Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights. National Collegiate Honors Council Monograph Series

This book asks an overdue question: can we build honors contracts that transcend the transactional? The word "contract" itself--as both noun and verb--delimits more possibilities than it reveals. The chapters collected here expand this restrictive term by reframing honors contracts as collaborative partnerships for experiential learning. While most, though not all, of the volume's contributors accept standard definitions of honors contracts as "[e]nriched options within regular [non-honors] courses," they also imagine many and varied possibilities for such enrichment (Schuman 33). The pedagogical conversation surrounding contracts has to date been more practical than inspirational, perhaps because many institutions have framed honors contracts as necessary stopgaps--rather than pedagogical catalysts--within the honors curriculum.