Fall 2024 Honors Classes

Students have been at the center of some of the world’s most transformative activist movements and justice causes. This class will explore some of those histories as well as local forms of justice organizing to introduce students to various kinds of activism, justice work, and build on the skills they already have to become future advocates, leaders, and change makers.

This class will introduce you to the fantastic array of film, tv, and short fiction made by Native American and Indigenous creatives. We'll watch music videos, short documentaries, animation, and chat about Indigenous representation in movies, tv, and pop culture.

We often think of the arts (for example, literature) as the opposite of science. But what happens if you use literature to understand mental illness? Read a medical case file as a work of literature? Study bio-chemical responses to art? This CAT community looks at the intersection of the arts and science.

This section is exclusively for students enrolled in the "Breaking the Art/Science Divide" CAT Community. See "CAT Community" section below for full details.

In the 1980s, some individuals feared that it would prove impossible to maintain thriving rural communities as rural populations continued to decline, even calling for portions of the plains to be converted into a “buffalo commons” for roaming herds of American bison. But where are we now? With the pandemic in the rearview mirror, people are moving into rural communities in pursuit of vibrant, quality lives. This class will take a look at the current challenges and opportunities for health and wellbeing, and their many contributing factors, in rural Kansas.

Historical and cultural documents provide insight into our world. But what if we can’t read them? During this class, we will explore historical documents and artefacts that may include handwritten letters, photographs, maps, and even physical objects. Our goal will be to make sense of them by asking questions and learning how to find answers for those questions. We will jointly explore items through in-class and out-of-class activities. Students in any major will be able to apply their experience reading cultural documents to future research.

Learn about the world of sustainable fashion and how to navigate it. In this course, students explore how garments are produced, why the fashion industry is currently problematic for ecological and social sustainability, and how we can rethink fashion for the future.

This section is specifically for students at K-State Salina.

Do you want to be a leader? Today’s leader needs a strong understanding of various leadership techniques. This course will explore servant leadership foundations and philosophies which support a management style that focuses on the growth and well-being of all team members. Active dialog, scenario discussion, and practice implementing the goals and mindset of this leadership style are important elements of the course.

DEN 160 (section G) can be taken as a substitution (this semester only) for UHP 189. The course also requires enrollment in a seminar component; students can enroll in any of the seminar sections.

General description of DEN 160: Students will be introduced to the requirements and expectations of the college of engineering. They will be exposed to tools to promote student success, while focusing on methods and resources for professional and professional development. Additionally, students will be introduced to all majors offered at K-State in the college of engineering and will be assisted in evaluating their options in order to select the most compatible major.

Instructor consent required.

Smith Caldas, Herren

Smith Caldas

No permission required. Description from the Division of Biology: "In this laboratory-based course, you will collect a soil sample and use virology techniques to isolate a virus that infects bacteria. You will then purify, amplify, and name this virus that will be part of a virus bank. This course is a lot of fun!"

First-Year Seminar. This section is for first-year students in the University Honors Program. For permission to enroll, contact kstatefirst@ksu.edu and ksuhonors@ksu.edu.

First-Year Seminar. This section is for first-year students in the University Honors Program. For permission to enroll, contact kstatefirst@ksu.edu and ksuhonors@ksu.edu.

No permission required to enroll. ENGL 210 can substitute for either ENGL 100 or ENGL 200 (but confirm with your advisor) and can be taken again with a different topic.

Turning on primetime television, picking up a newspaper or going to the movies, it is almost impossible to escape representations of criminality, whether in the form of crime scene investigators solving crimes or superheroes facing off against villains. Crime has long been a focus in literature, and our course will engage with literary texts in addition to films, music, and television as well as social science texts and social theory. In particular, we will focus on how criminalization in the United States is racialized.

We will focus on writing analytical essays about the themes and debates in the class, writing and revising three essays in addition to several shorter assignments. There will be substantial in-class collaboration and peer review of each other’s writings. This course will be discussion based, requiring regular attendance and classroom participation in relation to both readings and assignments.

*First-Year Seminar section. First-year students only. Some seats reserved for CAT Community members. For permission, contact kstatefirst@ksu.edu and ksuhonors@ksu.edu.

A discussion-survey of some seminal works in the Western literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions. You'll read some of the key works that helped shape the modern world; exposure to these works will help us address the big questions about our species, such as what is the role of destiny? What is the meaning of freedom? What is the value of an individual person and what constitutes a good life?

You'll read perhaps more than you would in most Humanities classes, but wrestling with Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Goethe, and Tolstoy is fundamental to gaining a well-rounded liberal education and a valuable intellectual challenge. We will pay particularly close attention to the ways language functions in representing and shaping the individual’s values and relations to the divine, to nature, to society or culture, and to other individuals.

Why do Kansas K-12 schools own so much historic artwork and how can they help students take a second look at these treasures? This weekly seminar will explore an early twentieth-century campaign by artists, school officials, and community members to transform Kansas schools into veritable art museums to improve the school environment and student learning; the course compliments the 2023/24 K-State Beach Museum of Art exhibition, "To the Stars Through Art: A History of Art Collecting in Kansas Public Schools, 1900-1950." Students will learn more about twentieth-century American culture and history and gain exposure to museum practices such as curation, exhibition design, and museum education. The class will collaborate to construct and design a digital resource. Each student will research and write a short essay about a “To the Stars Through Art” exhibition topic and develop a literature/writing activity related to an exhibition artwork to be published on the digital resource. The class will meet weekly in the Beach Museum of Art UMB Theatre. Knowledge of digitizing images, encoding languages, or web design is NOT a requirement for this course.

MATH 350 (along with MATH 351 in the spring) will form the second-year Calculus sequence for students in the Mathematical Scholars Program (MSP). However, students do not need to be in the MSP to take the course. Math 350/351 will provide an integrated approach to linear algebra, multivariable calculus and ordinary differential equations. Students will learn conceptual and computational techniques of linear algebra first and find immediate applications for ordinary differential equations and multivariable calculus. Topics include vector spaces, linear transformations, solutions to matrix equations, dimension, rank, eigenvalues, inner products, Sylvester's Theorem, multi-linear algebra, vector valued functions, vector fields and general ordinary differential equations. Applications to three dimensional geometry and ordinary differential equations will be made throughout.

First-Year Seminar. This section is for first-year students in the University Honors Program. For permission to enroll, contact kstatefirst@ksu.edu and ksuhonors@ksu.edu.

Messer, Alberto

Messer, Alberto

Messer, Alberto

Messer, Alberto

Some seats in Section A reserved for CAT Community students.

Barrett-Fox

This course is held on the Salina campus.

Matlock

Duke

Duke

Some seats reserved for CAT Community participants.

Wilkinson

Moley

Pettay