give to students in FYHC and one reason why capable student writers should be required to complete some type of FYHC course rather than being allowed to test out.  When we ask students to write, they are not merely discussing what they researched at the library or retained for the exam but how they understand these concepts through the words they use, the order in which they organize their thoughts, and the examples they use to support their points.  Unlike fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, and true-or-false exams, writing assignments make students think more critically about a topic because to summarize and paraphrase ideas successfully in their own words, they must understand a topic more fully rather than merely remember certain bits of information.  Challenging writing tasks promote rigorous thinking and class discussion, very desirable elements of honors curricula.
    
Similarly, writing across the curriculum should serve as a unifying force in honors education.  In fact, although many instructors, composition and otherwise, assume that honors students must be excellent writers, the truth is that not all honors students are good writers and that all honors students can benefit from some type of directed composition study.  In “Honors and Non-Honors Students: How Different Are They?” Thomas B. Harte states this point well:

Although as a group, honors students are generally effective at written expression, even honors students can have serious writing problems. After all, competent writing is a learned behavior and, for a variety of reasons, even bright people may not have learned how to do it.  Indeed, our English department tells me that last semester out of fifty honors students in freshman English, not a single one tested out into the advanced course.  (13)

To respond to this need, more honors programs are taking the WAC approach and increasing the amount of writing honors students do throughout their programs.  In fact, several survey respondents and follow-up interviewees in Honors Composition could not provide much information on specific courses, thesis requirements, or other projects because these components were planned but not yet implemented, a state of affairs that demonstrates the growing importance of composition within honors programs.  From Frank Aydelotte’s work with the “ideas” course onward, honors programs have always emphasized developing students’ critical thinking skills, and writing to learn has been a large part of this.  In Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, John C. Bean further emphasizes the connection between writing and critical thinking:

[I]n presenting students with significant problems to write about--and in creating an environment that demands their best writing--we can promote their general cognitive and intellectual growth.  When we make students struggle with their writing, we are making them struggle with thought itself.  Emphasizing writing and critical thinking, therefore, generally increases the academic rigor of a course.  Often the struggle of writing, linked as it is to the struggle of thinking and to the growth of a person’s intellectual powers, awakens students to the real nature of learning.  (xiii)

Therefore, FYHC courses can avoid the trap of being merely more readings and more writing assignments by promoting increased interdisciplinary opportunities for critical thinking through writing across the curriculum.
    
Currently, honors programs address their students’ needs for cross-curricular writing instruction and development of critical thinking skills in the following ways:
    
1.  Few honors programs exempt their students from freshman composition, and many offer honors sections or special combined courses that focus on research and argumentation skills.  Honors students thus start their careers of academic writing upon a common foundation.
    
2.  Many honors students are required to take an advanced or field-specific composition course, such as technical or business communication, if such a course is required by the student’s major or by the school’s general education requirements.  Many programs also currently offer these courses in honors sections.  While the bulk of an honors student’s writing will be academic writing, these courses develop skills that students will use in nonacademic workplaces.
    
3.  Many honors programs offer honors seminars and colloquia that are designated “writing-intensive.”   These courses are field-specific and sometimes interdisciplinary, and writing to learn plays an important role in developing students’ critical thinking skills.  At some schools, these courses follow first-year composition, but at others that allow exemption from first-year composition, these courses provide the students’ formal writing instruction.
    
4.  More honors programs at both four-year and two-year schools require students to write a senior thesis or written capstone project to complete the honors program and/or earn honors certification.  For these projects, students learn to research topics in their fields and to adopt appropriate writing styles and formats.  Students are also encouraged to present their materials at conferences and to publish them in undergraduate and professional journals. 
    
5.  Honors programs often use interdisciplinary faculty participation for evaluation of writing in a variety of ways.  For example, an interdisciplinary honors committee may be asked to read and evaluate writing samples during the annual admissions process.  Interdisciplinary honors colloquia and seminars are sometimes team-taught by faculty from different departments.  Thesis committees convened for evaluation of the written document and the student’s oral defense could be interdisciplinary as well, especially if the honors program director participates in all thesis committees.
    
With these types of courses and projects in place or in development within most honors programs, WAC seems to be effectively addressing many concerns about writing and critical thinking at the intersection of honors education and composition instruction. A major problem, however, remains in that we currently have no central set of criteria to determine what FYHC is, how it should be evaluated, how courses and projects should be structured, and who should be involved in designing courses and projects and evaluating the writing done therein.  Scholars in composition research have produced a number of sourcebooks and guidebooks for composition instruction at freshman and advanced levels; scholars in writing across the curriculum have created guides for administrators and interdisciplinary faculty who want to incorporate writing into their programs; and the National Collegiate Honors Council provides general guidelines for honors education at two-year and four-year programs.  None of these, however, specifically addresses FYHC. 

Contemporary honors educators have focused their goals and objectives in four areas: program rationale, curriculum, instruction, and evaluation.  These are significant for FYHC because honors program directors, writing instructors, and/or program faculty must address these issues when developing and implementing honors writing courses and projects.

Rationale for Honors
    
Honors educators are constantly defending their efforts against charges that honors education is elitist and that it perpetuates some hidden political agenda by providing special opportunities only for those students whom they believe will be “just like them.”  Also, as competition for limited funding increases, how can schools justify allocation of resources to programs that serve only a small, elite group of students?  Honors students and other above-average writers are already advantaged in their capacity to comprehend and apply complex concepts more quickly than other students; why should we work to push them even farther ahead of their peers when their peers are the students who truly need our attention and our resources?  Rinehart, however, argues,

Honors programs are not elitist when they perceive of their role in a broad social context, when they help their institutions to attract a diversity of excellent students and faculty, and when they are able to move some of the best features of honors education into a wider institutional context.  (32)

FYHC courses generally engage these “best features” by maintaining smaller class sizes than regular composition courses, by encouraging class participation through more substantive peer critique and editing of essays, and by allowing students to research and/or write about specialized or unique topics.  For example, one survey respondent in Honors Composition indicated that one first-year honors composition instructor focused the class on the epic form and required students to write a ninety-eight-page personal epic as the semester’s work.  While this may seem excessive for a freshman assignment, it demonstrates the possible diversity of honors composition.
    
Opponents of FYHC argue that above-average writers should remain in regular composition sections because they provide leadership in class discussion and peer critiques of essays.  Proponents, however, argue that rather than developing their own writing and leadership skills, students with advanced writing skills who are enrolled in regular composition end up focusing more on editing their peers’ papers and, in effect, become teaching assistants for the class.  But, in a separate section, students writing at similarly advanced levels can challenge each other’s writing and critical thinking skills through more in-depth, challenging writing assignments and thus focus on being students rather than semi-instructors.

Honors Curriculum
    
Honors educators have worked to increase both the breadth and depth of honors coursework and programs to create well-rounded yet professionally prepared graduates.  The variety of FYHC courses and projects traditionally offered should expand to meet these needs as well.  As colleges and universities struggle to balance demands for professional preparation and demands for retention of more traditional general education requirements, honors educators have been outspoken advocates of the liberal arts, particularly humanities, in their desire to expose students to a variety of subjects.  Program directors and honors instructors should take advantage of this attention to the humanities by promoting the benefits of FYHC courses and projects to students and faculty in all disciplines and generating institutional and financial support for a wider range of honors writing opportunities.  Honors programs were also in the forefront of the postwar/Sputnik push for improvement in science education and the need for university-based coursework in professional areas, such as engineering and medicine, in addition to a liberal arts background.  FYHC should expand to serve these students as well; in addition, advanced courses such as honors technical communication and business communication should be offered to prepare students for writing in nonacademic professional and technical settings.

Honors Instruction
    
The opportunity to teach an honors course can attract quality faculty to an institution: not only do faculty have the chance to work with high-quality students, but they can also try different instructional approaches that might not be readily accepted by students in a regular course section.  Such honors courses allow faculty to pursue their own special interests in greater depth than they would with regular undergraduate courses.  FYHC courses can also allow faculty to use different instructional approaches.  For example, one option is a team-taught seminar on a subject of professional interest with another faculty member from that discipline, such as writing in education or the rhetoric of scientific communication.   

Honors Evaluation

In this time of increased calls for accountability of all college and university programs regarding adequate preparation of employable students, honors educators are also developing more thorough assessment measures for honors programs and courses.  Thorough, valid assessment will either show the benefits of honors courses, helping to improve their legitimacy at the university, or cause instructors and administrators to reevaluate their efforts and work to improve their programs.  For FYHC, program directors and composition faculty should decide how the honors courses will be evaluated: as a part of an honors program evaluation, as a part of the writing program or English department evaluation, and/or as a part of an institutional evaluation.  FYHC courses are actually helpful in providing course self-evaluation and overall program evaluation.  For example, at the completion of a composition course, students can write a self-evaluation essay which reflects upon what they have learned and upon the course itself.  In addition to student reports, portfolios of student work can also inform faculty, program directors, and/or honors committees about the success of individual courses and assignments. 

In considering these four important issues and their development through parallel histories of composition studies and the honors education movement, we can see how FYHC makes an important connection between work in honors education and composition instruction.  The better we understand the foundational concepts behind honors education in general, the more effectively we can argue for the development of sound pedagogical strategies for FYHC specifically.  The next step, then, in establishing this connection as a valid area for scholarly research and discussion is to move discussions out of the realm of hallway lore into a legitimate line of scholarly inquiry in our professional publications and conferences.  Our work in such venues as this new journal, therefore, should begin to build this much-needed area, not in order to proscribe how FYHC should be taught, but to provide resources and guidance on how it could be taught to the benefit of students and faculty alike.

Works Cited

Asbury, Ray.  “A History of the Honors Movement Part Two: The History of ICSS.” National Honors Report 14.4 (Winter 1994): 7-8.

Aydelotte, Frank. Breaking the Academic Lock Step: The Development of Honors Work in American Colleges and Universities.  NY and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944.

---.   “The History of English as a College Subject in the United States.”  Originally in The Oxford Stamp and Other Essays: Articles from the Educational Creed of an American Oxonian (1917). The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History. Ed. John C. Brereton.  Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.  300-311.

Bean, John C.  Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1996.

Berlin, James A.  Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.  Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Bruffee, Kenneth A.  “Making the Senior Thesis Work.”  Forum for Honors (Spring/Summer 1993): 2-10.

Cohen, Joseph W. The Superior Student in American Higher Education.  NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Guzy, Annmarie.  Honors Composition: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practices.  National Collegiate Honors Council, 2003.

Harte, Thomas B.  “Honors and Non-Honors Students: How Different Are They?”  NHR 15.2 (Summer 1994): 12-14.

LeFevre, Karen Burke.  Invention as a Social Act.  Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

North, Stephen M.  The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field.  Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987.

Rinehart, Timm Richard.  “The Role of Curricular and Instructional Innovation in the Past, Present, and Future of Honors Programs in American Higher Education.”  Diss. Western Michigan University, 1978.

Rose, Mike.  Lives on the Boundary.  NY: Free Press-Macmillan, 1989.

Shaughnessey, Mina P.  Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing.  NY: Oxford UP, 1977.