The Honors Program includes five Honors courses within the Integrative Studies Program. In their entering semester, Honors students will enroll in one of two designated Honors Thinking and Writing sections. In the spring of 2008 and each semester of their sophomore year, they will enroll in designated Honors IS Perspectives sections. In their junior and senior years, respectively, Honors students will participate in a study-abroad experience and share a senior capstone IS course. Residential students may choose to be housed together in a living/learning community for their first year.

At Orientation this summer, the "O staff" will help Honors students to create their programs based on the shared Honors Thinking and Writing sections, the first step in the five Honors courses that will help students complete the Integrative Studies Program at Keene State College.

Courses for fall 2007 - Honors students need to choose one TW Honors course from the following two options:

1) Skin, Sex, and Genes

Are men better than women at mathematics? Can Blacks jump higher than Whites? Can we "cure" gays and lesbians? The power science has in our society to construct our knowledge of the world is often taken for granted. This course reviews some of the ways in which modern biology has been a site of conflict about race, gender, and sexuality. We will consider a number of scientific studies, as well as feminist, queer, and antiracist critiques of those studies, in an effort to understand how science serves to mark certain bodies as different.

The purpose of this course is to immerse students in the process of thinking and writing that they will be doing in college. Students' work will be organized around the development of a semester-long writing project on the complex relationships between plants and people. This work will involve careful observation of the world around us; students will read closely and critically, respond to and make use of the work of others, draft and revise texts, and make what they have to say public.

Students will be studying with a biologist and a writer who share a passionate interest in the science and literature of plants. This collaboration is designed to draw on the intersections between the fields of botany and the environmental humanities to illuminate the complex interrelationships between plants and people. The focus on plants will frequently take students outside the classroom, from fieldwork in the bogs to alpine regions to the salt marsh ecosystems of New England. The course will also explore how close attention to the natural world (with a particular emphasis on plants) alters the understanding of one's place in nature by reading the writings of Charles Darwin as well as the contemporary environmental writings of Michael Pollan, John Hay, and Robin Kimmerer.