Facilitating Holistic Curriculum Development

There is a movement in higher education to think of a curriculum less as a sequence of independent courses and more as a set of highly integrated learning and assessment experiences designed to help students develop clearly defined outcomes. This paper reports on a case study that illustrates how internal curriculum assessment processes used by an environmental science and policy department in an institution of higher education lead to the creation of an innovative tenure-track faculty line for someone whose primary activities and scholarship focus not on traditional disciplinary scholarship but instead on coordinating the holistic development of an integrated curriculum. This paper goes on to show how I, the person hired into this position, am facilitating the coordinated development of a senior thesis programme, a junior entry course into the major and a disciplinary writing programme for the purpose of developing a more integrated curriculum.     

Counselor Training for Facultative Human Relationships

This study evaluated the effects of the first stage (prepracticum) of a three-stage counselor training practicum designed to merge cognitive and experiential learning in a systematic manner using professional trainers. Results indicated positive changes in counselors in training who exhibited increases in facultative behaviors associated with positive client outcomes.     

A comparison of muscle activations during traditional and abbreviated tennis serves

The abbreviated tennis serve is a relatively novel modification of the traditional serve that has been reported to provide performance advantages over the traditional technique. However, there are limited objective data regarding the benefits and biomechanics of the abbreviated serve; no data exist that describe shoulder muscle activations during the abbreviated serve. The purpose of this study was to compare muscle activations between the traditional and abbreviated serves. Electromyographic data were collected for the anterior and posterior deltoid, infraspinatus, middle trapezius, latissimus dorsi, serratus anterior, and pectoralis major. When muscle activations were compared during each serve phase, no significant differences were observed between the traditional and abbreviated tennis serve techniques, indicating that the traditional and abbreviated serves are similar regarding shoulder muscle activations. These results could have implications for performance of and injury related to the abbreviated versus traditional serve technique. Although the abbreviated serve has anecdotally been described as advantageous, the present data do not indicate any significant advantages or disadvantages in performing the abbreviated serve technique versus the traditional serve.