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

  1. Demonstrate interdisciplinary inquiry or analysis by integrating knowledge and modes of thinking across disciplines to generate a new insight or line of inquiry.
  2. Demonstrate the ability to understand and weigh achievements and limitations of claims from the past and present, as well as their own.
  3. Articulate a complex understanding and variability of social issues in a diverse, global context.
  4. Utilize academic tools and critical thinking in complex and nuanced ways in order to frame and engage a contemporary issue.
  5. Demonstrate critical engagement in the process of situating and articulating one’s individual ethics and demonstrate the ability to reflect upon the role of commitment to service, justice, and sense of vocation in an individual’s life.

Assessed Through
IHON 328: Final Project

updated January 2019