The college serves the entire university as we have majors in all academic programs. We depend on having collaborative partnerships with every college at Marshall. Further, we support and are supported by a multitude of other units on campus that look after the welfare of all students. Together with Honors students, these partnerships with both faculty and staff are our most valuable resource. Without healthy relationships of mutual understanding and care, we cannot achieve our mission. Therefore, a priority of the college is to strengthen cross-campus connections. We envision the Honors College as an intersection. We want to provide a space where people from all over the university can come together to share ideas outside of the customary confines of institutional structure and disciplinary foci that may limit people’s ability to see a bigger picture and the opportunities for productive collaboration. That’s true for both students and faculty. Ours is a diverse community of thought and practice.
The 2022-2023 Cohort
The fellows program is an essential part of our vision for a college that serves as an exemplar of inclusive excellence. Informed by our core mission, the college has enthusiastically joined with the university’s Higher Learning Commission Quality Initiative as we seek to become a more flexible, stronger, and inclusive college through recruitment, admission, support, and retention of an increasingly diverse student population. The university’s Quality Initiative will have a first year theme of Complexities of Identity in which we will, as a community, explore the reality that every person has many intersecting identities.
As members of the inaugural cohort of Honors Faculty Fellows, these projects have been selected to contribute to collaborative intersections that productively explore this theme across different disciplines. Members of the cohort will meet regularly with the college’s administration and our university partners in appropriate areas to develop and act on plans for their projects and for a larger collaboration with substantive, positive impact on the many communities of which we are a part.
Dr. Cicero M. Fain, III
An Experiential and Collaborative Learning Opportunity: The Black Appalachian Migration Heritage Trail
Project precis: This project directly engages the theme of complexities of identity through examination of the historical presence, experiences, and contributions of African Americans who migrated into the state along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, Midland Trail, US Route 60 pathway from White Sulphur Springs/Lewisburg to Huntington, West Virginia. It will contribute to the theme by explicitly meeting two of the three articulated goals in the Quality Initiative outcomes. First, it will increase students’ readiness to work and live in a global and/or otherwise diverse community by providing them opportunities to grow and learn through contact with others who come from cultures, races, or backgrounds different than their own and second, it will promote student learning through outreach to the community and engagement in such high impact practices as community-based learning and research. Additionally, the project compliments and engages the antebellum and post-bellum Black migratory processes detailed in Dr. Fain’s book, Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story, one of two books chosen by the Quality Initiative Oversight Committee for campus-wide readership.
Bio: Dr. Cicero M. Fain is a fourth-generation black Huntingtonian. He received his B. A. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his M.Ed. from George Mason University. He is the recipient of the Carter G. Woodson Fellowship from Marshall University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from The Ohio State University. His teaching career includes positions at Marshall, Ohio University-Southern, Niagara University, and the College of Southern Maryland. He has authored several articles in peer-reviewed journals, including “Buffalo Soldier, Deserter, Criminal: The Remarkably Complicated Life of Charles Ringo,” in the Ohio Valley Journal, which is his current book project. His first book, “Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story,” published in 2019 by the University of Illinois Press was a finalist for the Appalachian Studies Association Weatherford Award. In 2021 it garnered the Literary Merit Award from the West Virginia Library Association. This summer, as a recipient of a 2019 Scholarly Research Fellowship, he will continue research on Ringo’s formative experiences at the Kentucky Historical Society. He is currently serving a two-year appointment as the Visiting Diversity Scholar at Marshall.
Dr. Brian Kinghorn
An Experiential and Collaborative Learning Opportunity: Adding TEDxMarshallU to the Mission of Honors Education at Marshall University
Project precis: For the last 4 years, TEDxMarshallU has been a student, faculty, and staff collaboration culminating in a yearly TEDx event on campus (www.tedxmarshallu.com). Students do most of the work and are organized by a peer leadership team mentored by faculty and staff. Beginning in the 2022-23 academic year, we are establishing the internship in the Honors College as an experiential and collaborative learning opportunity. Student roles on the team include: co-organizer/executive producer; co-organizer/event manager; curation coordinator; sponsorships, budgets, and purchasing manager; designer; communications, editorial, and marketing director; and video and production lead. TEDxMarshallU will align the 2023 theme to the Quality Initiative. Chosen speakers will share ideas related to intersections and complexities of identity. We plan to have significant diversity in chosen speakers as well as their topics.
Bio: Dr. Brian Kinghorn is an Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundations at Marshall University where he has taught courses in child development, educational psychology, assessment, school diversity, and science for elementary teachers. He has also taught his Psychology of Social Media course as an Honors seminar and is the founding lead organizer and licensee for TEDxMarshallU which moved to the Honors college this year. Kinghorn earned his PhD in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology (with an emphasis in science teacher learning and knowledge) from Michigan State University in 2013. Since 2002, he has conducted inquiry-based extra-curricular science programs and science assemblies and conducted both formal and informal teacher professional development across the nation and internationally. With his extensive science education experience, he was appointed as the director of the National Youth Science Camp in 2019 and is currently planning his third virtual camp. Kinghorn’s areas of research include ways teachers learn science from their own teaching practice, methods for effective teaching, and the psychology of social media. His family is very important to him. He and his wife Leah are happily married with eight children (three girls and five boys) aged 25 years to 8 months old
