Staff Proposals

Honors Course or Option Proposals

The mission of the Lane Community College Honors Program is to provide challenging and transformative student learning experiences by offering honors courses and options in a variety of academic disciplines. The Honors Program is committed to advancing academic rigor, scholarly inquiry, creativity, independent thinking, and civic growth throughout the campus community.

The Honors Program represents a powerful opportunity to support student achievement and development by promoting core critical thinking and communication abilities while fostering student inquiry, creativity, understanding, and self-efficacy.

Distinguishing Honors from Non-honors Offerings

Honors offerings do not simply add more work (readings, assignments, etc.). The intent of an honors option or section is to delve deeper into the topic or discipline, engender robust learning, and provide opportunities for expression of newly found concepts and ideas on the part of the students. It is a student-focused process. Honors instructors contribute to this process through an emphasis on facilitation as well as instruction. As a prospective honors instructor, you have multiple options to create an offering and add your unique voice and style to the program.

Curriculum Options

The Honors Program is seeking applications for honors sections and courses with honors options that deepen intellectual growth by engaging students in a wide variety of pedagogies and discipline areas. We are especially interested in honors offerings that fulfill general education transfer requirements for the AAOT, ASOT, and AAS. Honors sections and options must be taught at Lane's main campus.

Proposals are evaluated based on content only. Individual faculty are not being evaluated for program participation. However, honors section proposals will be evaluated on an individual basis in order to develop a rich, robust, and balanced program that is clearly different from (not necessarily better than) the great work currently being done at Lane.

Honors sections of existing courses engage all students in honors-level curriculum. They provide the general curriculum using an honors model. Honors sections delve more deeply into subject matter and may move at a faster pace than a non-honors class. These sections cannot exceed a thirty percent change in content to have the same course number as the non-honors version of the course. If you are proposing the development of a new course, contact the Honors Program before proceeding with your proposal.

Honors options include a variety of formats, which allow subsets or small groups of students to participate in honors-level curriculum within the framework of existing courses. Options may include independent study arrangements, presentations, or other formats intended to contribute to and enrich the learning of the entire class.

Proposal Application Process

Sections or courses selected for honors development will be provided up to thirty hours of curriculum funding to fully develop curriculum enhancements. Honors options may receive up to twenty hours of curriculum development funding; the number of hours will depend upon the format and development requirements.

Applications for honors sections and/or honors options are accepted on an ongoing basis. Please refer to the Recommended Honors Attributes webpage for guidance in developing your application and contact the Honors Program coordinators. We welcome proposals at any time; however, for a class to appear in the online class schedule, your application needs to be received two weeks prior to the deadline in the Class Schedule Production Calendar to allow time for the committee to review your application. 

Teaching an honors section or option requires additional commitments prior to and during the teaching term. These commitments may include extracurricular student mentoring and coaching, attending capstone presentations, honors faculty workshops and retreats, and Honors Program new student orientation participation.

Please direct any questions or comments to Honors Program Faculty Coordinator Kimberly Parzuchowski.

Thank you for your interest, and we look forward to reviewing your proposal!

Honors Course Proposal Application