Junior - Senior Year Courses

Honors Religion and Culture is an interdisciplinary, problem-based, topical seminar that features a particular problem or issue and includes an experiential learning component. Using a substantial number of readings, primarily from one discipline, but also from two or three other complementary disciplines that relate to the problem under exploration, the course examines what might it look like to be both a responsible citizen of this nation and this world and a curious truth-seeker or person of faith. The course explores how our political leanings and our faith commitments mutually inform one another, as well as ways such commitments have taken shape and produced both conflict and harmony in the course of our nation's history. 

Prerequisite: Honors 2950 Study Abroad Writing Workshop
The first of the Honors Research Triad, this course will build on skills developed in HON 2950 by applying those skills to the specific disciplinary research contexts of their individual Honors projects.Utilizing team-based, problem-solving learning strategies coupled with individual research and application, students will produce a project prospectus, including a literature review and timeline for their paper or product. In preparation for producing the literature review and prospectus for their projects, students will be introduced to important topics such as time and project management, project funding, targeted primary and secondary research, leadership, advocacy and the importance of being able to communicate project value to external stakeholders.

Honors Project Research and Execution is the second course of the Honors Research Triad. Students will execute the plan laid out in their prospectus, supported by class activities intended to increase those skills necessary for the completion of their projects. Specific sections of this course will be designed to implement a variety of research and production methodologies; students in majors which require extensive senior projects will be encouraged to use their honors project to extend the reach of those projects by providing the time for further and deeper research and/or production.

Honors Senior Symposium is the culmination of the Honors Research Triad. Students will present their projects first to their Honors cohort as well as Honors faculty, inviting question and critique, and later to the Belmont community as a whole; in connection with completing and presenting their projects, students will reflect on their project in the broader context of their Honors education, especially ways in which it fostered in them a global ethical perspective, aesthetic appreciation, and skills as researchers, scholars, artists, advocates and leaders. 

"An examination of the techniques of critical reasoning utilizing scientific paradigms, with emphasis on the development of the art of such reasoning." The course includes an experiential lab component.