One change, different effects: the impacts of reducing clerkship length

Background Medical school curricula are constantly evolving and change has potential positive and negative effects. At East Tennessee State University Quillen College of Medicine, a broader understanding of the effects of a curriculum change (reduction in clerkship length for one transitional year) was explored. Methods A broad, system-wide evaluation was used to evaluate impacts on all stakeholders. Curriculum management data, including qualitative and quantitative data and short-term and follow-up perspectives of stakeholders, were used for evaluation. Results Students evaluated the change positively. Academic performance in the transitional year was similar to the prior year. Differences in students’ clerkship evaluations were not statistically significant. Clerkship directors were concerned that students’ clinical experience suffered and noted that implementing changes was time consuming but recognized the benefits for students. Administrators dedicated a significant amount of time to planning the transitional year; however, the additional weeks at the beginning of fourth year made the scheduling process easier. Conclusion This article demonstrates an overall positive result with this tool for curriculum change but also indicates the impacts differed across stakeholders. Knowledge gained from this experience can help other schools successfully anticipate challenges and prepare for a variety of outcomes in implementing necessary curriculum change.

Jo Carson

Playwright, fiction writer, poet, and horsewoman Jo Carson was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, where she lived almost all her life. She became interested in theater while studying at East Tennessee State University, where she earned degrees in theater and communications. Early in her career, Carson worked for Broadside Television, a Johnson City cable series featuring locally made documentaries about the history and folklife of northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and western North Carolina. From 1972 to 1992, she worked for the Johnson City–based Road Company, a professional touring theater company for which she wrote two plays and performed in many. Carson frequently took her immediate surroundings and their history as her subject....

Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for the Future

In this chapter, we explore how our team of professors at East Tennessee State University integrated computational thinking into elementary education courses for pre-service teachers. We lean on current research to understand the definition, purpose, and culture surrounding computational thinking and consider how it may develop students' analytic skills and critical. Because of our particular context, we are interested in the play of gender and socioeconomic status in the development of technological and computational abilities. We share ideas we experimented with in Science and English language arts pre-service methods courses, as well as faculty and pre-service teacher perspectives on the developing experience.

“It’s My Role and I’ll Cry if I Want To”: An All-Female Hamlet Claims Non-Gender Production Space

A review of the East Tennessee State University Department of Theatre & Dance production of Hamlet.

Isabel GÓMEZ SOBRINO, «Jesse Graves, cuatro poemas inéditos»

Los cuatro poemas inéditos presentados a continuación pertenecen al poeta norteamericano Jesse Graves. Jesse Graves nació en Knoxville, Tennessee en 1973. Pasó su infancia en Sharps Chapel, lugar que cobrará gran importancia en el paisaje retratado en muchos de sus poemas. Recibió su doctorado en la Universidad de Tennessee y fue lector en la Universidad de Nueva Orleans durante un año. Actualmente imparte clases de literatura y creación literaria en East Tennessee State University donde hemos colaborado juntos en un recital bilingüe sobre su poesía en nuestro centro de enseñanza. Él mismo me ha proporcionado estos poemas que he traducido para su difusión internacional puesto que su voz está adquiriendo cada vez más renombre en los círculos intelectuales norteamericanos. La poesía de Jesse Graves ha sido reconocida a lo largo de su carrera con varios premios. En el 2014 recibió el Phillip H. Freund Award de escritura creativa de la Universidad de Cornell. En el 2015 la organización Fellowship of Southern Writers le concedió el James Still Award en su apartado denominado Writing about the Appalachian South (Escritura sobre el Sur de los Apalaches). Su primer libro de poemas, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine (2011), ganó el premio Weatherford Award in Poetry otorgado por el Berea College y el reconocimiento como Libro del Año por la Asociación de Escritores de los Apalaches. Su segundo libro, Basin Ghosts (2014), también recibió el premio Weatherford Award in Poetry en el 2015. En la poesía de estos dos libros el paisaje es de gran importancia, ya sea el del sur de los EE. UU., así como otros lugares de la geografía norteamericana. El paisaje se presenta en diálogo con recuerdos del pasado pero sin obviar emociones más personales que rezuman en los poemas. En el proceso traducción se ha intentado mantener el tono de cada poema original. Esto se puede observar en la diferencia entre el tono un tanto trivial con el que comienza el poema «Deuda» y la intensidad de «Alepo» o la carga emocional en «Recuerdo de un niño a quien nunca conocí» y la universalidad poética de «Hombre maldiciendo la noche». Así bien, en las presentes traducciones, se ha mantenido la voz poética original del autor ajustándonos a la lengua en traducción, en este caso, el español. Todos los poemas aquí traducidos son inéditos. En la bibliografía se pueden consultar los datos de libros de poemas publicados por Jesse Graves.

Policy Matters: Development of a Legislative Advocacy Week to Engage Student Pharmacists in Policy Discussions

Policy and advocacy discussions and activities are generally topics that student pharmacists are less excited to engage in during their PharmD curriculum. These can also be challenging to integrate within a curriculum in a meaningful, impactful, and engaging manner. At a college of pharmacy, two student organization chapters (American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists and National Community Pharmacists Association) partnered together to host a Legislative Advocacy Week centered on the primary elections for the 2016 presidential race. This Note discusses the conceptualization, planning, events, impact, and analysis of this week. Conflict of Interest At the time of this activity, Dr. Mospan was a faculty member at East Tennessee State University Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy. Type: Note