USM Honors

Our Mission:
The Honors Program provides a challenging, interdisciplinary alternative general education, open to highly motivated undergraduate students from any discipline or professional major at USM. 

The Association of American Colleges & Universities promotes General Education that develops what they call "Intentional Learners":

"Intentional learners are prepared to thrive in a complex, interdependent, diverse, and constantly changing world. Ready to adapt to new environments and integrate knowledge from various sources they will continue learning throughout their lives." (Greater Expectations, AAC&U 2002)

The USM Honors Program Learning Objectives:
The learning goals of the program focus on the integration of five related objectives, expressed in terms of dispositions, skills, values, and areas of knowledge and understanding in an effort to nurture "Intentional Learners."

• Community: Honors students participate actively in communities of learning, and are predisposed to the common goal of shared learning. They are empowered learners, who are committed to the practice of dialogue as a way of life, as a way of building community, and as way of fostering individual and collective learning.
   

• Communication: Honors Students advocate positions effectively through intertextual, original, imaginative, written and oral communication, and through performances or demonstrations of collaborative learning with diverse audiences.
   

• Wellness/Meaningful Life: An Honors student develops his/her unique and full potential personally, intellectually and interpersonally, by valuing and promoting human wellness.
   

• Interdisciplinary Learning: Honors students demonstrate multiple ways to interpret scholarly writing, engage in civic action and pursue interdisciplinary research.
   

• Engaged Inquiry: Reading, Writing, Action and Research: Honors students learn actively through interdisciplinary processes of engaged inquiry. They exercise the capacity to identify, describe, analyze, and critique qualitative and quantitative arguments

For further information or problems with this page, contact Beth Round: bround@usm.maine.edu