Journal of the European Honors Council

Opportunities in Disguise

2025-09-30T11:39:34+02:00

Towards a New Honors Manifesto: Re-evaluating values, attitudes, and themes in Dutch higher education

2025-12-16T11:18:33+01:00

Honors education in the Netherlands is continuously evolving. While core ideas and values remain in place-for example around the importance of student-centered learning, societal engagement and coaching didactics-, specific implementations, discourses, and approaches change over time. It seems helpful for that reason to occasionally re-evaluate the shared principles around honors. It helps to position honors thematically, pedagogically, and strategically within an ever-changing Dutch higher education sector. It also helps to strengthen bonds and collaborations between honors programs across institutions and educational settings. Finally, it helps to create a shared understanding between educators, students, and management about the “how” and “why” of honors education, nationally but perhaps also internationally. An effective way to summarize a changing set of common principles and values is through the writing of a manifesto. In the Netherlands, a first honors manifesto was written at the end of the Dutch honors stimulating programme, the ‘Sirius Program’, in 2014 (Janssen et al, 2014). The manifesto consisted out of seven “indicators” that were considered to contribute strongly to the identities of honors programs across the Netherlands at that moment. Since then, these indicators have served as a reference point for staff and students across the Dutch educational sector. Now, ten years later, the time seems right to review and recalibrate that manifesto. Shifts in educational discourses, strategic priorities of institutions, and changes in demands from both teachers and students, have highlighted the need to critically re-evaluate and further develop the manifesto.

Interdisciplinary Education: The Dynamic of Societal Challenges, Knowledge Traditions and Student Interests

2026-02-18T14:08:27+01:00

The complexity of today’s world requires higher education to foster knowledgeable and critical citizens who are educated to handle uncertainty. The underlying question is: How do we cultivate this competence?

Envisioning Honors Education as Complex Problem-Solving: A Human-Centered Design Approach for Global Challenges

2026-01-03T15:35:48+01:00

This article reimagines honors education as a catalyst for change by embedding human-centered design and interdisciplinary problem-solving into undergraduate curricula. The authors describe curriculum that centers on local problem solving informed by both local and global issues and human-centered design models and methods. These curricula emphasize empathy, stakeholder engagement, and iterative prototyping to help students tackle wicked problems such as food insecurity, housing inequity, climate resilience, and overall sustainability. We contextualize these examples both within European frameworks, including the Global Design Thinking Alliance and the Kyoto Design Declaration, highlighting cultural sustainability and cross-national collaboration, and within our own local communities and the strategic initiatives and visioning found there. Based on internal assessment data and qualitative feedback, we find that participants gain transferable skills in empathy, critical thinking, and civic leadership. The article concludes with a call for expanded collaboration to adapt these pedagogical strategies across global honors contexts.