Honor Culture

Building Honors Culture at Johnson County Community College

According to the National Collegiate Honors Council and honors program provides opportunities for measurably broader, deeper, and more complex learning-centered and learner-directed experiences for its students than are available elsewhere in the institution; these opportunities are appropriately tailored to fit the institution’s culture and mission and frequently occur within a close community of students and faculty. The Honors Program at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) was started in the 1980’s to establish a role of academic leadership for the college. The Honors Program consists of three main areas, which include Honors Program run by Anna Page (the students enroll
It was at this time the program failed to find a permanent director. From 2007-2009, some items went awry. In 2009, Dr. Pat Decker was awarded the position of permanent director. In early 2015 Dr. Decker retired, which somewhat left the program at a standstill yet again. Also impacting the program was the death of the Phi Theta Kappa Advisor Terry Helmick in 2014. In fall of 2015 Anna Page was hired as the Interim Director, and in 2016 she took over the permanent position where she oversees all three areas. Since there has been a lot of change one might feel that this is the reason for a lack of an inclusive culture at JCCC. We find in the article An Organization on Hold and Interim Leadership Demand: A Case Study of Individual and Organizational Identity by Blair Browning and Suzanne Boys that, “an organization creates and sustains its identity by what it represents but, because of mergers, crises, times of business reengineering, or some other reason, organizations may encounter an organizational identity change.” The culture and identity of the Honors Program at JCCC are going through a change. Building the culture will be the focus of this
Looking at the Cultures structure of an organization in a shift from the Systems structure could also help the program grow its communication and Sociocultural issues.
There appears to be some understandable confusion among students about what “Honors” means at JCCC because in addition to the Honors Program students may achieve “Civic Honors” through the Service Learning Program. Also, one needs to be in Honors to take Honors classes, and we do not necessarily restrict the word “Honors” to the program. Then, you add PTK to the mix and students can receive admission to an “Honors” society while not being active in it or even involved in the Honors Program. Clearly, we can see the issue of semantics coming into play here.
There should be a push to develop the Culture and implement the Sociocultural Communication that our class discussed. As the article by Keyton explains, “The interplay of messages and meanings creates a culture, or a set of artifacts, values, and assumptions, by which people choose their subsequent behaviors and messages and against which behaviors and messages are interpreted. Hence culture is both a process and a