By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
Scholars of Honors Northeast, the honors program of Northeast Texas Community College, appeared recently for the thirteenth time at the annual meeting of the Great Plains Honors Council (GPHC). In 2021, Northeast scholars also participated, but as it was a virtual meeting, only online. Organizers canceled the 2020 meeting because of the pandemic. The 18-20 March 2022 meeting thus was the first time since 2019 when NTCC scholars came face to face with their counterparts at universities and colleges from Nebraska to Texas.
The Great Plains Honors Council, dating back to 1975, is an association of eighty honors programs and colleges. It represents one of the six regional components that make up the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC).
A highlight of the trip was Skylar Fondren’s $100 Britt Poster Award which she won in intervarsity competition, in the division of students who had taken less than 60 hours of coursework. It was one of four awards in that division, and one of fourteen cash awards bestowed at the conference. Fondren’s project on the making of a news desert featured the case of Northeast Texas. After a research effort involving interviews with NTCC Journalism Professor Mandy Smith, Sonya Roberts-Woods of the Tri-County Press, and Hudson Old and Sam Ferguson of the East Texas Journal, Fondren told the story of how a loss of local advertising revenue, and the rise of the internet depleted the functionality, and even life of many local newspapers. In contrast to national expert, Dr. Mitchell Stevens who celebrates the explosion of more news thanks to social media, Fondren gave the example of a community that was experiencing more noise, but also an end to the filtered, more investigative news it had once known.
NTCC’s group included two sophomores who gave oral presentations. NTCC’s Dr. Jerry Wesson Scholar, Aaliyah Avellaneda, presented on emergent new ways of redefining police forces in the United States. NTCC’s Texas Heritage Bank Scholar, John Rodriguez presented on the mass incarceration of women in the United States in the twentieth century.
Jordan Chapin, Maiko Estrada, and Maxime Risner also presented posters at the conference. Chapin’s work on “legendary housewives of Northeast Texas,” based on a series of local interviews, detailed how some women in our area since 1990 have resisted the feminist current in modern culture, and devoted their efforts to raising generally successful offspring. Estrada explored the contributions of Dr. Red Duke in the 1980s, who he called a “Well Being Activist, an ideal interface between medicine and the public. Maxime Risner explored the backstories that gave rise to the synthesis of medieval medicine.
Dr. Andrew Yox noted, “I was very thankful for what NTCC brought to this conference. All the presentations had their strong points, one was very relevant, two were unique, two were beautifully conceptualized; our two panel presenters spoke with poise, and with ideas in mind, and all of our posters were brilliantly conceived. In fact, one of the two organizers of the conference, Dr. Ryan Diehl, of Hutchinson College in Kansas, told me that he was especially impressed with our posters, in particular, Fondren’s. For this, we also thank our May community poster judges who have ramped up our culture of scholarly art at the college over the years, as well as Andrea Reyes, our Phi Theta Kappa Mentor and Honors Coordinator who is a remarkably gifted, poster consultant.”
The trip was partially covered through a generous grant through the Whatley Employee Enhancement Fund. Beverly Kelley of Mount Vernon provided a generous gift, with Professor Jim Ward winning the needed amount through an application.
Britt Poster winner, Skylar, was homeschooled, and her parents are John and Holly Fondren from Avinger, Texas.
