MADDIE STEPHENS
HONORS PORTFOLIO
HONORS CLASSES
Spring 2022
I decided to work with Dr. Deeds for an honors option contract through the second semester of Human Physiology. I really enjoyed the first semester and thought completing a project second semester would be worthwhile because I had a good grasp of the material, and it was one of my favorite classes. This was my first honors option class, and I decided to implement artwork into my class notes. Therefore, the artifact I chose from this class was my heart anatomy notes and some of the artwork that I used to learn from. Overall, I had a great experience, and I learned that artwork heps solidfy the material for me and see it in an easy-to-understand format, while forming a greater appreciation for the complexity of the human body.
Fall 2022
Due to being unable to fit honors lectures into my spring schedule, I opted to take another honors option course--this time with Dr. Derossett in the social sciences, specifically in Medical Sociology. For the first project in the class, we had to conduct a windshield survey, which involved choosing a neighborhood in Springfield that we were unfamiliar with and taking an assessment of the factors that we thought would impact healthcare, from the comfort of our car to simulate an outsider looking into that particular neighborhood and its way of life. This also included making note of the available healthcare resources and clinics, the appearance and behavior of the community, and the quality of supermarkets, sidewalks, recreational facilities, streets, and homes. I enjoyed the project so much that I decided I wanted to complete a comparative windshield survey for my honors contract project. This involved choosing a more affluent Springfield neighborhood--University Heights--as well as a more low income neighborhood, such as Doling Park and conducting windshield surveys in each. I found that University Heights inhabitants had better quality resources and better health outcomes than did the latter neighborhood, showing that people with lower socioeconomic status have worse health outcomes and that location affects quality of care. The presentation that I prepared over my findings of this study is my chosen artifact.
I once again was unable to fit in an honors lecture into my schedule, so I turned Christian Ethics with Dr. Browning into an honors option contract. We decided to do a book club together, and I presented my thoughts on the book, as well as its major themes at the spring 2023 Honors Symposium. For the book club, we read Don S. Browning's book Marriage and Modernization, which discussed how the modernizing world is bringing destruction to marriage and family structure. It also discussed how the problem of globalization, or how nations share culture and ideas with one another through war and trade has led to the current status of high divorce rates, cohabitation, familial separation, fatherlessness, and declining health. Though published in 2003, I felt that the book was eye-opening to these issues, as modernization and globalization has done nothing but increase the last two decades since the book has been published and is therefore still relevant to this world that worships technology and all of its up-and- coming innovations. I was first interested in this topic from my personal experience in a broken family and the first unit of Christian Ethics, in which we studied the changing structure of family in the 21st century and whether it should be celebrated or destroyed, with the hope of returning to a more nuclear family structure. Don Browning proposed an option in the middle, in that family structure should be redefined to account for an equal-regard marriage, in which spouses have mutual trust, love, and tasks in order to spare the human race and their health. For my artifact, I chose to include my Honors Symposium presentation.