International Honors Program Learning Outcomes

What follows are two different ways of expressing the same International Honors Program Learning Outcomes: the first version is aimed at students beginning their studies; the second version is expressed in terms professors tend to use.

International Honors Program Learning Outcomes:  From the Student’s Perspective

  1. Learn how different disciplines approach the same problems, and then put their methods together to get new, bigger perspective on those problems.
    Different academic disciplines, such as economics, or sociology, chemistry, sometimes study the same problems. But they use different tools to do so. And any particular intellectual tool doesn’t just enlighten us, but also blinds us. In IHON, we try to overcome some of these academic blindnesses by studying problems or themes through multiple academic perspectives.
  2. Put the achievements of past societies – and their shortcomings — into context, and then turn that same skill on yourself and on the contemporary world.
    In IHON, you will learn to evaluate the claims past and present societies and communities tend to make about their achievements. You will also learn to contextualize these claims, in order to explore those societies’ and communities’ achievements and shortcomings.  But you’ll also use those perspectives to contextualize your own claims and your own society.
  3. Think about how social issues are different in different societies and different times: the basic questions may be the same, but every society and every time can have different answers.
    In any society, you’re raised to make certain assumptions — to think of particular values or habits of thinking as normal and natural. In IHON classes, you’ll explore some of these assumptions, across cultures and across time, in order to become aware of how they limit and guide your own perspective.
  4. As you progress through IHON, you’ll learn to how to use the academic tools and perspectives you encounter in your classes to research and think about a question that matters to you in a complex, nuanced way.
  5. Put it all together to think through your own, personal ethics.  Reflect on how the values expressed in PLU’s mission – service, justice, and vocation – might inform your life now and in the future.  You will use all of your skills in multiple disciplines, scholarship, and care for others to work out and support your thoughts in a way that will make a difference in the world.

International Honors Program Learning Outcomes:  Administrative Version

IHON 100-level LOs

Students in IHON 111 and 112 will:

  1. Practice historicizing our own categories of analysis, including (but not restricted to) modern categories such as nation, creed, race, and gender. In the case of texts (ancient and modern) which have been mediated by powerful interpretive traditions (religious, national, disciplinary, etc.), this requires becoming aware of naturalizing pre-interpretations. Through historicizing our own categories of analysis, we become capable of more profound experiences of cultural and temporal diversity.
  2. Attune ourselves to the unique voices present in each text and cultivate receptivity to the specific terms and modes in which they express themselves. Appreciate the diverse experiences they capture, including various ways of relating to and understanding the world.
  3. Cultivate students’ abilities to engage in the craft of conversation: describing texts precisely and specifically, rather than relying upon general terms and labels; keeping to the relevant text/s and avoiding general statements; learning to build on another participant’s thoughts; indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms; collaborating rather than competing.

IHON 200-level LOs

In IHON 200-level courses, students will:

  1. Employ combinations of concepts, traditions, modes of thought, and histories of inquiry in a way which gives us the capacity to have “second thoughts” about what previously seemed “obvious” to us;
  2. Employ the concepts, modes of thought, traditions, and histories of inquiry students encounter in the course in order to draw their own conclusions about the problems and/or materials they’re analyzing, and their relations to matters of common concern;
  3. Exhibit the capacity to employ one or more concepts, traditions, modes of thought, or histories of inquiry from the course to explore complexities of their own experience as social, historical, and natural beings.*

* Note: This is not calling for students to write a conventional personal essay, but rather to inquire into their own experiences; in other words, not “speech from nowhere,” but also not a memoir.

IHON 300-level LOs

In both IHON 328 and IHON 329, students build on capacities expressed in the learning objectives for IHON 100- and 200-level courses.

In IHON 328, students will:

  1. Explore notions of justice, from across the globe, as an open-ended endeavor;
  2. Examine the development of their own understandings of notions of justice, from the transformative texts read in IHON 111-112, to the inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches explored in 200-level courses, to courses from across PLU, while establishing connections among these notions;
  3. Integrate multiple traditions, modes of thoughts, and histories of these notions in a culminating project;
  4. Refine how they articulate their personal commitments to and understandings of notions of justice, and in doing so, foregrounding potential tensions and/or contradictions among these notions.

In IHON 329, students will:

  1. Respond to a single non-specialized book, film or other work, in a way which exhibits the conversational orientation and capacities which they’ve learned and practiced across the levels of the IHON Program.

updated Spring 2026