Expand C-START

Carolina Students Taking Academic Responsibility through Teaching is a program offered by Honors Carolina, giving students an opportunity to educate their fellow students while becoming well versed in their subject area with a faculty mentor.

Department chairmen should expand the C-START program outside of Honors Carolina and into their individual departments.

Currently, students apply in the spring semester to teach a course the following year.

If approved, they earn three graded independent study credit hours during the fall term for developing the course syllabus and for further researching their topic area.

In the spring, they lead the weekly seminar for a group of 10 to 15 students who earn one hour of pass/fail credit. Such a small class allows for more student-led discussion.

Courses are listed as SPCL 400 but they do not offer credit for specific departments or majors.

As the University fights through budget cuts and classroom overcrowding, expanding the program would create more new and unique academic opportunities for both the facilitator and students enrolling in the class.

At our large University, there are less chances to have such a close faculty mentor. But these student-educators benefit from a close interaction with a faculty mentor while researching and producing material for instruction.

At the same time, those who take C-START classes are given an opportunity to learn from their peers and share meaningful classroom time with some of the brightest students at UNC.

Additionally, the University can benefit from the research the students do. Student-facilitators will sometimes use their exploration for original academic research.

Faculty mentors must ensure the seminars offered meet the level of academic standard we expect at Carolina. If the program were to expand, that standard should not change.

Information about the program can only be found on the Honors Carolina website and listserv, making it less accessible to those not in the honors program.

There is also no promotion or marketing of C-START, leaving most students, even honors students, in the dark about the program.
Last semester, 11 student facilitators taught 10 C-START classes.

Only 25 new applicants applied for the program. However, in the spring there will only be 10 courses offered. This is a very limited number for the benefit the program could be offering.

By extending the program to individual departments, freshmen and sophomores would gain an opportunity to have an upper-class student mentor, potentially in their major.

While many classes get cut and those that remain become larger and more crowded, the C-START classes offer focused topics in a small classroom environment, a major need at a big university.

The list of courses offered is as diverse as the interests of Carolina students, such as hip-hop and politics and genocide reconciliation.

Putting more control of education into these bright and motivated students’ hands, in this case, would benefit the school as a whole.