Honors Courses
Instructor: Kathryn Dilworth, Professor of Practice, Honors College
J. Peter Moore, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description:
This course is a writing-intensive course in which students learn how to find, evaluate, and use credible information, how to express themselves well in a variety of different written genres, and how to write for different audiences. This course meets the university core requirement for Written Communication and Information Literacy.
Instructors: Kristen Bellisario, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Ashima Krishna, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
Course Description:
This course is for new members of the Honors College community, who entered as continuing Purdue students or transferred to Purdue. It, being your first or one of your first courses in the Honors College, is designed to help you hone some of the fundamental learning outcomes of an honors education: interdisciplinary thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, research thinking, collaboration, and global awareness. You will also engage with the pillars of the Honors College and develop community within the Honors College.
To accomplish these objectives, the course is simultaneously project-based and experiential. You will work in multi-disciplinary teams on applied research that emphasizes critical and multi-dimensional thinking about real-world problems. Through project-based learning, you will move your skills beyond identifying and understanding a problem to identifying and formulating solutions to that problem. The problem addressed in the course is local or global in scope and has social, economic, political, and/or environmental implications for our local and/or global community as well as begs a multi-disciplinary, innovative solution.
Instructor: TBA
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description:
“Exploring Place” is an examination of the cultural, social, and historical dynamics that influence communities and relationships of a site. Blending independent study and distance learning, in this experiential learning course, the student and the instructor work together to design an individualized, in-depth study of the place in which the student is located. This study will be attentive to the social, cultural, political, economic, and other forces that have shaped this place historically and today, while also focusing on community life and the relationships between residents, institutions, organizations, and others. Exploring Place offers students the opportunity to better understand the people and places around them, expand their worldviews, and increase their self-awareness as they engage within these spaces and understand their place in them. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Instructor: Ashima Krishna, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Nathan Swanson, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
Course Description: In this course, students from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana), Unisinos (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (Cuzco, Peru) will collaborate virtually in interdisciplinary teams to identify solutions to a global or trans-local challenge. At the start of the course, students from all three universities will meet together to learn about the topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives through guest lectures, assigned readings, and class discussions. Students will then be divided into interdisciplinary teams with members from all three universities and provided a prompt related to the theme. Teams will spend the remainder of the course focused on researching, developing, and packaging their solutions, which they will present publicly at the end of the term. In addition to increasing knowledge of the topic and improving teamwork skills, students in this course will advance in intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes through their international collaborative experience. Those completing this course will be given first priority to enroll in a subsidized study abroad program to Porto Alegre, Brazil, over Spring Break 2024 for 2 additional credits.
Instructors: TBA
Credit Hours: 1
This course meets during Fall Break, October 7-10, 2023
Course Description: Sumac. Hellbender. Puffball. Chokeberry. Cave Cricket. Ink Cap. Since the 1970s, overall monitored species populations have plummeted 68% (WWF 2020) and such population surveys are valuable tools for researchers, governments, and land managers. In this Study Stay course over October break, students will engage in active learning in the local community, exploring local sites to find, identify, and document as many different plants, animals, and fungi as possible using citizen science mobile apps and field guides. After gathering data, students will interpret the collected data and create a presentation to share their findings. In this course, students will approach biodiversity through multiple disciplinary lenses, learning basic scientific research skills while developing an understanding of the challenges and complexities of conservation, including climate change, economic development, urban planning, and policymaking. Students will learn about the anthropogenic causes for species decline, ongoing efforts to preserve biodiversity, and how the choices we make can help reverse declines. Get out of the classroom and into the forest, prairie, and wetland.
Get to know more about local flora, fauna, and fungi, further our understanding of the world, and celebrate the diversity of life.
Instructor: Temi Adeoye, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 4
Course Description: This course prepares students to help Lafayette youth with their homework and other learning assignments after school. Students will engage in critical class activities and discussions examining how culture supports the educational achievement of students of color. Students then visit an afterschool program where they will apply learned practices that integrate youths' interests, knowledge, and cultural experiences to support youth achievement. This course introduces students to the concepts of culture, class, and funds of knowledge with the opportunity to apply course content in service of local youth. No prior community or youth service experience is required. A background check will be required to confirm enrollment in this course.
Instructor: Ed Zschau, Adjunct Professor, Construction Engineering and Management
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description:This practical, “hands on” case-based course is designed for sophomores and juniors who aspire to start value-creating enterprises early in their careers and/or who want to be key contributors in young emerging technology-based companies directly after graduation. It introduces students to the conceptual frameworks, the analytical approaches, the personal understandings and skills, the needed resources, and the actions required to launch a successful technology-based enterprise.
Various versions of the course have been offered a total of 42 times for about 2,000 undergraduate students, many majoring in the liberal arts, at four universities including Princeton, Caltech, and Purdue. Several teaching and learning techniques are used in the course. The primary technique is an instructor-led classroom discussion by students about what to do in a real technology venture situation, described by a Harvard Business School case, involving the critical decisions and actions needed to address effectively the opportunities and challenges facing such a startup enterprise.
Ed Zschau (pronounced like the first syllable of “shower”) has started and led technology companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere during the past 55 years as well as heading the $6.5 billion IBM Storage Systems Division in the 1990s. He has served as a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Harvard Business School, Princeton University, Caltech, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Purdue University.
Ed represented the Silicon Valley area of California in the US Congress for two terms in the 1980s. He received his AB degree in Philosophy (bridging with Physics) from Princeton and his MBA, MS (statistics), and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. Ed leads the class sessions remotely from a classroom studio in his Nevada home with students in the Stewart G-52 classroom which has been specially designed, equipped, and operated to enable effective interactive class discussions to be conducted remotely.
Instructor: Adam Watkins, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 1
This course meets during Fall Break, October 7-10, 2023
Course Description: Honors Leadership Retreat is for Honors students who want to take meaningful steps on the path to becoming an exceptional leader. The retreat consists of a highly interactive two-day, one-night stay at Camp Tecumseh over Fall Break. Here, students can explore principles of leadership excellence in a fun, supportive, low-stakes environment, while also making connections with other Honors leaders. *There is an additional fee for this course. Students can apply for need-based support.*
Instructor: Adam Watkins, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 1
Course Description: This course is intended for JMHC students who have been awarded the Lead Forward Fellowship Grant. The course provides Lead Forward Fellows a space to receive further instruction on social impact leadership, to share their experience with enacting social impact projects, and to support each other's success and learning. Depending on availability, students who are undertaking social impact projects but are not Lead Forward Fellows may also enroll in the course, per approval from the course instructor.
Instructor: Hyunju Lee, Visiting Clinical Instructor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This course provides students with the concepts and tools they will need to make a meaningful social impact. In addition to exploring the theory behind social change leadership, the course will include case studies of various types of social change and guest speakers with expertise in social impact work. Through examination of social impact theory and models, and through dynamic class discussions and activities, students will undergo an intensive journey the includes establishing their own values and commitments; fostering a vision and network; and cultivating tools necessary for framing, examining, and addressing a social issue through collective action.
Instructor: Hyunju Lee, Visiting Clinical Instructor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This course acts as an asynchronous, curricular companion to students’ extracurricular leadership experience. Students will choose from a menu of course modules, allowing them to tailor the instruction they receive to their own leadership context. A portion of the course is designated as a leadership lab, which makes time devoted to the leadership role part of the course. Ultimately, the course will enhance students' performance in their leadership roles, promote deeper learning about leadership best practices, and help students cultivate a research-based leadership approach that is suited to their strengths and values.
Instructor: Kathryn Dilworth, Professor of Practice, Honors College
Credit Hours: 2
Course Description: This course will cover the history and motivation behind philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, the US Nonprofit Sector as well as the role of ethics in private action taken for the public good. Students will also learn the fundamentals of nonprofit leadership and fundraising. This course meets asynchronously online.
Instructor: J. Peter Moore, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 1
This course meets during Fall Break, October 7-10,2023
Course Description: This four-day course offers students a hands-on introduction to the Honors College Print Bay, a fullyequipped center for the experiential study of letterpress printing. This vintage method, once the dominant form of industrial printing, has over the past several decades experienced a dramatic revival. At a time when the campus is overwhelmed with posters and flyers that all look the same—with the usual fonts, preset templates and stock images—letterpress introduces into the visual landscape an unmistakably warm and vibrant alternative. A synthesis of art and machine, letterpress is an analog process that allows the user to physically compose layouts, and work within a completely unique set of visual constraints. The resulting prints testify to the beauty of irregularity, the joy of a meditative tactile practice, and the benefits of collaboration. By the end of our course, students will receive instruction in the following skills: grid layout, typesetting, form lock-up, make-ready, press operation, plate etching, press maintenance, and all relevant safety precautions. While no previous experience is necessary, students with an interest visual design, mechanical technology and/or creative expression are encouraged to enroll.
Instructor: TBA
Credit Hours: 1
This course meets during Fall Break, October 7-10, 2023
Course Description: This fall break course will bring students back to the nineteenth century in Chicago at a time of steam engines, robber-barons, and railway strikes. In Chicago, we will explore the lives of laborers, who were often migrants newly arrived in the United States, as they navigated the crushing economic inequality of the Gilded Age. We will explore the rise of labor unions and radical agitators who faced off with men like Rockefeller and Carnegie. The first day will be spent exploring the Driehaus Museum, where students will be tasked with thinking through the cultural and societal forces that brought on the Gilded Age. The second day will be spent in the Pullman Neighborhood investigating how laborers, suffocated by their working conditions, elected to strike, leading to the largest railway strike in US history. On the final day, we will explore the site of the Haymarket Affair, a bombing blamed on European anarchists, and the legal trials that followed. Students will be asked to think about their current historical moment and the commonalities between the present day and the Gilded Age. *There is an additional fee for this course. Students can apply for need-based support.*
Instructor: Dwaine Jengelley, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Anish Vanaik, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
This course meetind during Fall Break, October 7-10, 2023
Course Description: Purdue Sports Through the Years is a short, experiential course for students interested in the evolution of sports and athletic venues. Over October break, you will work in teams to dive into Purdue’s sporting past and showcase it in a cutting-edge medium. We’ll begin by drawing out sources that can help us recreate the atmosphere of a game at one of Purdue’s athletic facilities in the past. This will include a visit to the venue today and a brief investigation into archival sources. You will gain an in-depth understanding of the changes in Purdue's sports programs over time, including significant events and notable figures in the university's athletic history. Finally, we’ll showcase your findings by producing multi-media content to be displayed on the Vision Port in the Innovation Forum at the Honors College.
Instructor: Lindsay Weinberg, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: Science and technology are deeply intertwined with the distribution of costs and benefits in human society, underscoring the need for critical perspectives. This course will examine the social and ethical implications of science and technology using interdisciplinary methodologies/approaches. “Surveillance” introduces students to critical approaches to the study of surveillance in the United States. Students will consider historical, feminist, and critical race approaches to the study of surveillance, and examine the use of surveillance by government and commercial entities. Students will also study the ways that popular discourse, literature, film, and art critically engage with the practice of surveillance. Ultimately, students will be able to articulate how surveillance is enacted through various technologies in difference spaces, under varying conditions, and in ways that enable regimes of capital accumulation and state control. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructor: Katie Jarriel, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: Science and technology are deeply intertwined with the distribution of costs and benefits in human society, underscoring the need for critical perspectives. This course will examine the social and ethical implications of science and technology using interdisciplinary methodologies/approaches. From Pandora’s Box to Blade Runner 2049, the creation of artificial bodies has captured the human imagination. How do the materials we use to re-create the human body affect the way that we understand our own humanity? In this class, you will examine different materials people have used to replicate the body, such as wood, wax, digital media, and CRISPR. This course emphasizes hands-on learning; you will cast wax masks, sculpt clay figurines, and create automata, among other experiential activities. You will explore technobodies across many time periods and cultures, ranging from the Mechanical Turk to Amazon’s MTurk, death masks to Deepfakes, and statues to cyborgs. By the end of this course, you will be able to evaluate diverse societal practices of technology, materiality, and reproduction of the human form. Typical class days include student-led discussion and collaborative projects. This course fulfills the university core requirement for Science, Technology, and Society.
Instructor: TBA
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: In this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment— specifically, the built environment—from multiple social contexts and time periods. In this course, we will challenge the premise that infrastructure as invisible until it breaks down. We study the perspectives of communities who live and experience the infrastructure of their built environment with the perspectives of the designers of infrastructure who are intimately aware of the materials, systems, and structures that sustain society. For the intended community beneficiaries of infrastructure, we ask when and for whom infrastructure is visible or invisible. We will draw upon case studies from the US and Latin America to consider public policy, civil engineering, and cultural activism from comparative perspective. As a result of taking this course, you will recognize and evaluate important questions about our relationship to maritime environments, understand the perspectives of different peoples and why the coast is significant to them, and draw connections between course materials and your own experience. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Instructor: Immanuel Williams, Limited Term Lecturer
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This course aims to provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the field of data science. Students will be taught how to extract, transform, visualize, and interpret data from sources such as Spotify, sports, and social media.
Programming concepts such as variables, functions, and data structures will be introduced in Python and R while using ChatGPT to enhance your understanding, but no prior programming experience is required. Students will learn how to apply data science to real-world problems, as well as gain an understanding of the ethical considerations behind data collection and analysis. By the end of the course, students will be able to confidently analyze data from various sources and use their newfound knowledge to make informed decisions.
Instructor: TBA
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: This class introduces students to the role of banishment and exile in the making of the modern world. Seen as a less cruel form of punishment, and an alternative to public execution, governments around the world have used banishment and exile as a method to control their populations, creating diasporic communities as a result. Those forced into exile left embittered communities behind, scarred by the expulsion of their compatriots. In the communities that received them, they were met with skepticism, and at times, resistance.
For the exiles themselves, the trauma of forced removal changed them in important ways. Some became radicalized as a result. Others yearned for home and put their hand to artistic pursuits to work through their grief. At other times, the bringing together of disaffected populations created networks of solidarity. Students will explore the psychological impacts of exile on those affected, how it has affected populations intergenerationally, the art that has blossomed in exiled communities, and the efforts to bring reconciliation and justice. Students will be exposed to exiled communities trans-historically, including the Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka, Irish exiles, the Jamaican Maroons, and the French Acadians.
Instructor: Daniel Guberman, Assistant Director for Inclusive Pedagogy, Teaching Success
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: Grades have become one of the central features of American higher education. They form a foundational element regarding who has access to educational opportunities both before and during higher education programs (e.g., scholarships, research or study abroad opportunities, and even majors and disciplines). In many cases, college grades become key factors in post-grad opportunities like internships, jobs, or graduate school admissions. However, grades are problematic. It is not clear what they measure. Grades can be a source of stress and anxiety, and they can magnify inequalities inherent in society. Grades can undermine effective learning through undermining intellectual risk taking and peer-to-peer collaboration. It will come as no surprise that instructors report disliking grades and grading. But what if there were another way? Increasing recognition of the problems inherent in grading systems has led to new ways of thinking about grades and their roles in higher education. In this course, we will explore grades and grading together. As students, you will consider your own relationship with grades, explore how faculty and administrators across Purdue understand, value, and use grades, engage with scholarly literature about alternative practices, and pursue a project based on your own goals to impact grading practices at Purdue.
Instructor: Mung Chiang, Purdue University President
Christopher Brinton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Credit Hours: 3
Course Description: What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results from literally trillions of webpages? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods? Is it really true that everyone on lnstagram is connected in six steps or less? And how do music videos-or anything else-go viral on the Internet? While these questions are each unique in their own right, their answers can be traced back to a handful of principles that crosscut the networks surrounding us in our daily lives. These principles--"negative feedback sharing,” "wisdom of crowds,” "divide and conquer,” and others—contain keen insights into how many different types of networks are formed, managed, and maintained. This course examines these principles in detail and uses them to answer these and other questions in a manner accessible to an interdisciplinary body of students. Students can also expect a few lectures from world-renowned networking professionals, including the "fathers of the Internet," to be interspersed throughout the semester. The course also includes a research-based final project which allows students to dive deeper into a contemporary networking topic of interest. Students will be permitted to flex their own strengths in this project, i.e., it can be either technical or conceptual in nature.
Instructor: Jason Ware, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: Tokyo, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, and Munich are the five most livable cities in the world when using metrics to measure crime, emergency services’ response time, transportation networks, cycling culture, food, drink, retail, and the number of independent bookshops. Many surveys exist to rank the world’s best cities, but wealth is one theme that emerges from among the varying indices and their respective results. The metrics—indeed, the participants responding to the metrics—represent populations of people with high levels of discretionary income. How might the metrics reflect different values if these indices include a different kind of participant, such as the urban poor? Our goal in this course is to investigate indicators of community well-being related to quality of life within urban poor communities. The underlying premise is that urban poor communities across the globe have negligible influence in determining the criteria for measuring a city’s livability. We’ll imagine that material realities of poverty manifest in issues of failing infrastructure and poor living conditions that compromise healthy living, and that social realities manifest in decreased educational attainment and outcomes. All of which suggests that urban poor communities may produce collectively a set of indicators that create a different picture of what it looks like to live within urban environments. We’ll plan to work with urban poor communities within the Greater Lafayette area to create and capture these indicators, the result of which will be a set of inclusive indicators for influencing policy and producing enhanced local future outcomes and community wellbeing.
Instructor: TBA
Credit Hours: 2
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: This course establishes a new pathway for Honors completion through a critical reflection of a student’s engagement with the Undergraduate Research pillar of the college. This course empowers Honors College students to leverage their research, scholarly, and creative experiences in curricular as well as co- and extra-curricular experiences toward completing the scholarly project requirement. The major assignment of the course is a reflective portfolio, which will serve not only as a record and reflection of past experiences, but also will be an opportunity to undertake self-reflection about how your time as an Honors College student has shaped your research thinking and helped prepare you for life beyond the university.
Instructor: Kristen Bellisario, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: With increased habitat fragmentation, air travel and travel corridors, noise is ubiquitous and has an impact on both wildlife and people. In this course, students will design and conduct a research study about noise the local community and discuss novel ideas to address these issues. The technical component of the course will cover properties of sound, techniques of qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Instructor: Dwaine Jengelley, Clinical Assistant Professor, Honors College
Anish Vanaik, Clinical Associate Professor, Honors College
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: This is a course-based undergraduate research experience through which students can work towards completing the scholarly and creative project requirement of the Honors College. This semester we’ll work with editorial cartoons created during and about the COVID-19 pandemic. Cartoons are a rich and hybrid medium of communication and editorial cartoonists have generated a lively and unique record of the public arguments in this period.
Instructor: Nathan Swanson
Credit Hours: 3
In completing all aspects of this course, students fulfill the requirements for an Honors College Scholarly Project. This course is only open to 3rd and 4th year students.
Course Description: In this course, students will produce maps, (info)graphics, and other media to tell community histories from the Greater Lafayette area. In creating a public exhibition, students will work individually and collectively to tell stories about home, identity, belonging and exclusion, and related themes. From research and data collection, to analysis and interpretation, to project design and curation, we will engage with theories, tools, and methods from multiple disciplines. Course projects may involve archival research, interviews and oral histories, textual analysis, and more. No specific technical or research skills are required coming into this course, and students of all majors are invited to bring their interests, ideas, and skill sets to the table. Students are encouraged to apply to fulfill their Honors scholarly project requirement with this course.