School Community

Eric Baum

Eric Baum couldn’t find a job as an English teacher after graduating in 2004 with his bachelor’s degree and needed one with benefits. His father, a geriatrician from Concord, told him the local nursing home in Mentor was hiring. 

 The Case Western Reserve University nursing student from Rocky River never imagined it would lead to a career in nursing.

“I gave myself one month at the nursing home and thought I would be gone. But I fell in love with nursing,” Baum said.  “I enjoyed working closely with the patients and becoming involved with their care.”

Today, not only is he a nurse practitioner in geriatrics and palliative care, but he also is a history maker at Case Western Reserve. He is the first student accepted into the dual doctorate DNP/PHD program at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing.  The program begins this fall.

“Five years ago, I didn’t even know there were nurse practitioners,” Baum said.

In 2005, he began to pursue his degree to become a registered nurse through the graduate-entry program, which is geared toward students who have their bachelor’s degrees in fields other than nursing.

Now nearing completion of his Doctor of Nurse Practice (DNP) degree with a focus on educational leadership, Baum will take on several additional years of courses and a dissertation project for his PhD.

“It’s ironical that I rebelled against doing what my parents have done, but now I’m pursuing advanced degrees in nursing with an interest in geriatrics–the same area my father practices in as a medical doctor,” Baum said.

One of the reasons Baum is seeking dual degrees is he hopes to teach at the faculty level at a nursing school in an effort to ease the nationwide shortage of nursing educators—and, subsequently, the shortage of practicing nurses.

The new dual degree program provides students an opportunity to simultaneously pursue both doctoral degrees and take courses concurrently in research and clinical leadership in nursing.

The DNP is a terminal degree for those pursuing leadership roles in advanced practice across diverse settings, and the PhD is focused on knowledge development and empirical research to advance nursing science, said Jaclene A. Zauszniewski, associate dean for doctoral education and the Kate Hanna Harvey Professor in Community Health Nursing.

The two degrees overlap on 11 of the 55 credits required, enabling students to complete coursework in three to four years. The entire program takes about five years and includes exams, proposal defenses and completion of two research studies.

Admission to the program is gained through the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing for the DNP and the Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies for the PhD.

The Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing was the first school in the country to offer the DNP degree program, which has become a model for nursing schools across the country. The dual doctoral program strengthens the nursing school’s graduate programs and contributes to the profession of nursing, Zauszniewski said.

For information about the program, visit the website.

Students practice fly fishing at the Museum of Art lagoon.

Man met nature last week as fly-fishing lines and rods whipped through the air at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s lagoon and bluegills nipped at the lines.

For 15 students in Case Western Reserve University English professor John Orlock’s SAGES seminar–Fly Fishing:  The Sport, the Metaphysics, & the Literature–it was the moment to connect with nature.

Lining the pathway along the lagoon, the first-year students got some step-by-step instructions from a master of the sport, George Vosmik.  The rods and reels for the experiential component of this seminar were a generous gift from the Orvis Corporation, a major manufacturer of fly-fishing gear.

With rods in a forward position, Vosmik had the students repeat, “It’s great to be from Ohio” as they accelerated the rods into the back cast.  The phrase serves as a mnemonic device to aid in achieving the proper rhythm and timing of the movement.

They then cast forward, accelerating and then stopping and abruptly releasing their lines with no flick of the wrist to create a balletic stream of lines dancing and arching through the air and into the water.

Emily Wixted, who is interested in creative writing, got her line caught in nearby trees and shrubs, but after moving a few steps away from the foliage she gracefully sent her line soaring.

But casting isn’t the only thing Wixted likes about the class. 

She enjoys the syllabus filled with “water and fishing” literature: Dame Julianna Berners’ Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle; Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Rural Life; Norman F. MacLean’s A River Runs Through It; and Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation.

These literary classics provide access into the metaphysical, spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the sport, Orlock said.

The seminar has become a popular offering over the past several years and has grown from a handful of students in its first year to full enrollment of 15 students across the disciplines, according to English professor Bill Siebenschuh, a fishing enthusiast who stopped to observe the students practice the sport.

He added, “As I remember it, the first students John had in this course took a while to get comfortable with a fly rod. This year’s kids seem to be taking to it pretty quickly. A couple that I watched were casting surprisingly well for the first time out.”

But the seminar is more than fishing and reading.  Ashley Seitz Kramer, the course’s writing instructor, guides the students toward mastering the art of casting their thoughts into words for an effective research paper as well as other writing assignments.

Arjun Appadurai.

How has globalism changed from the time when camel caravans moved goods and cultures from one continent to another?

That’s the question Case Western Reserve University Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities hopes to answer during its yearlong discussion on “Globalism and Its Origins.”

The discussion launches with Arjun Appadurai, the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University, as he delivers the keynote address during the 2010 Humanities Week celebration. 

He will set the stage for the yearlong event by arguing that globalism has roots that stretch back in time. His free public talk, How New is Globalism: Reflections on the History of the Present begins at 6 p.m. Sept. 30, in the Wolstein Auditorium, 2103 Cornell Road.

The contemporary social-cultural anthropologist is among the visionaries who framed the concept of what is known as globalism. He will discuss the extent to which the world has always been a place of faraway locations and distant times. 

Additionally, he’ll assert the need for a new approach to the study of globalism—one that moves away from single factors, forces and causes and focuses instead on the idea that large-scale connectivity saturates the practices of everyday life.

Appadurai is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006, Duke University Press) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996, University of Minnesota Press; 1997, Oxford University Press, Delhi). 

He is one of the founders of the Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization, a consortium of institutions in various parts of the world devoted to the study of global politics and culture.

For information or reservations, go online or contact Maggie Kaminski at the Baker-Nord Center at 216-368-2242 or email.

  The  Obama administration has made huge grants to create new testing formats and designs that  will link k-12 statewide tests to college standards. This is the second phase of the common core standards movement that will spread to 44 states. These assessments will start from college readiness and work back to the elementary grades.

The Department of Education announced awards of some $330 million to two state coalitions – representing 44 states and the District of Columbia – for the design of new assessment systems aligned to the common-core standards. The grant money will be divided almost equally between the two applicants in the competition, which is part of Race to the Top. A third group of 12 states that applied for a smaller, $30 million pot under a separate but related competition to support specific exams at the high school level, failed to win an award

A new report alleges that most colleges lack a clear conception of general education-literature, composition, advanced foreign languages, math, science etc. Instead colleges offer a smorgasbord of disconnected and incoherent course requirements- see http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com

I am concerned that there is no general education program in college for secondary schools to align their curriculum with. AP helps with curriculum alignment for the top students, but there is nothing for the rest of the students.

With the exception of the common core curriculum program, there are no major efforts to provide curricular coherence and sequencing between the senior year and postsecondary education, and the role of the senior year in high school as a forum for general education is rarely discussed. Nor has anyone proposed a conception of liberal education that relates the academic content of the secondary schools to the first two years of college. Instead, students face an “eclectic academic muddle in Grades 10–14” (Orrill, 2000) until they select a college major. In Ernest Boyer’s metaphor, postsecondary general education is the “spare room” of the university, “the domain of no one in particular” whose many functions make it useless for any one purpose (Boyer and Levine, 1981). The functional “rooms,” those inhabited by faculty, are the departmental majors.

When attention is paid to general education, two contending theories predominate. One holds that the purpose of general education is to prepare students for a specialized major; the other, that the purpose of general education serves as an antidote to specialization, vocationalism, and majors. Clark (1993) hoped that somehow the specialized interests of the faculty could be arranged in interdisciplinary forms that would provide a framework for a coherent general education, but there is little evidence that this is happening.

In sum, the high school curriculum is unmoored from the freshman and sophomore college curriculum and from any continuous vision of liberal education. Policymakers for the secondary and postsecondary schools work in separate orbits that rarely interact, and the policy focus for K–16 has been more concerned with access to postsecondary education than with the academic preparation needed to complete a postsecondary degree or certificate. Access, rather than preparation, is also the theme of many of the professionals who mediate between the high schools and the colleges: high school counselors, college recruiters, and college admissions and financial aid officers.