At the Mid-East Honors Association conference, papers presented as part of a three- or four- person panel session that lasts 50 minutes. Each presentation should be 10-12 minutes long to ensure everyone is heard and time is left for questions and answers.

A moderator will be assigned to introduce the speakers, manage time and facilitate those questions. Reading papers from the page is discouraged.

Suggested paper topics include: creative and effective pedagogy, discussion of honors college issues and solutions, and research or creative topics relevant to the conference theme. All rooms have computers and projectors allowing for audiovisual display. If you opt to use audiovisual accompaniment to your presentation, be sure to bring a loaded onto a flash drive and have a backup file. Please submit your proposal at the appropriate link below.

Workshop proposals should address topics which span the interest of many institutions and are not specific to a single institution, course, or discipline. A workshop is a 1-hour focused meeting spanning that will attract a significant group of people interested in a common topic for an intense, interactive, informational discussion.

A typical workshop may consist of:

A warm-up activity. Start by getting people relaxed and comfortable with each other using a quick creative challenge or quirky introductions. This is vital–plenty of studies demonstrate the importance of being in a relaxed state for productive conversation to take place. Anxieties and tensions prevent people from making the kinds creative leaps and improvisational thinking required to make creative workshops successful.

Clearly stating the objectives for the session. It is critical that everyone understands the context of the activities that will follow.

A framing of the problem to be solved. If participants are to stay on track, it is important to draw some hard boundaries within which everyone is encouraged to play. Think of this as building a fence around the playground. The tighter this fence, the more likely participants will see useful ideas at the end of the day. Every constraining detail is a potential trigger for a brilliant idea, so be sure the brief is focused and specific.

Dividing people into smaller teams. This encourages participation and ensures there will be a variety of ideas presented at the end of the day.

Idea generation activities. The bulk of time is typically spent in these two to three activities spread across the session. While the types of activities vary with every workshop, they share one goal: to encourage participants to look at the problem/opportunity in different ways. This can be by:

• role-playing a specific brand or person (“how would Elizabeth Warren, Arnold Schwartznegger, and Starbucks solve this problem?”)
• reversing the problem (“how might we encourage people to cheat?”)
• forcing connections between unrelated things (“how is our idea like a paddleboat?”).

Idea refinement and focusing activities. Ideas are collected, sorted, and prioritized using various voting exercises.

Small groups sharing their ideas with each other followed by a discussion of relative pros and cons of each idea.