Mission, Values, and Learning Objectives

WWU Honors College Vision

To foster excellence and achievement through the creation of a scholarly community that honors the needs of students from diverse institutional and cultural backgrounds, a community that meets those needs by providing tools and sustained individualized support for students who choose to take up the challenge.

WWU Honors College Mission:

1.

To recruit and foster a diverse scholarly community by providing an inspiring liberal arts experience that builds on the excellence of Western's undergraduate programs and draws on the expertise of Western’s faculty.

2.

To promote personal and intellectual growth through a seminar-based curriculum and independent inquiry in a community that strives to understand why and how we pursue truth, liberty, and happiness.

3.

To instill in our students the desire to extend the values of the Honors College into the communities they join upon their graduation: intellectually rigorous inquiry, honesty, compassion, and equitable access to opportunities.

Student Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the Minor in Honors Interdisciplinary Studies, you will have: 

  1. experimented with unfamiliar modes of process, inquiry, and dialogue by engaging with challenging, diverse materials in both textual and non-textual forms; 
  2. engaged in improvisational exchange with diverse others, particularly by opening conversations and creating lines of inquiry; 
  3. cultivated an appreciation for the generative potential of unlearning and not-knowing, in part by undertaking willful acts of creativity, interdependence, and vulnerability in the classroom; 
  4. acquired substantial knowledge of the ways that the methods, tools, and discourses of academic disciplines have been developed and deployed in a variety of historical periods and geographical locations, as well as by the individuals and communities within them; 
  5. demonstrated fluency in the mobility of disciplinary-specific methods, tools, and discourses, especially their generative potential when combined with the methods, tools, and discourses from other fields of inquiry; 
  6. undertaken sustained, rigorous, and relevant work that integrates the methods, tools, and discourses of several academic disciplines; 
  7. immersed themselves in a community of practice, thereby expanding their appreciation for self-awareness and sustainability, ambiguity and complexity, contingency and difference; 
  8. engaged in regular acts of service to the communities in which they are locally embedded: the Honors community, the broader campus community, and communities in Whatcom County; and 
  9. deployed each of the above in everyday life.