Courses

This course is for new members of the Honors College community, who entered as continuing Purdue students or transferred to Purdue. It, being your first or one of your first courses in the Honors College, is designed to help you hone some of the fundamental learning outcomes of an honors education: interdisciplinary thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, research thinking, collaboration, and global awareness. You will also engage with the pillars of the Honors College and develop community within the Honors College.

To accomplish these objectives, the course is simultaneously project-based and experiential. You will work in multi-disciplinary teams on applied research that emphasizes critical and multi-dimensional thinking about real-world problems. Through project-based learning, you will move your skills beyond identifying and understanding a problem to identifying and formulating solutions to that problem. The problem addressed in the course is local or global in scope and has social, economic, political, and/or environmental implications for our local and/or global community as well as begs a multi-disciplinary, innovative solution.

Continuing in the vein of experiential learning and of building your honors ethos, you will attend events (some as a class, others individually) and participate in programs in the Honors College and across campus that embody the Honors College’s pillars: Community and Global Engagement, Leadership, Research, and Interdisciplinary Academics.

Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary team in a semester-long exploration of the physical, social, and cultural geographies of heritage sites (these can be natural or cultural heritage sites). Student teams will explore the interconnectedness of the historic, built, and natural environments and the human interventions and interactions that occur within them. In this workshop-based hands-on course, students will develop a variety of mapping, presentation, analytical, and team building skills and conduct research with partners like federal government agencies and other organizations. Beyond traditional classroom texts and tools, students will learn to employ cutting-edge visualization techniques through VisionPort, an immersive pedagogical tool housed in the John Martinson Honors College. The course will culminate in a collaborative project report that will be presented to the Honors College community at the end of the semester and create a report that will be presented to our partners. In doing so, in this course, students will explore the entangled relations between humanity and the environment from multiple social contexts and time periods. This course meets the university core requirement for Human Behavioral and Social Sciences.