IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 2, Issue 1, Winter 2013

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

Psychological well-being through music listening

Design has gotten good at delighting and stimulating us in the short term. Could we design products that are good for us in the long run? In this project, I looked at positive psychology for concepts to develop into features of products and use music listening as a vehicle for integrating them. I propose three music-listening features that help exercise and cultivate emotional regulation strategies: 1_The Reaction Tile 2_The Monofilter 3_The Vibelist Each feature represents one or multiple strategies from the Process Model of Emotional Regulation

Empirical investigation on satisfaction and service quality level of radical process change implementation

The paper reviews the literature related to the implementation of radical process changes in higher education (HE) environment. Several issues and implementation results related to radical process change in HEIs, particularly business process reengineering (BPR), are being investigated. Furthermore, as the implementation of process change would have an impact in HEIs,specifically on service quality and customer satisfaction, this paper discusses both concepts. A survey has been developed to assess the students’ satisfaction of the radical process change implemented in one of the HEIs, namely HEI-A which was selected as a case study. The results indicate some significant differences among groups for both satisfaction and service quality measured.The paper provides a framework for future research to develop a metric for measuring satisfaction and service quality level in HEIs. This research contributes to studies of BPR in HE context, by focusing on the key processes performance

Culturally responsive engineering education: A case study of a pre-college introductory engineering course at Tibetan Children\u27s Village School of Selakui

Culturally responsive teaching has been argued to be effective in the education of Indigenous youth. This approach emphasizes the legitimacy of a group\u27s cultural heritage, helps to associate abstract academic knowledge with the group\u27s sociocultural context, seeks to incorporate a variety of strategies to engage students who have different learning styles, and strives to integrate multicultural information in the educational contents, among other considerations. ^ In this work, I explore the outcomes of a culturally responsive introductory engineering short course that I developed and taught to Tibetan students at Tibetan Children\u27s Village of Selakui (in Uttarakhand, India). Based on my ethnographic research in Tibetan communities in northern India, I examine two research questions: (a) What are the processes to develop and implement a pre-college culturally responsive introductory engineering course? and (b) How do Tibetan culture and Buddhism influence the engineering design and teamwork of the pre-college Tibetan students who took the course? ^ I designed then taught the course that featured elementary lectures on sustainability, introductory engineering design, energy alternatives, and manufacturing engineering. The course also included a pre-college engineering design project through which Tibetan high school students investigated a problem at the school and designed a possible solution to it. ^ Drawing from postcolonial studies, engineering studies, engineering and social justice, Buddhist studies, and Tibetan studies, I provide an analysis of my findings. Based on my findings, I conclude that my culturally responsive approach of teaching was an effective method to help students feel that their cultural background was respected and included in a pre-college engineering course; however, some students felt resistance toward the teaching approach. In addition, the culturally relevant content that connected with their ways of living in their school, Tibetan communities, and surroundings helped the students to relate to abstract concepts in familiar settings. Lastly, they appreciated that I brought to the course relevant information about technology and society in India (their host country), engineers\u27 work in industry, technologies used in other contexts as well, and projects that show how engineers can help to alleviate poverty. ^ The findings of my research can inform (a) educators who are interested in integrating culturally responsive activities in their teaching methods, (b) researchers or teachers in ethnic minority schools abroad, (c) educators interested in developing engineering activities or courses for underrepresented ethnic minorities, ethnic diasporas or refugee youth in the United States, and (d) facilitators at multicultural engineering summer camps in the United States

The Power of the Provisioning Concept

This paper supports the conception of economics as the social science that studies provisioning processes. Conceptions of economics help us understand the history of economic thought and have methodological, theoretical, policy and strategic significance. When economists are careful to define their discipline without committing ourselves a priori to particular assumptions, methods and theories, but as merely focusing on a class of phenomena, then the result is a more thoughtful and richer economics. The 'natural' choice for this class of phenomena is provisioning systems, because we want to understand as fully as possible the systems that nurture us– meaning that we ought to be interested in monetary and non-monetary mechanisms, self-interest as well as altruism, perfect rationality as well as quasi-rationality, exchange as well as gift relationships, etc., all as part of one discipline.provisioning, definition of economics, economic methodology, history of economic thought, scarcity, comparative paradigms in economics

What is Community Operational Research?

Community Operational Research (Community OR) has been an explicit sub-domain of OR for more than 30 years. In this paper, we tackle the controversial issue of how it can be differentiated from other forms of OR. While it has been persuasively argued that Community OR cannot be defined by its clients, practitioners or methods, we argue that the common concern of all Community OR practice is the meaningful engagement of communities, whatever form that may take – and the legitimacy of different forms of engagement may be open to debate. We then move on to discuss four other controversies that have implications for the future development of Community OR and its relationship with its parent discipline: the desire for Community OR to be more explicitly political; claims that it should be grounded in the theory, methodology and practice of systems thinking; the similarities and differences between the UK and US traditions; and the extent to which Community OR offers an enhanced understanding of practice that could be useful to OR more generally. Our positions on these controversies all follow from our identification of ‘meaningful engagement’ as a central feature of Community OR

The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life (20th Anniversary Edition)

The recent release of Pope Francis’s much-discussed encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has reinforced environmental issues as also moral and spiritual issues. This anthology, twenty years ahead of the encyclical but very much in line with its agenda, offers essays by fifteen philosophers, theologians, and environmentalists who argue for a response to ecology that recognizes the tools of science but includes a more spiritual approach—one with a more humanistic, holistic view based on inherent reverence toward the natural world. Writers whose orientations range from Buddhism to evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Native American beliefs explore ways to achieve this paradigm shift and suggest that “the environment is not only a spiritual issue, but the spiritual issue of our time.”https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_press/1003/thumbnail.jp

The Iwakura Mission in Britain, 1872

In London, at the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (LSE), a symposium was held on 6 December 1997 - the anniversary of the day when the members of Iwakura's delegation were received by Queen Victoria. Comprising four lectures the symposium was attended by a packed audience of some 75 people including the Joint Chairman and many members of the Japan Society, several senior representatives of the Japanese Embassy, as well as staff and students. Each lecturer focused sharply on a particular aspect of the Mission's work in Britain that fell within his or her special field and each prompted numerous questions and much discussion. It is some measure of the great range of subjects that the Mission was attempting to cover that there was no real overlap between any of the four papers. They are now included in their entirety in this volume.Iwakura misson, Victorian London, Kume Kunitake, Iwakura Tomomi, Ito Hirobumi, education, industry, exports, religion, Kairan Jikki chronicle, Meiji government, unequal treaties, embassy, 1872, Britain, Japan, America.