Call for Proposals for the NE regional Honors Conference
Submit a ProposalDuring its sesquicentennial celebration in the spring of 2010, Pennsylvania’s state capital will host the Northeast Regional Honors Council Conference from April 8th-11th. Harrisburg’s position as a political, geographical, and industrial center provides the perfect context for us to explore and define the center.
Deadline for proposals – November 16, 2009
Notification of acceptance – December 16, 2009
Defining the Center
In its early development, Harrisburg’s location along east-west Native American trade routes and the north-south Susquehanna River provided a natural hub for commerce and transportation. The potential of this location drew Englishman John Harris to establish a trading post and ferry boat crossing on the site in 1733. Its central location was instrumental in the choice of Harrisburg as the seat of Pennsylvania state government in 1812. Forging a vital link between the Atlantic coast and the Midwest, Harrisburg grew as a major canal and rail center as well as a center of energy and industry.
During the Civil War, Harrisburg’s Camp Curtin served as the largest training center for the Union Army. Due to its significance as a northern state capital and transportation hub, General Robert E. Lee targeted Harrisburg for invasion by the Army of Northern Virginia; however, he ordered Ewell’s divisions to the Battle of Gettysburg before they could reach the capital. As an important stop on the Underground Railroad, escaped slaves crossed the Susquehanna River and received food and supplies in Harrisburg before heading north to Canada. Much of the city’s history revolves around its position in the center.
Central Pennsylvania’s landscape and culture have inspired several significant writers and artists. John Updike, born in Reading, PA, set his Rabbit novels in the rural and industrial landscape of Berks County, while John O’Hara, born in nearby Pottsville, featured Harrisburg as “Fort Penn” in many of his works. The “precisionist” painter Charles Demuth made his home in Lancaster, PA, where a museum honors him and his work, and the modern/conceptual artist Jeff Koons was born just south of Harrisburg in York.
The Northeast Regional Honors Council’s 2010 host city invites us to consider the development and impact of centers. Whether geographical, political, economic, artistic, philosophical, cultural, or scientific, how do centers or the act of centering impact us? Are power, integrity, creativity, and knowledge diminished or enhanced when we meet in the center? Do central positions suggest compromised conviction or the increased balance provided by consensus? We look forward to learning from you as you help us to define the center when we meet in central Pennsylvania next spring.
Conference Theme Strands
We invite members to examine the concept of centers, centering, and central positions in the arts and humanities, social sciences, business and technology, natural and applied sciences, and education.
Paper Presentations
Paper presentations should be short, formal presentations that touch on conference themes. Papers should be planned for 10-12 minute presentations to allow time for discussion.
- Important Note: Papers should not be read. Presenters of papers should prepare formal presentations that summarize key issues the paper examines rather than read the paper to the audience. The presenter may also choose to highlight critical aspects of the inquiry process, including but not limited to the following: What challenges were encountered? What unexpected or exciting discoveries were made? How has the presenter’s understanding of the discipline changed as a result of the inquiry? Has the inquiry changed your ways of thinking, and if so, how?
AV Equipment Policy and Process
- To keep registration costs as low as possible, only selected rooms will be equipped with AV capabilities: a projector and a screen. If visual representations (maps, images, video clips, tables, and illustrations) are integral to your paper presentation, please check the appropriate box on the submission form and provide a rationale in the appropriate box to illustrate how/why the AV equipment is central to your presentation.
- The AV-equipped rooms will be assigned according to demonstrated need. Presenters will receive notification of assignment to an AV-equipped room with their proposal acceptance. Presenters using AV-equipped rooms must provide their own laptops (projectors and screens only will be provided).
- If you do not receive AV notification, you have not been assigned to an AV-equipped room. Therefore, you should prepare to deliver your presentation without the aid of AV equipment.
- Questions should be directed to Conference Theme Strand referees (contact information provided below).
Arts and Humanities
This strand seeks proposals focusing on the idea of finding a center as it is explored in the arts and humanities. Proposers may wish to consider the idea of center, or centers, and the relationship between center and periphery.
- Could a geographical center encourage the creation of a cultural or political center?
- How do artists, who often push boundaries and challenge conventional opinion, find a center for their work so that it can resonate with others?
- John Updike set his Rabbit novels near Harrisburg: what might this choice tell us about geographical, political, cultural, and artistic centers?
- Why might artists, critics, or thinkers choose to avoid the center?
- How have the arts and humanities responded to efforts of governments to forge centrist policies or articulate more extremist positions?
- Can civility exist without a center?
Reviewed by Dr. Susan Dinan, William Patterson University
(dinans@wpunj.edu)
Education
Education has recently become central to a number of hotly-contested political debates. All members of these debates assert that a strong education is essential for life-long success. However, while all may define education as central to success, they advance very different strategies for strengthening educational programs.
This strand encourages proposals that engage the debates about methods for
strengthening education. The following list is intended to be suggestive of some of the issues facing education and educators today. Proposers are encouraged to submit on these or other issues that they feel are central to understanding
education today.
Primary and Secondary Education
- Private, for-profit educational companies taking over low-performing schools from various publicly-funded state or educational departments.
- The merits of “theme-based” charter schools with specialized curricula vs. traditional elementary, junior and senior high schools that employ traditional curricula
- Centralization of school authority under a “school czar” vs. dispersed authority among local school boards
- Bi-lingual elementary education vs. English-only programming
College and Universities
- The merits of pure scientific research vs. “practical” research that may pay the college dividends
- Honors Colleges (or honors courses) that “segregate” high-achieving students from traditional students vs. more egalitarian distributions of students across courses
- The value of the liberal arts vs. a technical education that emphasizes direct applications for course work
Many, many other issues are also possible.
Reviewed by Dr. Ross Wheeler, Queens College
(rwheeler@qc.cuny.edu)
Business and Technology
Historically one can profit by finding a central location and trading in goods produced by others. Similarly one can learn and invent new things by sitting at the center and collecting the ideas and innovations of others. In Harrisburg, PA, an American city that has needed to reinvent itself after the failure of an essential early industry (steel mills in this case), we will explore the roles business and technology play in our lives.
Our conference theme statement emphasizes the geographical centrality of Harrisburg, which certainly played a key role in the country’s early economic and cultural life. Geography does not provide the only sort of “center” that can be relevant—this thread seeks submissions that address centers and centering in all senses in economics, finance, design, and technology.
Some questions you might consider include: What role does geography play in economic and/or technological development? Is success in life found in the middle or at the extremes? Why are some centers so productive and others so desolate? Are smaller communities like Harrisburg, seemingly far from the centers of commerce and media, more or less viable in a Globalized economy?
Reviewed by Dr. Nicholas Hunt-Bull, Southern New Hampshire University
(n.hunt-bull@snhu.edu)
Natural and Applied Sciences
The great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his description of scientific revolutions, but just as fundamental to his thought was the idea of “normal science”: the plodding, patient research intended to elucidate paradigms, not to shift them. Ultimately such work brings anomalies to light, and these can lead to scientific revolutions, but most scientific work is “normal,” seeking to better ground our ideas, not to revolutionize them.
With this in mind, the NRHC organizing committee invites students to submit their own "normal" scientific research. How does your work fit in with the central assumptions of your research area? What core problems are you engaging with in the lab or the field? How will the small details that you help uncover define the limits and possibilities of your subject? What central paradigm is your scientific work helping to develop? We invite students from all fields of the natural sciences and mathematics to contribute.
We also invite students to submit their research about science in society. How has the central importance of science evolved? What controversies does science have at its center? How can we make science more central to our systems of education or habits of mind? Diverse disciplinary perspectives on the sciences are welcome.
While we focus often on the revolutionary in science, we can’t forget that in the sciences, the metaphor of the center still has great power.
Reviewed by Dr. Richard England, Salisbury University
(rkengland@salisbury.edu)
Social Sciences
This strand seeks proposals that examine the notion of “center” as it applies to groups, individuals, and ideation using qualitative and quantitative methods of social science. The following questions suggest some of the issues proposers might consider:
- How have the findings from major research centers shaped our national policies and agendas (or conversely how have national agendas shaped the research agendas of our major research centers)?
- In the past one hundred years we have witnessed swings in the nature/nurture debate from one pole to the other, often with a rhetorical settling in a central position. Where do we go from here?
- How can therapists, coaches, teachers, and organizations promote “centering” (that is, mental focus, inner growth, and common cause) in an increasingly distracting and fragmented world?
- How has the central foci of our educational, political and social institutions evolved over time?
Reviewed by Dr. Joanna Gonsalves, Salem State College
(jgonsalves@salemstate.edu]
Roundtables and Posters
Roundtables provide students working at different schools and in different disciplines an opportunity to discuss shared topics and concerns. Students submitting roundtable presentations should be aware of the following guidelines:
- Students should expect to present a short (5 minute) summary of their own work and then spend most of the time at the table in discussion. No more than two students should submit the same proposal. (If students have worked in larger groups and all wish to submit, they should submit separate proposals emphasizing different aspects of their joint work. These smaller groups will then be placed at different tables.)
- Moderators will run discussion at each table. Students should be prepared to respond flexibly to the moderator’s questions and to share discussion time with other students at the table.
Posters provide students a great place to showcase research in all disciplines. Posters should be prepared on a tri-fold board or a similar self-supporting framework that can rest on the tables provided by the hotel. Posters will be presented on Sunday morning.
Reviewed by Dr. Ross Wheeler, Queens College
(rwheeler@qc.cuny.edu)
Minority Scholarships
The NHRC has long supported the value of minority participation at the regional conferences. To encourage minority participation, the region implemented a scholarship that provides a registration-fee scholarship to students who are presenting work at the conference. Minorities of all types are encouraged to apply for this award. Minority Fellowship Application forms are available on our NRHC website or by contacting the NRHC Secretary-Treasurer, Dr. Shirley Shultz Myers (shirley.shultz.myers@gallaudet.edu).