Honors faculty value you being "in the know" as soon as we have information available. Jared Diener and I co-direct the first year experience for Honors students, including the HON 100 course. We made the difficult decision to move HON 100 online for a number of reasons, including difficulty finding classroom space that meets the 50% room capacity cap for social distancing guidelines, and increasing requests from students who wanted an online class experience.
That said, we are working diligently to ensure that you will have a high-quality HON 100 experience. Your Teaching Fellows will be attending a training during the first week of August that will include sustained discussions of online teaching best practices. Each HON 100 class session will be small, with no more than 8-9 students participating, so that you have opportunities for meaningful exchange of ideas and the chance to get to know each other. We have adjusted the syllabus as well, changing assignments and class expectations to be better adapted to an online learning environment. We hope you know that all of these decisions are being done thoughtfully, with the desire to establish learning opportunities that serve your best interests given existing constraints. As always, Mr. Diener and I are here for you, and we hope that you will provide us feedback over the course of the semester. Please shoot me an email if you have any questions in the interim. We hope that you are enjoying Factfulness! There will be a number of opportunities for you to engage with the content over the coming months, both in your HON 100 class and in Honors programs. Below is a link to a Reading Guide developed to help guide you to how you might use factfulness to think about wicked problems in the world, as well as to contextualize the legacy of James Madison at JMU.
As a JMU Honors student, the path you are embarking upon is one that will equip you with the tools to tackle the world’s “wicked problems,” those that have no easy answers, are tough to describe, and have innumerable causes. In fact, the wicked problems that have gripped headlines for the past few months – the fight against racial injustice and the COVID-10 global pandemic, among others – are currently impacting your lives and will continue to shape the contours of your college experience. The first step in being solution-minded is to cut through the noise and identify the facts that matter. That’s why we chose Factfulness as required reading for the incoming class. A reading guide will be coming to your inbox soon. We hope that you'll read the book and the guide completely, and arrive at JMU ready to share your thoughts about how you plan to cultivate a more factful worldview.
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AuthorAll posts are written by Dr. Alysia Davis, Director of Student Engagement in the JMU Honors College. The goal of these blog posts are to inform JMU Honors students and alumni about programs, activities, and opportunities in the JMU Honors College. To reach Dr. Davis directly, email her at [email protected]. Archives
August 2023
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