Honors Seminars

This seminar explores how generative AI (GenAI) technologies represent both liberation and constraint across educational and professional contexts. You will critically investigate how AI-powered tools like ChatGPT enable freedom from traditional limitations while possibly creating new dependencies and potential points of resistance. Through examining historical precedents, current implementations and future possibilities, you'll develop a nuanced understanding of AI's transformative potential in teaching, learning and workforce development. The course emphasizes skills valued by employers and graduate schools: research, critical analysis, ethical reasoning, collaborative problem-solving and innovative design.

Taught by Cindy York, Ph.D., Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment

This is a hands-on seminar that introduces you to innovation, creativity, leadership and entrepreneurship through engagement with active research and NIU's innovation ecosystem. You'll learn how ideas form, evolve and create impact by studying past and present innovation leaders and connecting with faculty through the Northern Exposure speaker series. At the 71 North Partnership Studio, you will participate in interactive workshops on problem discovery, ideation and early-stage prototyping, working individually and in teams to identify meaningful problems, generate ideas and propose viable solutions.

Taught by Federico Bassetti, Division of Research and Innovation Partnerships

Over more than two centuries, major social movements have not only rejuvenated but expanded the Declaration of Independence's meaning to shape a more democratic America. This course uncovers that forgotten history, showing how these movements creatively interpreted the Declaration as a vehicle for critiquing the present. The document challenges citizens to judge whether their government is truly promoting the rights it enumerates and if it is not, to understand how to make such critical distinctions and work with others to create needed change. You will develop their own interpretations of the Declaration to identify where today's government may fall short in protecting human rights, using these insights to imagine the democratic transformations needed now.

Taught by Kerry Burch, Ph.D., Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations

This seminar explores how World War II reshaped food culture, nutrition science and food systems in ways that still influence what we eat today. You will trace the story of food from prewar traditions and preservation methods through rationing, Victory Gardens and military rations to the postwar boom in convenience foods and modern innovations. Hands-on cooking labs, campus food system visits and artifact analysis bring history to life while highlighting the role of women, communities and science in transforming food. You will gain insights into health, culture and sustainability while developing critical perspectives on how war, science and innovation continue to shape what ends up on our plates.

Taught by Melani Duffrin, Ph.D., School of Interdisciplinary Health Professions

Aging is more than just a relentless progression of time. Humans age at different rates, depending on many genetic and lifestyle factors – the implications of which are just beginning to be understood. Scientists are working to discover underlying causes and modifiers of aging, in hopes to develop effective interventions to eventually slow aging rates and increase people's health spans. The aim of this seminar is to give you the tools to explore and understand aging from a scientific (biological) as well as historical standpoint while also providing experiential learning opportunities within a service learning paradigm to share your knowledge with local aging adults and to discover how topics covered in your course play out in real time within our community.

Taught by Jamie Mayer, Ph.D., Department of Allied Health and Communicative Disorders

You will read and analyze Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a masterpiece of Gothic and science fiction literature as you consider how monsters, as a category, help us to understand our ethical responsibilities when using technology. We will ask questions such as: how and why should we use technology; what responsibility does one have for one's research/creations; what is needed to live well; and whose responsibility is it to ensure that others have what they need to thrive? Considering how Shelley approaches themes of monsters, making, technology and ethics, students will grapple with these questions in maker activities using digital, analog and AI technologies. These activities encourage you to reflect on the properties of a particular technology and how it affects them. Projects include: making a “lab notebook” for reading notes, a literary analysis incorporating AI techniques, a creative letterpress project in NIU's Book Lab and a creative digital project.

Taught by Melissa Adams-Campbell, Ph.D., Department of English

How do we escape the traps of misinformation, bias and anxiety in a world dominated by social media and artificial intelligence? This seminar explores how digital technologies shape our mental and social health and how we can use them to foster resilience, empathy and equity. Through interactive discussions, interviews and reflective writing, you will critically examine how AI and social media influence well-being, identity and belonging. By the end of the course, you will design your own “escape plan” a personal or community action project that uses digital tools to promote healthier, more ethical engagement online.

Taught by Anitha Saravanan, Ph.D., School of Nursing

The seminar argues that wittingly or otherwise we all use history to organize our lives, to justify our decisions and to create identities. Delving into select events, we explore the ways in which history has been used to both correct past injustices and to perpetuate them. Geographically, the seminar starts globally before narrowing to the United States; temporally, it focuses almost exclusively on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Taught by Bradley Bond, Ph.D., Department of History