Honors JA/SP 2027 Course Catalogue
Take a look at all the Honors Program has to offer this Jan term and Spring!
October 29, 2026
Take a look at all the Honors Program has to offer this Jan term and Spring!
On October 14th, Jon Meacham visited Whitworth at President McQuilken’s 2026 Presidential Leadership Forum, this year hosted at the Fox Theatre. I attended his evening talk at the Fox called, “American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union,” a nod to the title of his most recent book published earlier this year.
Some people go to the lake, some people pick up extra shifts, and some spend hours tanning in the sun. Me? I spend my summer Saturdays attending regional festivals and parades with the Spokane Lilac Festival.
The KSPS PBS micro-internship is focused on their online educational content. PBS has a learning platform called PBS LearningMedia where any station from across the country can upload lessons, videos, and teaching tools for free use by teachers and students. KSPS is one of the stations that contributes material, but they’ve become increasingly aware that the material currently up isn’t as robust as it could be.
Whitworth is the proud host of a literary journal called Script. Script is a completely student-run journal that has been producing editions since 1987, and this year’s edition is collecting submissions from several new categories.
Your Planning Guide to 2026 Jan Term, Spring, and Summer Registration!
A core part of the Honors Program here at Whitworth is our final capstone project.
Whitworth traditionally hosts a large selection of speakers for students, visitors, and faculty to hear and learn from. Honors students, in particular, will find these experiences valuable and instructional.
Some people go to the lake, some people pick up extra shifts, and some spend hours tanning in the sun. Me? I spend my summer Saturdays attending regional festivals and parades with the Spokane Lilac Festival.
The KSPS PBS micro-internship is focused on their online educational content. PBS has a learning platform called PBS LearningMedia where any station from across the country can upload lessons, videos, and teaching tools for free use by teachers and students. KSPS is one of the stations that contributes material, but they’ve become increasingly aware that the material currently up isn’t as robust as it could be.
We are proud to announce that micro-internships, mentors, and upcoming professionalization events now have a home on the Whitworth Launch website. This site hosts the applications and internship postings, connecting you directly with the people who want to give you a job.
Your Planning Guide to 2026 Fall Term Registration!
Sarah Immel, a senior double majoring in human computer interactions and English writing studies, is using the Honors program as a way to merge the different interests in her majors and design interdisciplinary projects.
Hannah Stoddard, who is majoring in international studies, found that Honors has given her a way to connect her major, her personal experiences, and her passion. The intersection of these different parts of Hannah’s life has resulted in a pool project aimed to improve local communities.
Grace Pedersen, a senior majoring in psychology, used HN 400 as a platform to launch her future. HN 400 gives students the ability to complete an individual project with faculty support and guidance.
Every year during the Spring semester, Whitworth hosts a few Honors scholarship weekends. These weekends are times in which highly motivated students are invited to stay at Whitworth. During the weekend, the invited students give a speech, participate in a discussion group, and write an essay in hopes of winning a full ride scholarship or a runner-up $1,000 a year scholarship. This year, one of the full-ride scholarship winners is eighteen year old Stella Ester Palmisano.
On the 2026 Honors Hawaii Jan term trip, we had the opportunity to visit the Bishop Museum. The Bishop Museum is located in sunny Honolulu and is the official Museum of Natural and Cultural History of Hawaii. Here we had the joy of exploring several fascinating exhibits, including sections devoted to Hawaiian and Polynesian history, natural science, and even dinosaurs!
Over the course of the 2026 Jan term trip to London I had the privilege of attending nine different stage productions, all very different, but all equally valuable to my experience studying abroad. It was an opportunity I had never had before to be able to go somewhere where dozens of shows of West End quality were all playing at the same time. I bought as many tickets as I reasonably could with my budget and aimed to get the maximum value out of each show I saw. Over the course of the trip, I gained a renewed appreciation for the performance arts and their value, not only to British culture, but society in general.
At the Wahiawā Botanical Gardens, the practice of lei making is taught to visitors, both to carry on the tradition and teach the significance of the weave to visitors, but also to aid in the onerous task of weaving approximately 53,000 lei for Memorial Day. The Wahiawā Botanical Gardens contributes 7,000 natural lei every year to the project. In the hour and a half the Whitworth students were there, we made one hundred woven Ti lei. Hundreds of organizations run similar lei making sessions for the five months leading up to Memorial Day, freezing the lei braids to keep them until May.
On the 5th day of the First Year Honors group’s stay in Hawaii, we visited the Polynesian Cultural Center. After a long, sun drenched day full of information, performances, and beautiful scenery, most of us came away with a deeper understanding of Polynesian culture and the complex traditions preserved in places like the PCC (Polynesian Cultural Center).
This project had two facets: one was working with the Books to Prisoners organization to put on a book drive. Through this drive we collected over 200 books which will be mailed to prisoners across the country as well as a grant for 500$ from the Sigma Tau Delta Honor society as a part of the Chapter service project to provide them with new shelving, postage, and specifically requested books. This meets a physical demand: access to the books prisoners want to read.
The other aspect of this project was volunteering in the Juvenile Detention Center in downtown Spokane where I was able to work with high school students in their English classes through creative writing workshops. I was able to connect with individual students who come from a variety of situations and use the tools I’ve learned about creative writing to help them to process and create though creative writing of their own.
Growing up, I attended a Japanese immersion school, so I have been learning the language since I was a child. However, upon graduation without any more opportunity for classroom education, I had to turn to self-education to further my learning. This is where I discovered there was a severe lack of convenient language acquisition assistance tools for the Japanese language, and the ones that did exist were all hosted in different locations. That is the motivation for this project, where I aimed to create an all-in-one location for Japanese language learning tools to assist those partaking in self-study.
The Spokane Intercollegiate Research Conference (SIRC) is a conference sponsored by Whitworth and Gonzaga University for undergraduate students across Spokane to present their research and creative works.
This research project examines how institutions of higher education in the United States are responding to the rapid integration of artificial intelligence tools in academic environments, and where significant regulatory gaps remain. As generative AI systems become increasingly accessible to students and faculty, universities face growing challenges in maintaining academic integrity, supporting cognitive development, and addressing algorithmic bias.