First-Year Fellowship: Fostering an Inclusive Community Within Honors

The transition to college life presents myriad opportunities, hurdles, and learning experiences. In honors education, we emphasize the importance of building community. In this article, we will showcase a program developed to engage first-semester honors students in community through cocurricular activities designed to raise their awareness of diversity, inclusion, equity, and access within the university community. We intended for this program to provide the framework necessary for students to create unique friendships that enrich their first-year experiences. Through building community, students begin to understand the diverse perspectives of others. By providing a safe environment for fellowship and friendship, First Year Fellowship (FYF) allowed students to meet others and create friendships they may not have encountered otherwise, while encouraging them to try activities that push them out of their comfort zone.

Our overall goal for FYF was to enable student participants to learn more about themselves through introspection and gain knowledge about others through building that new community in their first semester on campus. At the time this program was implemented, the Honors College student profile was 93% White, 8% first-generation college students, and 2% international students. These statistics are either similar to or less reflective of the diversity on campus; thus, Honors College leaders embraced the opportunity to explore the value of diversity through building a community focused on the multiple aspects of self-defined identities. The objectives for this program were threefold: (a) to recruit a minimum of 15 participants, (b) for students to learn something new about themselves or someone else, and (c) for participants to be able to define what diversity and community mean to them. Student learning outcomes for the program were to articulate personal values, beliefs, and self-identity, and to articulate the value of diversity, inclusion, and equity.

FYF was developed utilizing various aspects of academic community-building models. Active contact communities are important to student development, and they emphasize the importance of learning in a social context rather than solely at the individual level inside of the classroom (Van Ginkle, Van Eijl, Pilot, & Zubizarreta, 2012). Through several case studies of American universities, Van Ginkle and colleagues (2012) found that honors communities yield many personal and academic benefits for students. Additionally, students from diverse backgrounds defined belonging as feeling comfortable and fitting in; they revealed that cocurricular involvement contributed to their sense of belonging (Vaccaro & Newman, 2016). A sense of belonging and identification with the group and a personal investment is important for a sense of membership and community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). Young and colleagues (2016) found that feeling a part of a community, such as honors, can also help students to feel connected within the larger campus community. Honors cocurricular programming often reinforces community and character building and creates a unique experience that helps students connect to the program, university, and peers. Tieu and colleagues (2010) found a positive correlation of involvement variables—like organization participation, activity structure, planned-out activities, supervision, goal-oriented activities—and the quality to students' transition to college. These models helped shape how FYF was approached and implemented.

IMPLEMENTATION

The FYF program was developed as a partnership between faculty and a senior honors student who served as the program cochair. Together, the student and faculty partners designed a program that consisted of 4 event gatherings, each of which was advertised to honors students at the beginning of the fall semester via both in-class announcements and e-mail messages. Each gathering was designed to allow participants to focus as much on the diversity within the group as on the similarities.

Event 1: Welcoming Event

The first event set the stage for expectations and our focus on enhancing appreciation for diversity and community. It also provided multiple modalities for participants to get to know one another. Student leaders explained the value of exploring one's own identity as well as the identities of others. These student leaders also advocated that because the Honors College serves students from all academic backgrounds, one can find community with people from intellectually diverse...