Fall 2025 Honors Courses

Age of Revolutions

Professor Pewitt's “Age of Revolutions” is a game-based simulation course where students play out scenarios that place them in the revolutionary era. The goal is for students to not only encounter a more complex view of the origins of the modern world, but to place themselves into this formative period to see how they could “change the course of history.” Each week’s activities will thus be shaped directly by how students have responded to the
professor’s challenges the previous week. Students will develop deep insights into not only the famous figures of the American Revolution but also the less widely told stories of those whose lives impacted these momentous events—from the Indigenous to the indentured, from European princesses to Caribbean pirates, from ideas of the Enlightenment to the experiences of the enslaved. In doing so, students will encounter an interdisciplinary taste of how Honors courses reveal interconnections between various academic fields in ways that put students in control of their own intellectual journey. “AoR” shifts between large group discussions and lectures as well as various smaller group structures where students develop interdisciplinary strategies for achieving their goals as a “revolutionary.”

American Coming of Age: Boundaries and Belonging

This class is about who we are, both as individuals coming of age, and about who we are as a country. This is not a typical class. It will offer some big events for the whole cohort, like Q&A with sitting politicians or a giant simulation activity where students role-play to understand the process of becoming American. It also includes weekly small-group discussions and activities like choose-your-own adventure workshops with recent alumni. There is a service project working with members of the local community. The assignment are designed to build skills like communication, networking, critical thinking and also expand your comfort zone. You will learn about yourself as an individual and as a citizen, build skills that will help your future, and make strong connections with your classmates.

Please note that when you sign up for this class, you will also sign up for a breakout group. This group will be defined by it service project. The projects for this year may include teaching reading to elementary school students, creating holiday events for elementary school students, coaching soccer for elementary school students, raising money to support the community, GIS projects mapping local resources or mapping Jacksonville’s immigration history, making short documentary films, tutoring adults in English, or mentoring high school students.

Code Breakers

This course will introduce you to the architecture of one language. As a class we will work from scratch with a speaker of a language that none of us know, with the goal of unlocking the mysteries of that language at all levels—sound system, word formation, sentence structure, semantics and pragmatics. In essence, you will be introduced to techniques of linguistic and anthropological research and analysis through direct work with a native speaker of an unfamiliar language. By working with a native speaker consultant in the classroom, we will approximate in some way what it is like to do fieldwork. In this class, you will learn how to elicit field data through direct questioning and gathering of texts, how to organize field data, how to prepare entries in a field dictionary, and how to organize and write a grammar. At the end of the class you will be asked to present a mini-description of the language. Students will meet with the native speaker in the class as well as for 30 minutes outside of class to investigate one aspect of the language’s grammar. No previous courses in linguistics are required.  The identity of the language will be revealed on the first day of class. 

Design Thinking

This course will engage students in human-centered design and solve real-world problems creatively. You'll learn about social innovation, connecting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), design thinking and research practice as an approach to social innovation. Through the design thinking framework, you'll collaborate on solution-oriented analysis for social and organizational problems in new and creative ways. Additionally, this course will examine AI's role in innovation and the future of work as it relates to these topics. Through innovation challenges and collaborative projects, you'll learn how to think like a designer and gain valuable experience through stakeholder engagement and conversations with local community members.

Introduction to Chemical Measurements

How much lead is in your tap water? How much mercury is in your favorite seafood? This course focuses on how scientists answer questions like these. Students will be exposed to state-of-the-art instrumentation in a research laboratory and will work collaboratively to monitor the concentrations of trace metal contaminants present in our surrounding environment. This course provides a research experience, introduces students to how research in the physical sciences is performed, and places heavy emphasis on the development of both theoretical expertise and hands-on skills that will translate into success for future research in any STEM discipline.

Publishing Local Archives Online

In this collaborative, workshop-style course, students will publish archival materials related to local history online. Participants will work with documents held in Special Collections and University Archives in UNF's Thomas G. Carpenter Library that provide insight into life in North Florida in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will learn to use TEI-XML, the international standard for document markup in the humanities, and Omeka, a platform for creating online collections. The students' digital editions will be made available through the website of the North Florida Editorial Workshop (nfew.org), an ongoing project affiliated with the UNF Digital Humanities Institute. In doing this work, participants will consider how archival and editorial processes allow us to discover hidden stories and question accepted narratives about the region where we live. The course will involve visits to UNF's Special Collections and University Archives as well as historical societies and archives in the surrounding community.  

Self and Society

Self and Society is taught by Lt. General Richard Tryon. This course focuses on the concept of Community and Belonging: who you are, who you want to be, what you hope to get out of your college experience, and how you can have a positive impact on our greater society and world. S&S provides an overview of all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals but has students choose 1 SDG to further examine. Students in Self & Society will fulfill their service project requirement by choosing a project as a class, and then deciding as a class how it will be completed. Because of its smaller size, S&S is able to provide its students with the option to participate in small group discussions covering assigned readings on cultural legacy and opportunity.

Strategy & Innovation: Making a Magic School Bus

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hop on the Magic School Bus? This interdisciplinary course won’t involve deep sea journeys or microscopic mitochondrial exploration, but it will challenge you to hone your strategic communication skills through the imagination, development, and celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville’s new MOCA-Mobile project and its potential for hands-on community art education and connection. Together, we will push the limits of creative skill, language, planning, audience analysis, research into perceptions and motivations, and social innovation as an exercise in self-discovery, team building, and community care.

Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist: Researching Academic Success

Psychology isn’t just about theories – it’s about solving real-world problems. This course will focus on applying psychological science to the broad questions: What does it take to succeed in college? And: How can psychology help us understand and improve academic success? In this course, you’ll learn to think like a psychological scientist, to distinguish scientific from non-scientific ways of thinking and knowing, to read scientific journal articles, and to develop a testable research question. By the end of the course, you will develop a testable research question asking about factors related to academic success.