To ensure a productive and safe learning environment, it is imperative to be explicit about our classroom policies and expectations.
Please take your time to examine these expectations closely, as you are expected to know and understand them during the course.
To be clear: It’s YOUR task and responsibility to acquaint yourself with my expectations of you during the course.
The following video may be a good help, also for things to avoid in college:
This is a summary of Enhancing Recovery through Linkage with Indigenous Natural Supports
Author: John B. Allen Jr.
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This paper argues that people with psychiatric disabilities recover better when linked into the same informal community resources everyone else relies on, not just formal mental health programs. The author calls these resources natural supports and works through where to find them and how to build them.
The term natural supports comes from Nisbet and Hagner’s 1988 work and originally focused on workplace settings. West, Kregel, Hernandez, and Hock broadened the definition in 1997 to include community resources like transportation, recreation, and government assistance programs.
This is a summary of Social Work Assessment Tool (SWAT): Guidelines for Use and Completion
Author/Developers: The SWAT was developed by the Social Work Outcomes Task Force of the Social Work Section, National Council of Hospice and Palliative Professionals, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Task force members included Mary Raymer, ACSW; Ruth Huber, Ph.D., MSW; Dona Reese, Ph.D., MSW; Stacy Orloff, LCSW; and Susan Gerbino, Ph.D., MSW. Charlotte Butler, Ph.D., wrote the guidelines booklet.
Publisher: National Council of Hospice and Palliative Professionals, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, Alexandria, VA.
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This booklet explains the purpose, content, and use of the Social Work Assessment Tool, a scale designed to help hospice and palliative care social workers document their effectiveness with patients and caregivers.
This is a summary of Parenting Styles: The Four Styles of Parenting
Author: Kendra Cherry
Publication: About.com Psychology
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This article summarizes Diana Baumrind’s foundational research on parenting styles and how later psychologists built on it, then walks through what each style tends to produce in children.
Baumrind studied more than 100 preschool-age children in the early 1960s using naturalistic observation, parental interviews, and other methods. From that research, she identified four dimensions that define how parents raise children: disciplinary strategies, warmth and nurturance, communication style, and expectations around maturity and control.
Based on how parents scored across these dimensions, she originally proposed three distinct parenting styles. Maccoby and Martin later added a fourth style in 1983.
Publisher: Center for Civic Engagement, KVCC (Kalamazoo Valley Community College)
The Supervisor Assessment Form is a service-learning evaluation template used by KVCC’s Center for Civic Engagement. A field supervisor at a student’s service-learning site fills it out to rate the student’s performance for a course.
It collects basic identifying information: student name, service-learning site, supervisor’s name and contact info, the course number, and the instructor’s name.
This is a summary of The Effect of the Guilty but Mentally Ill Verdict on the Outcome of a Jury Trial
Author: Michael A. Eagan, Institution: Texas State University
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This paper traces the insanity defense from its earliest roots through the modern Guilty but Mentally Ill (GBMI) verdict, then asks whether GBMI actually changes what juries decide.
The defense started long before McNaughton. Roman law excused people found non compos mentis, and English courts later ran three successive tests. The “good and evil” test, used from the 14th to 16th centuries, drew on religious ideas and asked whether a defendant could tell good from evil.
This is a summary of Reconstructing Constructionism
Authors: Richard Noss, University College London; James Clayson, American University of Paris
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This paper argues that constructionism, the learning theory launched by Seymour Papert around 1980, needs to reconnect with its original epistemological foundations if it’s going to have any lasting effect on education. The authors want to shift constructionism from a loose framework for action into a more precise set of tools for describing what learners actually do inside constructionist environments, so those descriptions can be tested and used to improve design.
This is a summary of Chickering’s Seven Vectors of Student Development Explained
Leticia L. De Larrosa
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This paper walks through Arthur Chickering’s seven vectors theory, a well-known model of how college students develop identity, emotion, and independence over their years at a university.
De Larrosa opens by placing Chickering’s work in context. Student development theories fall into two camps: psychosocial theories, which describe development as a sequence of stages involving thinking, feeling, valuing, and relating to others; and cognitive theories, which focus on how beliefs and assumptions get restructured. Chickering’s seven vectors (1969) and Erikson’s eight developmental crises (1959) both fall under psychosocial theory. Kohlberg’s moral development theory is the standard cognitive example.
This is a summary of Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Limits of Social Constructionism
Author: David Peterson, Sociology Department, Northwestern University
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This paper pushes back on both strong social constructionism and strong nativism, using the concept of number as its test case. Peterson argues that neither side has it right on its own and proposes a more precise framework for sorting out where culture actually shapes cognition and where it doesn’t.
The sociology of knowledge generally holds that meaning comes from social processes like tradition, ritual, and institution, not from objects themselves or from individual minds working in isolation. This idea traces back to Durkheim, who argued that basic categories of thought, things like time, space, number, and causality, come from society itself rather than from pure experience or from an innate rational structure.
This is a summary of Adolescent Storm and Stress, Reconsidered
Author: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, University of Maryland, College Park
Publication: American Psychologist, Publisher: American Psychological Association
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This paper revisits G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 claim that adolescence is inherently a time of “storm and stress.” Arnett argues that while Hall’s original version, universal, biological, and inevitable, is clearly wrong, a modified version of the theory holds up well against a century of research. He examines three specific areas: conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risk behavior, arguing that all three are genuinely more common during adolescence than at other ages, even though not every adolescent experiences them.