Contract Course Form and Examples

Fall 2024 Contract Course Form: https://forms.office.com/r/4M3tfjzMD6

The online form requires you to log in with your CSU credentials.

If you have questions about the online form, please contact Dean Carnell at r.carnell@csuohio.edu.

 

Innovative Honors Contract Projects

Fall 2023

• A student in my Literary Analysis course with a keen interest in law and justice is working on a supplemental project exploring Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water.  Significant portions of that poetry collection are erasure poetry and collage poetry that draw from historical and legal documents.  The student is planning to explore “Declaration,” an erasure poem about the Middle Passage drawing upon fragments from that founding document. 

 

Summer 2023

• A student in my course on American Dystopian Literature was in training to be a teacher.  As it happened, this was an undergraduate/graduate course with a number of current teachers enrolled in graduate students.  Because education and government/school board control over education has become a source of contentious debate in recent years, the honors student conducted oral history interviews (anonymized by name and school) about pressures teachers are facing from local governments and dioceses in terms of their teaching.  The student wrote this up as a report, making links to instances of government control of education in the dystopian novels we read in the course.

 

Spring 2023

• Students performed numerical modeling for Thermal Analysis which can be very useful for research and industrial work in engineering.

 

• Even though our objectives was in line with the course, the projects were very creative. In ANT 304 Linguistic Anthropology, the student studied the history and the properties of Hawaiian, an endangered language. In LIN 341 Morphology and Syntax, the student studied the morphological and syntactic structure of Mohawk, a nearly extinct language. Both of those languages are understudied, particularly Mohawk, so the students made a significant contribution to those areas of study.

 

• My student wrote an entry for an online encyclopedia that is currently being created. She wrote about a critically neglected artist and thus had to do primary research. Her project was a tremendous contribution to art history, women's history, and Jewish studies. And she now has her first publication, as only a sophomore in college, which will help distinguish her as a young and successful scholar when she attempts to gain admission to a Ph.D. program, which is her ultimate goal.

 

• I have done a few honors projects that were successful. One student conducted a local area needs assessment to identify resources in the community for Children with intellectual disabilities, like autism. The course was HSC 410 and the course project was a clinical question, literature review, clinical practice guideline recommendations. This additional honor's contract needs assessment was a really great compliment to the overall approach to a project and outlined real world next steps to actually implement evidence based practice in local communities. 

 

• I had two honors students this semester. Their assignments involved preparation of essays on current controversial planning projects in the City of Cleveland (potential closure of Burke Lakefront Airport and options to connect downtown with its lakefront). In addition to the essays, they also developed PowerPoint summaries that they presented to the entire class

 

Fall 2022

• Student helped me write and hang the upcoming exhibition at the Galleries at CSU.

 

• The student worked with an idea in the social sciences, concerning the tendency of people to seek out and perceive information so it is consistent with what they already think, evaluated it with Democrats and Republicans, talking to people, and analyzed the results precisely. We talked about the idea between us and I gave her critical feedback about the paper -- nicely, of course -- and she took the feedback and made the paper so much better; this speaks to the importance of the faculty adviser and the student meeting, which we did.

 

• The class already had a great project in it, so to do a different one would have overburdened the student. So, I decided to have the student go deeper into the class project.

 

• The student was able to design DIY FM Radio. The Project was simulated using Matlab / Simulink / Simscape and build it to prove his concept. The project involved both hardware and software.

 

• The original assignment was a sexuality rights presentation on a current contentious political issue. She was then responsible for using this research to write and send an advocacy letter to a senator, representative, governor, etc. I believe she picked incarceration of sex workers.

 

• In one case, the student was enrolled in a GIS course (digital mapping). I suggested to him a lesson I hoped to include but had not prepared yet. The lesson was on digital globes (Google Earth). The student presented this lesson to the class. It provided a history of how Google Earth was created and implemented, and how it's managed with a short demo/lab on some of its features. I was very pleased with the project. So was he.

 

• In another case, I asked students to select professionals in the field related to their (Urban Affairs) major or their home community for informational interviews. I had to approve the professionals and provided students with an interview script if they didn't know what to ask about. Students recorded the meetings and prepared a guided reflection on the interview.  They seemed to like the experience and came back with great reflections on those talks.