Current University Honors Teaching Fellows | University Honors Program | SIU

FALL 2025 

 

-Grant Miller, Associate Professor & Lingguo Bu, Associate Professor, School of Education 

• Making Math Fun for Children 

Creativity matters. So does community engagement. In this seminar, students will learn about a basic concept in design thinking, i.e., Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and how it may be used in freeing the creativity of children and making the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fun for elementary school children. In this theory-practice seminar, students will study the history, development, and curricula related to Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and try out what they have learned with children. We will design toys and exercises to make these subjects fun and meaningful, in the process, discover the joys of both learning and teaching. This seminar brings together some of the best Saluki traditions, i.e., the legacy of Buckminster Fuller’s contributions to design thinking and the SIUC commitment to enriching the local community. 

 

-Darryl Clark, Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre and Dance

• The Maternal in Movement 

Dance – one of oldest art forms in human history - honors the sacred and the maternal with many dance forms originating in the celebration of fertility rituals and even as birth dances. This course explores the portrayal of the idea of mother in dance from pre-history into our own time. We will study iconic works of choreography that draw on the idea of the maternal, such as works of artists like Alvin Ailey, Pina Bausch, Vaslav Nijinksky, and Isadora Duncan, to name a few. We will look at traditions of dance in relation to their historical contexts. Finally, we will relate the maternal and sacred in dance to ongoing explorations in mythology and psychology.

 

-Mike Eichholz, Professor of Zoology, College of Biological Sciences

• Why people who have a different opinion than your own are dumb, or maybe not? 

Many perceive the current level of discord in politics and throughout our society to be unnecessarily high. A primary contributor to this disagreement is likely our ability to silo ourselves by communicating with only like-thinking individuals, both in person and virtual socializing. This partitioning often leads us to vilify people with differing opinions than our own. What most people don't recognize is that thoughts and opinions are a chemical response to an external stimulus, creating a reflexive reaction based almost exclusively on our past experiences and memories. To be better at accepting people with differing opinions than our own and form consensus among and within groups, we first must understand the basics of how opinions are formed, then understand how past experiences can lead to very different, but valid opinions. In this seminar, students will learn that an opinion is at first a response to an external stimulus over which we have very little control. Additionally, our response to that stimulus (our opinion) can change with additional experience and memories i.e., rational or emotional reasoning. Acquiring a better understanding of how and why these special interests and opinions form can help us work better and achieve consensus within and among group members.

 

-Jenny Huang, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, College of Liberal Arts

• Workplace Safety and Worker’s Rights – New!

Our workplaces are changing and evolving with new forms of work, consequences of climate change and pandemics, and possibilities generated by new technologies. This course addresses several critical questions: What are the most common workplace hazards, and how can they be effectively mitigated? What rights do workers have when it comes to safety, and how can they advocate for themselves in unsafe environments? How do employer responsibilities influence workplace safety culture? The goal of this seminar is to empower students to not only understand their role in maintaining a safe work environment but also to see how safety impacts productivity, worker morale, and long-term industry sustainability. These issues matter because workplace safety directly affects the health, well-being, and lives of workers, making it a vital concern for both individuals and society as a whole.

 

-Christina Ivey, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, College of Liberal Arts

• A future we are already in: Exploring technology and digital culture through Black Mirror – New! 

Black Mirror (Charlie Brooker, 2011-2014) is a contemporary BBC/Netflix television series that poses questions, in the nature of sci-fi, about the direction we are headed with the proliferation of technology. What are the implications of our “always on” culture? What will advance in robotics and artificial intelligence mean for humans? How will increasingly immersive media environments shape human relations with other humans and non-humans? What impact does hyper publicity have on reputation, interpersonal relationships, and civic affairs? How is the internet changing patterns of surveillance and voyeurism? Is “digital immortality” something to strive for or resist? How will new technologies help us love and hate better? These questions—and many more like them—are (or are soon to be) pressing issues that demand thoughtful responses. We will use Black Mirror as a springboard to ask these questions of our present moment. As such, this course promotes/encourages critical thinking as well as application of fantasy world ethics to our own reality.

-Maria V. Johnson, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, School of Music

• Yoga and Sound Healing

This course provides introductions to both yoga and to the healing science of sound. While learning basic alignment principles and core poses of yoga, students will experience first-hand yoga's health benefits and the healing effects of sound/vibration on brain and body. How can yoga and sound practices help foster clearer thinking, emotional equilibrium, a sense of peace and well-being, balance, flow and ease in navigating your life? How can yoga and sound practices facilitate greater awareness, compassion, empathy, presence, and deeper interpersonal communication? How can practices of yoga and sound create safe spaces that nurture internal processes and a sense of feeling at home in your body while fostering a sense of community and belonging? This course challenges the student not only to think across disciplinary divides but also to integrate the creative and the scholarly, the embodied practices of yoga and sound with the scientific principles and concepts behind them.

 

-Daniel Mahony President, Southern Illinois University System
-Dr. Julie Partridge, Professor, School of Human Sciences, NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative

• Intercollegiate Athletics: Origins Through Contemporary 

Intercollegiate athletics started out as student-run sport clubs and eventually became recruiting and marketing tools for colleges and universities throughout the U.S. This course will chart the history of intercollegiate athletics from its start on the playing fields of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and other private institutions as student-run, student-played, and student-coached sporting clubs to the development of the Power Four Conferences and football coaches who make over $10 million dollars a year. As part of this exploration, the course will also examine the impact of factors such as social class, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability on the intercollegiate athletic experience. The content will also cover topics such as amateurism, labor unions, protests, academic scandals, NIL, the transfer portal, the changing role of the NCAA, and the future of college athletics. Assignments are designed to allow students to explore options to address the issues faced in intercollegiate athletics and propose solutions.

 

-Heather O’Brien-Takahashi, Assistant Professor, Cinema and Interdisciplinary Media, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, College of Arts and Media

• The Film Essay as Art Form: Cinema, Memory, & Trauma – New! 

Cinema is rich with references to memory. With the rise of digital and over-image- saturation/stimulation, documentary and narrative practices have taken turns into representing history with a pensive slowness. This course takes up the genre of the “essay film” and reflects on the relationship the still and moving image sets up to memory, to the preservation as image of spaces destroyed by wars, climate change, and capitalist reconstruction. We will look at works that explore the relationship latter generations have to bear to trauma (personal, collective, and cultural) encountered by those who came before them. Memory and history are invariably political – it can be a weapon or a cry for justice and is as such tied deeply to structural inequalities. Cinema is a technology of remembrance – akin to stories, images, and behaviors among which we grow up, it is an archive of the ever-changing relationship humans have had to memory since the invention of the camera and early modernism.
This is a practice and research-based course. We will be analyzing and interpreting film and photo essays and also creating our own.

 

-JP Reed, Professor, School of Africana and Multicultural Studies

• We Shall Overcome: The History, Possibilities & Continued Significance of the Civil Rights Movement

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will – Frederick Douglas. This is an introductory course on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. It is intended to give students a broad understanding of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and how it has been theorized and analyzed. We will learn about key figures, texts, and popular cultural forms that arose with the movement. We will ask: Under what societal conditions did the Civil Rights Movement emerge? What empowered people to sustain this struggle against great oppression? In what ways did the movement transform the understanding of the self and society?

 

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