Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights -- Introduction

This book asks an overdue question: can we build honors contracts that transcend the transactional? The word “contract” itself—as both noun and verb—delimits more possibilities than it reveals. The chapters collected here expand this restrictive term by reframing honors contracts as collaborative partnerships for experiential learning. While most, though not all, of the volume’s contributors accept standard definitions of honors contracts as “[e]nriched options within regular [non-honors] courses,” they also imagine many and varied possibilities for such enrichment (Schuman 33). The subtitle’s pairing of “Insights” and “Oversights” thus suggests not that the authors have seen it all or missed the point when it comes to honors contracts, but that contracts, like courses, benefit from the creative pedagogical approaches and thoughtful administrative practices that define honors education. Caitlin McCuskey’s Home, the cover art for this monograph, captures a key idea of the book as a whole: the work of building honors curricula is both imaginative and structural. The beauty of honors education, like that of the cover art, lies in both the scaffolding and color of its conceptual architecture. By mapping honors contracts onto that imaginative blueprint, this book empowers honors educators to build communities and curricula that welcome their various administrators, faculty members, and students home

Honors in Practice: Beyond the Classroom

Six years ago, in my first week as director of the Utah State University (USU) Honors Program, a senior physics major and her frustrated faculty mentor marched into my office. The student was shy and embarrassed, the mentor surly and blunt: “Why,” he asked, “must a senior complete an honors contract in a class that isn’t fundamentally shaping her future?” Good question. Because students were required to earn honors credits each term at USU, the choice facing this student was whether to enroll in an honors general education course she did not need or to develop a contract to deepen the work of a non-honors course only tangentially related to her impressive research agenda. The problem was that she had completed her major coursework and was just fulfilling some remaining requirements as she focused outside the classroom on her true academic passions: multi-messenger astronomy, measurement of ambient light pollution, and public science education. She had recently applied for and won a Goldwater Scholarship for research coupling electromagnetic and gravitational astronomy. She was also collaborating with local city officials to measure and propose solutions to a growing light-pollution problem in our northern Utah valley and volunteering for a range of public science education programs on campus. As she explained how her research, Goldwater application, and community engagement connected to each other, this shy and embarrassed student became animated and expansive, moving me to rethink honors contract rules. If a contract involved additional faculty-mentored academic work beyond course requirements, why did that work have to be connected to a particular course and mentored by its instructor? Indeed, bringing one’s curiosity to life—whether through engagement with undergraduate research and creative work, applications for national scholarships and fellowships, or development of collaborative community partnerships—quite clearly defines honors education, in or outside of the classroom

Towards a politically avant-gardist criticism in landscape architecture

This thesis proposes the development of a politically avant -gardist criticism of landscape architecture as a starting point to a politically avant -gardist practice of landscape architecture. The thesis examines major texts on the avant -garde from the fine arts. Two distinct meanings of avant -garde are traced. The first indicates an artist or artwork that calls attention to particular political structures and works for change. The second refers to an artist or artwork that is "new in its field ". The judgment of newness is often based on stylistic issues. There is no current critical approach based on a political avant -garde in landscape architectural discourse. In landscape architecture, avant -garde is most often used as a stylistic label, meaning "new in the field ". When it is used in critical or theoretical work, the political issues surrounding projects or ideas are not addressed or are referred to in broad terms. A case study reveals that important information is lost when this definition of avant -garde is employed. A second case study reveals that a political approach to criticism of public space exists in the fine arts and that this approach can shed light on a potential approach within landscape architecture. The proposed critical methodology is outlined and tested in a final case study that examines one particular urban space. This case study reveals a set of complex political issues related to the design and management of public space

Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights

Acknowledgments Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights, Kristine A. Miller Curriculum Gone Bad: The Case against Honors Contracts, Richard Badenhausen The Timeliness of Honors Contracts, Shirley Shultz Myers and Geoffrey Whitebread Honors Contracts: Empowering Students and Fostering Autonomy in Honors Education, Anne Dotter An Undeserved Reputation: How Contract Courses Can Work for a Small Honors Program , Jon Hageman One Hand Washes the Other: Designing Mutually Beneficial Honors Contracts, Antonina Bambina Honors Contracts: A Scaffolding to Independent Inquiry, Cindy S. Ticknor and Shamim Khan Enhancing the Structure and Impact of Honors by Contract Projects with Templates and Research Hubs, James G. Snyder and Melinda Weisberg Ensuring a Quality Honors Experience through Learning Contracts: Success beyond Our Wildest Dreams, Julia A. Haseleu and Laurie A. Taylor A High-Impact Strategy for Honors Contract Courses, Gary Wyatt Facilitating Feedback: The Benefits of Automation in Monitoring Completion of Honors Contracts, Erin E. Edgington Moving Honors Contracts into the Digital Age: Processes, Impacts, and Opinions , Ken D. Thomas and Suzanne P. Hunter Honors in Practice: Beyond the Classroom, Kristine A. Miller About the Authors About the NCHC Monograph Serie

A Comparison of Information Systems Programs at AACSB and ACBSP Schools in Relation to IS 2002 Model Curricula

Given the downturn in Information Systems (IS) program enrollments, IS departments housed within schools of business are justifiably concerned about attracting more students into their programs. While some reasons for the downturn may be beyond the control of the academic community, it has been argued that IS programs are suffering, in part, because many of their curricula are out-of-date. To help address this problem, the current study offers guidance to support IS departments involved in revising their IS curricula. To accomplish this, catalogs from fifty randomly selected AACSB schools and fifty randomly selected ACBSP schools were accessed via the Internet to determine the most commonly required courses for an undergraduate IS major. Findings were then compared to previous research in order to identify changes and trends, as well as to determine compliance with model curricula

From Hospital to Home to Participation: A Position Paper on Transition Planning Poststroke

Based on a review of the evidence, members of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Stroke Group’s Movement Interventions Task Force offer these 5 recommendations to help improve transitions of care for patients and their caregivers: (1) improving communication processes; (2) using transition specialists; (3) implementing a patient-centered discharge checklist; (4) using standardized outcome measures; and (5) establishing partnerships with community wellness programs. Because of changes in health care policy, there are incentives to improve transitions during stroke rehabilitation. Although transition management programs often include multidisciplinary teams, medication management, caregiver education, and follow-up care management, there is a lack of a comprehensive and standardized approach to implement transition management protocols during poststroke rehabilitation. This article uses the Transitions of Care (TOC) model to conceptualize how to facilitate a comprehensive patient-centered hand off at discharge to maximize patient functioning and health. Specifically, this article reviews current guidelines and provides an evidence summary of several commonly cited approaches (Early Supported Discharge, planned predischarge home visits, discharge checklists) to manage TOC, followed by a description of documented barriers to effective transitions. Patient-centered and standardized transition management may improve community integration, activities of daily living performance, and quality of life for stroke survivors while also decreasing hospital readmission rates during the transition from hospital to home to community

Therapeutic-yoga after stroke : effect on walking recovery

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Stroke is a sudden and devastating medical condition. People who experience a stroke tend to have long-term physical limitations including impaired walking as part of the ongoing consequences of stroke. While a variety of rehabilitation interventions have demonstrated efficacy for improving walking after stroke, none of the interventions have emerged as superior, and prior to this study, therapeutic-yoga had not been tested as an intervention to improve walking recovery after stroke. METHODS: This study was a secondary data analysis of group therapeutic-yoga on walking recovery measures including walking speed, walking distance, and spatiotemporal step parameter symmetry. The walking recovery measures were collected as secondary outcomes in a sub-sample (n=12) in a pilot randomized controlled study (n=47) designed to test the efficacy of 8-weeks of group therapeutic-yoga on balance and fear of falling. Participants in the current study completed 12-weeks of group therapeutic yoga with outcome assessments at baseline, 8-weeks, and 12-weeks. The main analysis was repeated measures ANOVA to assess the main effect of time with additional analyses including effect sizes, percent of participants achieving change greater than or equal to minimal detectable change (MDC), and mean change score comparisons between baseline and 8-weeks, 8-weeks and 12-weeks, and baseline and 12-weeks. RESULTS: Twelve people with chronic stroke enrolled in the study with 9 completing the intervention and all 3 assessments. No significant main effect of time was found on any of the variables of interest. Walking distance demonstrated a trend toward significant change (p=0.064) and step length symmetry demonstrated significant change (p=0.05) between baseline and 12-weeks. Several spatiotemporal step parameter symmetry ratios demonstrated small to medium effect sizes with the majority (91%) being a negative effect. CONCLUSION: Twelve weeks of group therapeutic-yoga appears to be feasible in a population of people with chronic stroke. Walking distance and step parameter symmetry should be tested in a larger sample. An improved understanding of the impact, progression, and remediation of walking asymmetry is needed