Faculty Members as Course Co-Convenors with Students: Jointly Creating a Complex Ecology for Learning Communities in Natural Resources and Agriculture

How can we, as student and faculty scholars together, delve into the complexities of issues along the natural resources/agriculture interface? How can we think deeply about such topics as urban sprawl, food production and culture, or globalization? Then, how do we take our thinking and our dialogue further, so that we make thoughtful choices about both our professional and personal lives? The Liberty Hyde Bailey Scholars Program offers one model. The declaration of this program states that we are “a community of scholars dedicated to lifelong learning.

Trading Places: Learning From the Student Perspective

A unique opportunity exists within Michigan State University for undergraduates to be valued members of a community of student and faculty scholars dedicated to lifelong learning. With the motto, “college is a journey, not a guided tour,” the Bailey Scholars Program encourages students to take charge of their learning, with plenty of assistance and resources available. The program offers students a chance to tailor their education or degree toward particular interests. Bailey provides a comfortable environment to learn however is appropriate for the topic, creating a space where scholars become interdependent and gain a sense of community. Many of the core classes involve field trips, guest speakers, projects, and discussions developed by the students. Along with the actual learning experiences, the student scholars within a class determine assessment and evaluation. Classes are generally small, bringing students and conveners together at a round table. In the first of three core classes, there is a chance for student conveners to facilitate in the course. The role of a student convener is similar to that of faculty conveners. Student conveners experience the ideal practice of peer leadership; the confidence gained from being a valued member of the convener community can encourage student scholars to take the lead and initiate ideas and conversation without dominating class dynamics

Too clean, or not too clean: the hygiene hypothesis and home hygiene.

The 'hygiene hypothesis' as originally formulated by Strachan, proposes that a cause of the recent rapid rise in atopic disorders could be a lower incidence of infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings. Use of the term 'hygiene hypothesis' has led to several interpretations, some of which are not supported by a broader survey of the evidence. The increase in allergic disorders does not correlate with the decrease in infection with pathogenic organisms, nor can it be explained by changes in domestic hygiene. A consensus is beginning to develop round the view that more fundamental changes in lifestyle have led to decreased exposure to certain microbial or other species, such as helminths, that are important for the development of immunoregulatory mechanisms. Although this review concludes that the relationship of the hypothesis to hygiene practice is not proven, it lends strong support to initiatives seeking to improve hygiene practice. It would however be helpful if the hypothesis were renamed, e.g. as the 'microbial exposure' hypothesis, or 'microbial deprivation' hypothesis, as proposed for instance by Bjorksten. Avoiding the term 'hygiene' would help focus attention on determining the true impact of microbes on atopic diseases, while minimizing risks of discouraging good hygiene practice

"I Remember/Know/Guess that I knew-it-all-along!": Subjective experience versus objective measures of the knew-it-all-along effect.

The knew-it-all-along (KIA) effect occurs when individuals report that they previously knew something that they learned only recently. People often err when reporting the level of knowledge they had prior to feedback, but there is no research exploring the subjective experience of this effect. We incorporated a remember/just know/ guess judgment into a traditional (Experiment 1A: rating scale) and a modified-traditional (Experiment 1B: two-alternative forced choice) KIA procedure. Experiments 2A, 2B, and 3 were similar in format to Experiments I A and I B, but the trivia stimuli were replaced with word puzzles, which were expected to be better suited to inducing a feeling of having known it all along, because answers to trivia questions typically seem arbitrary, whereas word puzzles often give rise to ah-ha experiences. A KIA effect was observed in all the experiments, but an accompanying subjective feeling of having known it all along arose only with word puzzles.</p