Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Lee R. Skabelund / College and university campuses have the potential to organize buildings, outdoor spaces, pedestrian corridors, roadways, parking lots, and infrastructure all within one cohesive and unified place. Dynamic but unified spaces are typically the result of thoughtful architecture, landscape architecture, and years of planning. Recognizable design styles, material use, and plant palettes work together to create something bigger than simply a collection of buildings, transportation corridors, and outdoor spaces. Each building, group of buildings, series of spaces, transportation feature, and infrastructural component needs to be designed and implemented with the entire campus in mind to be truly successful. When planned correctly, a unified campus can harbor innovation, provide inspiration, and initiate interaction. Stouffer Place Apartments has evolved into a secluded housing development within the midst of the busy University of Kansas (KU) campus. Apartments are only available to graduate students, international students, students with families, non-traditional students, and post-doctoral researchers. Stouffer Place has maintained a quiet and peaceful atmosphere at the corner of 19th and Iowa in Lawrence, Kansas since 1957. Like so many of the university housing developments built after World War II, Stouffer Place is full of aging infrastructure, providing the basis for a discussion of a new or renovated development on the site (Casey-Powell 1999, 86). Not only are the aging Stouffer Place buildings an eyesore to many people in the community, but their existing arrangement limits community interaction and shared space. Additionally, many of the Stouffer Place apartment buildings are near the end of their lifetime, but they can they be recycled, reused, and deconstructed to create dynamic spaces for the residents. In short, Stouffer Place can be redeveloped to create a new model of affordable, sustainable, and self-sufficient on-campus apartments that attract and retain students as well as create a higher quality of life. With the growing trend of sustainable building practices, KU’s Department of Student Housing (DSH) has an immense opportunity to transform this student community into a model for other universities nationwide. By implementing a design strategy that successfully reuses and phases out the existing built infrastructure of the site, a place that facilitates sustainable living and community interaction will be created. Through this project, the culture and identity of Stouffer Place is revealed and catalyzed, using the missions of KU and DSH to create a plan that supports, sustains, and creates.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture / Laurence A. Clement, Jr. / Restorative landscapes are a growing trend within health care environments and can have a lasting impact on people if applied within other settings, particularly higher education campuses. Their design captures the many healing qualities of nature that humans are instinctively attracted to (Heerwagen, 2011). Within restorative landscapes, people have been historically found to experience relief of stress, improved morale, and improved overall well-being (Barnes et al., 1999). While campus planning standards do consider the outdoor environment as an extension of the classroom, higher education campuses can do more to utilize the cognitive benefits of nature for students, faculty and staff. This project explores principles and theories of restorative landscape design, empirical psychological research, and campus design to develop a framework that facilitates the creation of restorative campus spaces on higher education campuses. In partnership with the Office of Design and Construction Management at the University of Kansas, the framework was subsequently applied through the design of the landscape for the Center for Design Research on the KU campus. In the context of current campus planning challenges, restorative landscape design is a potentially valuable strategy in strengthening the beneficial roles and efficacy of the campus landscape. This design project explores its application to envision places within a higher education campus that, along with other benefits, relieve stress for students, faculty and staff.

The Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (IOM, 2003) proposed strategies for higher education leaders and faculty to transform their institutions in ways that address the healthcare problems. This study provides higher education leaders and faculty with empirical data about the processes of change involved to implement the core competency of healthcare informatics. I chose the core competency of health care informatics as a base from which to conduct semi-structured interviews with faculty and college leaders at three schools of nursing intending to capture their stories about how healthcare informatics has been implemented, what strategies were used, and why they were selected. All three nursing schools used patient case scenarios loaded into electronic health records in their computerized human simulation laboratories. Participants' at all three nursing programs reported increased use of the pedagogical approaches of active learning and problem-based learning in these simulation labs. These approaches encourage greater faculty-student and student-to-student interaction, engender more self-directed learning, and do a better job of providing students with a process for integrating previous learning. University of Kansas and Large State University Schools of Nursing demonstrated results that substantiate the viability of the Mobile Model for Transformational Change. One school used almost all the suggested methods and achieved transformation; the other, which used some of the methods, was not transformed. I suggest the model would benefit from specific ways of detecting the breadth in the application of the change markers and from the addition of strategies for creating a breadth of intensity to the change processes. The components of the model relating to the structural and cultural markers of change need to be further developed to focus on the breadth of change. Finally, I suggest the Mobile Model needs greater emphasis on and clarification of the role and nature of intentionality in the change process, as well as a greater focus on the relationship between the core strategies, support strategies, and the breadth of change. The intent of college leaders is important, in part because without it the breadth of change required for transformational change is not likely to be achieved.

No description available.