Kaleidoscope

Volume 2, 2023 (view/download the digital journal)

We are honored to present the second annual volume of Kaleidoscope. The fast pace of college life sometimes keeps us from fully appreciating and learning from students’ work. Too often, exceptional ideas and prose, creative expressions, graphics, and other forms are graded and returned to the students, to be filed or forgotten. Perhaps two or three people ever get to see these very special works. Furthermore, the submissions of a semester often hold untapped potential that isn’t released in a single write-edit cycle. Kaleidoscope aims to unleash some of this potential by cultivating and honoring incredible work done within KHC.

Kaleidoscope showcases students’ achievements “above and beyond” assignment expectations—with three main aims. First, by sharing these contributions with the KHC community, we hope to inspire more remarkable work and show faculty, prospective students, and anyone else what KHC is all about. Second, we extend the creation and revision timeline past the confines of a single semester. Each author has the chance to engage in meaningful dialogue about their ideas, words, and creations with a member of the KHC editorial board and collaborate to make the work as strong as possible: the best of dialogic grading, without the grading. Finally, we simply want to celebrate you, the students—because taking time to listen to and appreciate each other matters.

The thirty pieces in this volume include maps, legal memos, digital art portraiture, a critical analysis of the genre of portraiture, poetry, and podcasts, among other genres. The authors dive into studies of international diplomacy, forced displacement, music, urban planning, gender discrimination, and environmental justice. Each author not only deeply examines a key issue but also seeks out the best form, style, and voice to express their ideas—and help us deepen our own learning, questioning, and engagement with one another. We thank the contributors for sharing their work and engaging wholeheartedly in the revision process. And speaking of extraordinary work, we are grateful to our extraordinary Managing Editor and Designer, Megan West Kagstrom, for leading every step of the Kaleidoscope process, and to our wonderful editorial team. We hope you enjoy these pieces as much as we have!

Volume 1, 2022 (view/download the digital journal)

We are delighted and honored to launch this inaugural issue of Kaleidoscope: A Journal of Kilachand Honors College, filled with the fascinating and insightful work of students in Kilachand Honors College. Kaleidoscope is an interdisciplinary journal that features the best student work of any genre produced in Kilachand Honors College classes. Like the optical instrument and work of art for which Kaleidoscope is named, we seek work that sheds light on many perspectives and angles and reflects the world in all its beauty and terror.

The idea of a Kilachand journal emerged from conversations about changing the culture around grades at the honors college. Many of our faculty have adopted alternative grading systems such as dialogic grading – or grading based on conversation and self-reflection – because we recognize that conventional grading is inimical to our most cherished aspirations for teaching and learning. At Kilachand, we want to encourage intellectual curiosity and risk-taking, foster intrinsic academic motivation, and engage (rather than just evaluate) students’ work. Typical grading approaches got in the way of these goals, and so we moved towards a model that was a better match for our KHC pillars of living and learning together: Knowledge, Humanity, and Community. This has been an exciting and transformative shift across our curriculum. But we knew there was still another piece of this puzzle. How could we provide a more meaningful platform for acknowledging extraordinary academic achievement? How could we appropriately incentivize, identify, and celebrate truly exceptional efforts, those projects and essays that explode assignment guidelines because their authors are genuinely engaged, even enthralled, in their work beyond the bounds of course-based expectations?

We would publish them in a brand new journal of course!

But first we needed a title for it: We asked Kilachand students, alumni, and staff members to propose titles. Alumnus Evan Armacost, soon to be invited to join our editorial team, proposed Kaleidoscope because he believed that Kilachand brought together many perspectives and students from all disciplines to create a mobile, ever-changing, colorful curriculum and community. We asked faculty to nominate the remarkable work from their classes, and students also nominated their own work. Throughout the summer of 2022, we read this work with immense interest and learned a ton along the way. Students responded to reviews and suggestions from the editorial team, and many drafts later, we have the essays, projects, artwork, and reflections you will enjoy in these pages.

We are tremendously thankful to our Managing Editor and Designer, Megan West Kagstrom, as well as the entire editorial team for all their hard work and good cheer in launching Kilachand Honors College’s first journal, Kaleidoscope. Happy reading!