Call for Course Proposals

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students make SIU sign
Kate Held and Evan Tollins find their center on the planet making the SIU sign. From Professor Cade Bursell's Fall 2019 Honors Seminar, Forests and Humans.

Call for Course Proposals:  Fall 24-Spring 25

Due:  Monday, October 30, 2023.  Results will be announced by December 1, 2023.

The University Honors Program invites SIUC faculty to propose courses for our Fall 24-Spring 2025 UHON 351 seminars. Honors students take these UHON seminars to fulfil their University Core requirements. The goal is to introduce students to the foundations of intellectual enquiry in a comprehensive research university within the seminar-style model of collaborative learning. Seminars are dialogic. Faculty and students engage in debate and discussion grounded in texts and materials that the class is considering. 

We encourage experimental and interdisciplinary approaches that integrate theory and practice, the university and the community, and foster habits of critical thinking. These foundational courses are not surveys in specific disciplines. Rather, the objective is to engage students in exploring the big questions embedded in discipline/s, approaches or methods, and to deepen and broaden their ability to untangle major problems that confront us. 

In developing your course proposal, please consider: How does the course introduce students, especially non-majors, to the significance of your field or study? How does your method of analysis and research help examine how knowledge shapes our world and is shaped by it? How does your pedagogy engage students in experimenting with and communicating concepts such that they make deeper connections with each other and faculty? How does your subject help students feel some sense of control over their lives? 

All SIUC faculty are encouraged to apply. 

We invite proposals in either one of the following two categories:

  1. General call for proposals: A topic of your choice that would be of interest to undergraduate majors from an array of academic disciplines. Remuneration:  faculty incentive, i.e., $5000 in salary, if taught in addition to regular teaching duties; School incentive i.e., $5000 to the faculty member’s academic unit for release of faculty to teach the course (highly competitive, dependent upon strength of the proposal); or College Signature Course, taught on-load by the faculty member (no renumeration to College or faculty).   
  2. Call for Themed cluster: You will join a cluster of Honors faculty whose classes coalesce around this year’s theme: Play and civilization: History, theory, practice.  Faculty in the cluster will make one public presentation on their research-teaching in the semester.  The Honors program also seeks to coordinate our distinguished speaker series with the theme.    Remuneration is the same as for the general call for proposals.
Course Proposals are vetted by the Honors Advisory Council, comprised of faculty from all the Colleges.  Current members are:

Stacey McKinney   Health & Human Sciences                   Satoshi Toyosaki   Liberal Arts

Mehdi Ashayeri  Arts and Media                Jeb Asirvatham Agribusiness, Director, University Core Curriculum

John Farrish   Agricultural, life, and Physical Sciences               Bobbi Knapp   Health & Human Sciences

Kelly Bender   Agricultural, life, and Physical Sciences              Shaikh S. Ahmed   Engineering

Carol Westerman-Jones
Chief Academic Advisor, Agriculture, Life, and Physical sciences

Call for proposals for the themed cluster