Culminating Your Honors Experience with Growth, Development, and Transformation

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I sat down with Professor Mark Roblee to discuss his new thesis seminar beginning in the Spring 2024 semester, A Sacred Earth – Ancient Thought, Indigenous Wisdom, and the New Animism. This eight-credit seminar will be an intensive deep dive into the critical examination of climate change, the environmental crisis, and the sacredness of the earth. The course will engage with ancient philosophy, world religions, indigenous scholarship, ecofeminism, climate activism, spirituality and the “new animism.” All of these ideas align with Mark Roblee’s expertise as a historian who focuses heavily on the intersection of philosophy and religion. 

The seminar allows room for flexibility and is open to students of any major. Because of the vastness of the curriculum students can choose to focus on race, gender, inequality, colonialism, public policy, health, economics, business, science, religion, philosophy, public history, or culture and the arts. Roblee noted that he intentionally chose a broad topic because he wants students of all majors to find a way to fit into the seminar. 

Building on Honors Coursework

Roblee also teaches Honors 201H: Ideas that Change the World, which is the Honors Signature course required of all students in the Commonwealth Honors College. He shared that this thesis seminar is essentially “the bookend of Ideas that Change the World.”

““I'm really interested in how this course can be used to culminate your academic work AND your personal transformation at UMass,” he says. 

In terms of the structure of the seminar, Roblee describes it as three-fold: part seminar, part research and methods and part writing workshop. While the class will of course be heavily research oriented, Roblee wants to allow for individual creativity for students looking to stretch beyond the general written thesis. 

Reasons to Enroll

During the interview with Roblee it was clear that his intentions for this seminar were not for students to merely complete their thesis, but to surrender to the adventure of committing to a question that will lead you to feel a sense of accomplishment and pride.  

“Being able to go deep into and stick with a question or a problem is another skill that you're going to come away with.  This is not something you do in a weekend. You’re going to experience the reward of sustained attention to a topic and to a problem, and that's a lifelong learning skill. It's also a career skill.” 

The goal of completing a thesis is to showcase all that you have learned during your time as an honors student and to focus on skill development. Roblee shared that he is confident students will complete his seminar with improved verbal and written critical engagement, sustained problem solving and a new appreciation for the diversity of human experience and perspective over time and space. In other words, empathy. 

“You will gain an appreciation for all the different ways that humans perceive and experience their embodied existence on planet Earth. This will be an empathy building experience in addition to the intellectual and critical skills that will get honed.”

If you are considering joining a thesis seminar and have a spark of attraction to this course, take the leap. By completing this course you will have a tangible piece of work that represents the culmination of your learning and experience. You will have a new set of skills that you can carry though the rest of your life and you will have learned about the depths of the sacred earth and how history, religion and philosophy intersect. 

At the end of the interview with Professor Roblee he shared, “What's going to be a big component of this course is reflection on one's own growth, development, and transformation. I am really committed to the notion that this experience will be transformative. I mean, think about the best classes you've taken, haven't you changed?”