Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: One of the benefits of technology in education has been the development of new approaches to both teaching and learning. This session examines the development of the web course as a viable alternative to the traditional classroom approach that can provide significant benefits to both students and instructors. However, it is important that web courses provide a comparable experience for students taking such courses. They should not be harder or easier; rather they should provide a different way to accomplish the same educational ends.

A few years ago our campus began the process of providing web enhancement options for courses. Initially, it was little more than document storage and making materials accessible to students. However, some of us began to realize that web enhancement could be expanded to developing pure web courses. Moving from Web Course in a Box to Blackboard to Desire To Learn, these various web course programs have provided the vehicles for the development of web courses serving traditional and non traditional students equally well. These web courses also provided benefits to nontraditional and working students as well as traditional students by allowing them to complete course work at times more convenient to them not only during regular semesters but especially during summer and winterim sessions. Similar benefits accrue to faculty teaching such courses and allow faculty to teach courses during periods as winterim and summer from off campus locations.

The key to making these web courses comparable to the regular courses has been the development of the electronic notebook technique, a wide variety of forums for mandatory student participation, web assignments and online testing where appropriate.

This presentation provides models for other instructors by examining the presenter's currently implemented web courses. These web courses have been designed to provide students with not only the same subject matter and substance, but they have been further designed to provide equivalent opportunities for student to student and student to faculty interaction as well as equivalent assignments and assessments.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This session presents a description of the pedagogy of resilience as well as assessment tools for collecting evidence that teachers and pre-service candidates are affective at implementing this new pedagogy.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Objectives
The first objective is to characterize PharmD student learning preferences as determined by the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) and personality preferences as determined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The second objective is to determine if learning preferences and personality preferences correlate with students’ reported preferences for method of content delivery in two didactic, entry-level PharmD courses.
Methods
Two didactic courses employed narrated PowerPoint lectures available via the internet coupled with workshop or laboratory-based in-class sessions. At the beginning of a quarter, second year PharmD students were asked to complete the LSI, MBTI, and also to report their anticipated personal preferences for course content delivery. At the end of the quarter they were asked specifically about how well the content delivery in these two courses aided their learning and which of the delivery methods they preferred most.
Results
Aggregate student results from the two standardized instruments (LSI and MBTI) will be presented. Correlations between reported preferences for content delivery mechanisms and tested learning and personality preferences will be reported.
Implications
Results of this project will be used to inform curricular revision at the College and to allow faculty to modify pedagogy in order to reach varying types of learners. Results can also be used to help students understand and develop their non-preferred learning and personality types within a safe environment of the classroom for future application in the classroom and in practice settings

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how the animal, as biological species and as idea or human potentiality became important to post-Darwinian understandings of and debates about education and child development. I show how in late nineteenth-century America, the discourses of child study and nature study, on the one hand, and the literary naturalist novels of education, on the other hand, imagined very different pedagogical roles for the animal and animality. Both believed that the developing human child retraced the species’ evolutionary history, that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and that exposure to the natural world was spontaneously educational – what I term autopedagogy. However they ultimately articulated very different models of education and development.

Advocates of child study (such as G. Stanley Hall) and nature study (such as Liberty Hyde Bailey) believed that isolation from nature and the animal world was detrimental; accordingly, they argued for an education in and through nature, whereby the child would pass through animal and savage developmental stages. In this linear and instrumental model, animality was something to be given its moment, but ultimately abandoned or repressed on the way to developing a modern self. Within this model, the animal and notions of evolutionary development were used to naturalize education and to normalize the modern human subject.

The naturalist authors Frank Norris and Jack London presented a model of education that lacked the directionality and teleology of child and nature study, but relied on the same underlying evolutionary logic. Instead of a linear progression, they advocated what often amounted to an antipedagogy, whereby the deleterious effects of culture and formal education were stripped away, leaving a more animal core. While these authors frequently described what amounted to devolution, imagined as a linear process that proceeded in the opposite direction, away from the human, they also described the unpredictable reactivation of animality and primitive instincts within human characters. These events are evolutionary discontinuities, non-linear changes. In naturalist novel of education, such as Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914) and London’s autobiographical Martin Eden (1909), education and development are radically reimagined, such that they become separated from notions of progress and humanization. Indeed, these perverted Bildungsroman force one to question whether education can exist or remain recognizable without teleology.

Take together, these two different examples show how the animal became important in reimagining education in the Darwinian age. They also explain how the notion that exposure to nature is spontaneously educational – an idea that still has currency – frequently rests on Darwinian assumptions and a recapitulationary logic. This logic imagines that developmental errors could be corrected through temporary, controlled regression – a return to animality – that allows for a sort of rebirth.

More generally this paper shows how, at a particular historical moment, the animal was used to debate and redefine the human, extending and testing this ontological and epistemological category. It thus contributes to a broad reconsideration of the significance of the animal in American culture.