Dr. Rey’s Honors course at the theater after the play.
Students in Denis Rey’s Honors Introduction to Government and World Affairs class visited Stageworks Theatre several weekends ago to attend a matinée performance of Judgement at Nuremberg. The students, pictured on the set after the performance, were impressed with the dramatic portrayal of the events that transpired during the attempt to hold perpetrators accountable for the crimes committed during the Holocaust. They were conflicted between the arguments made by both the prosecutor and defense attorney and contemplated whether principles such as collective responsibility applied, a broad concept that implicated most if not all of German society, or whether a narrower standard should be employed. In the end, students benefited greatly from watching these dilemmas play out. The Honors Program provided the funding for this learning experience.
Dr. Jen Wortham and Dr. Abe Miller took their pathways students on a walk through Tampa using the Riverwalk. The Riverwalk is a great way to explore downtown Tampa while simultaneously enjoying scenic views of the Hillsborough River and The University of Tampa. Pathways courses help UT students adjust to Tampa and give them a number of engaging opportunities to learn.
Dr. Jen Wortham in UT’s Department of Health Science and Human Performance recently oversaw a tutorial in her HSC 231 course with Julia Sengbusch. To help other students become familiar with tutorials and with inquiry projects in general, Dr. Wortham highlighted Julia’s tutorial on a bulletin board outside her office on the 2nd floor of the Health Science and Human Performance building.
BIOH124 is a non-majors Honors Biology course that is being taught as an intro to human genetics. The professor, Dr. Sarah Cuccinello, developed a karyotyping activity that is unique to the Honors version of the course. The photos above show the students engaged in this activity. There are also some pictures of them using micropipettes for the first time. The micropipette practice is preparation for some genetics experiments they will be conducting in a couple of weeks.
Dr. Kristen Foltz and Dr. Chris Gurrie took 13 students from their Honors Speech courses to the Florida Communication Convention this past weekend. Of the four awards given at this conference, UT Honors students received two of them: runner-up for the best work/poster overall and the best oral presentation.
Students in Dr. Chris Gurrie’s Honors Speech for Business and the Professions class recently participated in the Leadership Challenge Ropes Course. Students worked together in groups, focusing on challenges that would enhance their communication competency. Charles Yezak and his student leader, Faith, led the students through obstacles and then discussed the purpose of each obstacle and how it related to communication and teamwork. Purposeful communication in teams won the day, illustrating how vitally important working as a team is in business communication and life. These are the kinds of enhancements that are added to Honors Courses at UT.
(Sickle cell next to a red blood cell. Illustration from Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions Web site. http://cnx.org/content/col11496/1.6/, Jun 19, 2013.)
Honors courses at The University of Tampa are designed to enhance the educational experience of Honors Program students. Kimberly Dobrinski, Assistant Professor of Biology, developed several experiments for the students in her General Biology (BIO 198) Honors course that students in regular sections of General Biology do not get to do. In this post she describes the experiments they conducted.
In order to instruct the students on the associations between red blood cell morphologies and human disease I developed a new assignment. Using funds from the Honors Program provided to supplement the course content, the students were presented with red blood cell slides. The students determined which diseases they were observing from four possible diseases: Alcoholism, Iron Deficiency Anemia, Malignancy, and Sickle Cell Disease, basing their analysis on the slides with red blood cell morphologies, patient history, physical exam and laboratory tests. The students seemed to really love the exercise and I am happy to say they did very well! In fact, one of the correct answers for their case study was iron deficiency anemia and I even had a student come to me after class and tell me he had been diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia. He was so excited that he now understood how the diagnosis was made and what his own blood cells would look like. It made for a very personal experience for this student. For all the students, this exercise allowed them to engage their problem solving capabilities to solve real-world problems. As many of the Honors students will be pursuing a career in some aspect of medicine, I think they really enjoyed getting a taste of how clinical laboratory science works and how doctors make a diagnosis based on this type of analysis.
