Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Higher Education
- Creators: School of Sustainability
Description
This paper explores multidisciplinary curricula, services, and experiential learning in higher education on sustainability. Researchers attempt to understand sustainability as a formalized degree program, what frameworks and techniques are used to improve new disciplines, and how Arizona State University's School of Sustainability (SOS) improves sustainability education in higher learning. Secondary research includes a discussion on the history of sustainability as a discipline, the university as a social system, the role of university administration, the roles of professors and students, benchmarking and process improvement for curriculum development, and methods to bridge epistemologies in SOS. The paper presents findings from a study of the SOS undergraduate student experience that used focus groups to gather qualitative data and statistical analysis to analyze that data quantitatively. Study findings indicate that that measuring student perception of SOS's academic services, and understanding the social system of the university, helps administration, faculty, and students collaborate more effectively to enhance learning experiences.
ContributorsTom, Sharyn Paige (Author) / Haglund, LaDawn (Thesis director) / Ankeny, Casey (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
As the US and the rest of the world face a growing need for affordable and accessible higher education, we must more deeply examine the scalability of our universities: how do they change with size? How do different institutional types vary? What makes ASU number one in innovation? At least two of these questions have immediate relevance to not only higher education, but political economy and sustainability as well. We apply to institutions the exciting complex systems framework of scaling, which has led to deep theoretical insight into the structure of biological systems and cities (West, Brown and Enquist 1997, Bettencourt 2013). First we group universities into seven distinct sectors, from public research universities to professional schools. Then we examine the returns to scale of university revenues, expenditures, and graduation rates, by correlating these key variables versus total enrollment. We discover that the sectors exhibit some important similarities, but overall leverage different economies of scale to serve their own priorities. These results imply shared mechanisms and constraints among the entire class of institutions. Furthermore, the uniqueness of each sector reveals their "speciation" into diverse institutional models, offering a fresh (though limited) first look at their scale-dependent complementary roles and competitive advantages. Accordingly, we outline what additional data and analyses might sufficiently strengthen these results to make recommendations, at levels ranging from student and family decisions to individual university strategies to sector-wide and system-wide policies. Promising future directions include longitudinal analysis of university growth patterns, detailed outlier analysis, and deeper theoretical investigation of mechanisms that drive the observed scaling.
ContributorsTaylor, Ryan Chin (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis director) / Kempes, Chris (Committee member) / LePore, Paul (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
There are unfortunately very few curricular guides that focus on community engagement within the higher education of landscape architecture. A Beginner’s Guide to Community Engagement in the Curriculum of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning to Improve Social Justice and Sustainability helps resolve this issue and serves as a resource to students, educators, designers, and more. The guide centralizes a diverse collection of resources, guides students through learning materials, shares insight, and proposes potential community engagement methods. The booklet aims to help readers understand the importance of community engagement in design and shares different curricular approaches to introduce the work to students.
ContributorsNeeson, Margaret (Author) / Cheng, Chingwen (Thesis director) / Coseo, Paul (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
In student affairs departments in higher education institutions, supervisors are responsible for meeting the changing needs of both students and employees while staying attuned to the evolving college environment. A student affairs supervisor’s effectiveness relies heavily on social skills, particularly on the ability to communicate through an institution’s ever-changing environment. Effective communication at the management level can continually improve the institution’s ability to meet students shifting needs in educational spaces. A key component of effective communication among student affairs supervisors is offering employees feedback and coaching. Nevertheless, many student affairs supervisors are underprepared to provide feedback and coaching to their employees, especially when it includes difficult conversations. Guided by social constructivism, this survey method study is built on research related to synergistic supervision and performance management to explore the perceived practices, experiences, and needs of student affairs supervisors at Central Community College. The purpose of this study was to examine how student affairs supervisors utilize best practices, including frequent communication of feedback and coaching, goal setting, and employee development outlined in performance management and synergistic supervision theories. This study’s findings add to the current research body on student affairs supervisors' limited training and preparation within the community college context.
ContributorsWalton, Janel (Author) / Sampson, Carrie (Thesis advisor) / Basile, Carole (Thesis advisor) / Walton, Candace (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Interprofessional educators increasingly recognize the importance of establishing graduated interprofessional learning strategies to socialize and prepare learners to work in collaborative care environments. Interprofessional socialization (IPS) is the process of bringing students together from different disciplines to learn from, with, and about each other. However, education programs struggle to systematically integrate evidence-based interprofessional learning. Community-engaged learning, a pedagogical tool adaptable to diverse circumstances, offers an opportunity to expand IPS. The purpose of this mixed methods action research dissertation study was to explore the factors that contribute to IPS through participation in a community-engaged learning course and how IPS evolves among early learners. In this study, I explored several factors, including theoretically-grounded and contextually relevant teaching and learning strategies pivotal to IPS. Specifically, I created and facilitated an innovative pilot Interprofessional Education and Community Health course, guided by experiential learning theory, asset-based and critical pedagogy and flow theory. I found that these theoretically guided instructional techniques nurtured the benefits of team-based experiential learning, inspired a community of confident learners through praxis, and promoted optimal engagement in challenging and meaningful health promotion activities. The learner’s diverse backgrounds, meaningful community-engagement, and challenging collaborative assignments contributed to IPS. The shared novel real-world experiences ignited emotional reactions that nurtured their relationships; facilitating their ability to address conflicts. They sustained motivation to participate in community-engaged learning and maintained a consistent strong belief in the importance of working as a team. Whereas, their understanding of interprofessional teamwork, comfort and preference working on interprofessional teams grew over time. Four pedagogical strategies pivotal to interprofessional socialization emerged for use with community-engaged interprofessional education: 1) purposeful community partnerships, 2) structured collaborative written assignments, 3) intentional conversations, and 4) welcoming cultural assets.
ContributorsRamella, Kelly Johnson (Author) / Sampson, Carrie (Thesis advisor) / Ross, Allison (Committee member) / Yañez-Fox, Lisa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
More than half of the students who start this year at a community college will not return to the same institution the following year. This persistent problem negatively impacts students, institutions, and society at-large. However, institutions that experience greater success in retaining students place academic advising initiatives at the core of their retention efforts. The Appreciative Advising Model (AAM) may be uniquely suited to promoting student persistence because the AAM engages a student in long-term planning, showing how their current and future academic efforts can be aligned to achieve their goals. Employing the AAM, advisors use open-ended questions to uncover a students’ dreams, and then co-construct, with the student, a set of systematic goals uniquely tailored to help the student reach their dreams. As part of this study, the AAM was implemented as an innovation at a community college advising center. Guided by a framework that includes theories of social constructivism, positive psychology, and appreciative inquiry, this qualitative action research study employed semi-structured interviews and focus groups with students and advisors to explore their perceptions and experiences related to the AAM as a potential tool to enhance community college
retention. The goal of this study was to chronicle the implementation of a new advising model for a community college—the AAM—study the perceptions and experiences related to the new model, and to assess the model’s influence on a student’s likelihood of persisting at their community college. This work increases the understanding of the AAM
in a community college setting and results may have implications for community colleges, advising centers, and retention efforts.
ContributorsDisrude, Jim (Author) / Sampson, Carrie (Thesis advisor) / Coronella, Tami (Committee member) / John, Beth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This thesis is exploring the potential disconnect between the operational and cultural parts in the making of sustainability at Arizona State University (ASU) to find the disconnect in operational goals, student engagement, and thus student behavior in building sustainability at the university. To do so, I compare and contrast how ASU, Northern Arizona University (NAU), and the University of Arizona (UA) define, create, and demonstrate sustainability in their university’s culture and campus engagement programs. I first define what “culture” is in this study to provide context on how the word is being applied. Next, I assess how culture is reflected in the mission, vision, and/or goals of each university to set the tone for how the university intends to shape the culture of student experience through its services, as well as provide context where sustainability concepts may fit within. Then I assess what sustainability is demonstrated and defined as at each university. To thread each of these components together, I compare and contrast campus sustainability engagement programs at ASU, NAU, and UA based on the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) reports produced by The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE), as engagement programs are a reflection of the university’s vision, goals, and values brought from theory to practice. My findings are demonstrated in the form of a policy analysis, followed by recommendations on closing the gap where engagement programs and opportunities are potentially missing. These recommendations are intended to advance a stronger culture of sustainability on campus at ASU.
ContributorsMullis, Kailey Cheyenne (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis director) / Jung, Kendon (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05