Back Row: Dr. Craig Clark, President, Board of Directors, CCA; Dr. Bill Seymour, President, CSCC; Jon Poole, Vice President, East Region; Pearsons. Front Row: Dr. Victoria Bryan, Director of Honors Program, CSCC; Dr. Ann McNutt, Executive Director, CCA.
The Cleveland State Community College Honors Program received the Outstanding Instructional Program Award at the 2019 Community Colleges of Appalachia Annual Conference held this past week in Asheville, NC. The theme of the conference was Community Colleges: Catalysts for Entrepreneurship, Economic Development and Empowerment.
“Our award was specifically for innovation and academic programs,” stated Dr. Bill Seymour, “We submitted the honors program, and we have one of the strongest honors programs among community colleges in the country.
We include not only degree transfer students, but students who are completing their associate of applied science degrees, as well.”
Since its redesign in 2015, the Honors Program at Cleveland State has grown from a single-track program serving 14 students to a multi-track program serving more than 100 students. In four years, it has developed two interdisciplinary tracks and three discipline-specific tracks (nursing, business, and mechatronics). In the process, the program has come to serve as a model of best teaching and learning practices for the campus and other Honors programs in Tennessee. The CSCC program holds Honors articulation agreements with three universities, and is currently the only community college Honors program to have an articulation with the University of Tennessee. Over these years, CSCC has moved away from a contract model--wherein one or two students graduated with an Honors diploma each year--and towards a cohort-style program set to graduate thirty students this year alone. The program operates according to one central ideology: they are developers, not gatekeepers.
“I thoroughly believe that no one accomplishes anything alone,” said Dr. Victoria Bryan, CSCC Honors Program Director. “This program would not be nearly as strong, and would it wouldn’t serve our students nearly as well, without the work the Honors Committee and Honors faculty have done to develop our courses, policies, recruiting structure, and multiple Honors tracks. I hope that they feel as proud of this program as I do.”
For more information about the Cleveland State Honors Program, visit the website at clevelandstatecc.edu or contact Bryan at vbryan@clevelandstatecc.edu.