Honors REACT is the first-year seminar for Honors students, teaching academic skills as well as ways to integrate themselves into Temple and Philadelphia communities.
Photo by Ryan S. Brandenberg
Can volunteering at a soup kitchen, familiarizing yourself with Temple’s Career Center and touring the city’s murals be considered homework? For students enrolled in the Honors REACT first-year seminar, the answer is “yes.”
Honors REACT, the specialized seminar for first-year students in Temple University’s Honors Program, is carefully named for both the verb and an acronym: read, engage, act, consider and team up. These concepts serve as the course’s pillars of learning for the semester, with assignments tailored to each unit. The whole thing is designed to help new students ease into college life while allowing them make connections that lead them to grow into empathetic citizens. According to the syllabus, the course’s goal is to “provide first-year Honors students with a foundation for their college experience by helping them explore who they are, what they value and how they want to engage with the world around them.”
“We want students to not just be consumers of knowledge, but really learn how to question knowledge—we want them to not just receive information, but to react to it,” explained Amanda Neuber, director of the Honors Program. “We want them to push, we want them to think, we want them to grapple, and so we try to scaffold that experience within the first-year seminar.”
That starts with their immediate surroundings—Temple’s campus. “The goal, I feel, is not to be super academic, it’s more to expand your mind and learn how to be a good member of the Temple community,” said Finn Metzger, a first-year advertising major with a minor in PR from Radnor, Pennsylvania. “It’s a very nice way to ease into the Honors Program because each of our units has been based on one of the four pillars [of the program], so it helps make the goals of the Honors Program more tangible.”
The four pillars of the Honors Program are inclusive community, intellectual curiosity, integrity in leadership and social courage. Over the course of the semester, three weeks are dedicated to each of these concepts, with culminating experiences for each. For instance, the integrity in leadership unit ends with a teamwork-driven escape room activity in which more collaboration leads to increased success. The social courage unit finishes with group community service activities at organizations like Grace Cafe, Broad Street Love, Cradles to Crayons and more.
Despite the course’s emphasis on in-person engagement, the curriculum for REACT was developed remotely during the pandemic. Students were looking to be engaged while they were separated by physical distance, and so Honors staff incorporated hands-on learning activities into their weekly email newsletter. Each week, the newsletter provided students with something to read; something to do; a journal prompt; something to consider; and an optional “team up” activity they could complete with their friends, family or community.
It worked. The staff found that the pillars resonated with the students, and that the activities fostered both engagement and community. The programming worked so well that the Honors staff decided to use it as the basis for the first-year seminar, and REACT was born. Since then, the course’s learning goals have not changed significantly.
“Seeing the intentionality behind the curriculum was really eye-opening to me,” said peer instructor Jack Brownfield, a junior evolution, ecology and biodiversity major from Santa Cruz, California. “It’s really masterminded so that all of these experiences are cumulative, and they lead you toward certain conclusions; Amanda puts a lot of effort toward making that happen in a way that has been really fun to see behind the curtain.”
The course is in its sixth semester, and more than half of first-year Honors students are taking it. Neuber said that the sections fill up every semester and often have extensive waitlists. Both because of its popularity and its positive impact on first-year students, Neuber and the Honors staff are hoping to make the seminar required in the next few years. For now, interested students are encouraged to register as early as possible to secure their seat.