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Liberal
Studies at St Joseph College
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*** St Joseph College has been serving returning and nontraditional students since
1932.
*** St Joseph has strong traditions, small classes, and a
sense of value, but also flexibility and progress.
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Liberal Studies is a major for students who wish to design their
own interdisciplinary or focused major, or . Liberal
Studies is a major for students who wish to pursue a wide range of courses in a traditional liberal arts manner, with an interdiscplinary
philosophy, or .
Liberal Studies is a major for students who have taken enough courses to be near graduation, with a well-balanced liberal
arts range, but have not found or completed a major.
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Welcome ! Here I am as
a teacher. Hi- I'm Rick Rayfield. I
have taught for over fiften years at St Joseph College, usually commuting one day a week from Vermont to West Hartford CT.
I think it's a great school- interesting students, eager colleagues, and a can-do atmosphere. My college and graduate
training was at the University of Chicago. My pre-Chicago experiences
include St Bede Academy, Aurora College and St Dominic College, all Catholic rooted. I spent one summer in Greece and Turkey with a Northern Illinois University program studying
Greek literature and culture, and New Testament. My undergraduate degree was an interdisciplinary porgram in philosophy
and psychology, housed in the New Collegeiate Division. My PhD is in Biopsychology from The University of Chicago. Among
my teachers were Al Rechtschaffen who developed the definitions of sleep stages based on EEG, Pete and Lori Grossman who pioneered
work in neurotransmitter coding of feeding and drinking, Martha McClintock who discovered human menstrual synchrony,
Bob Schuster who became the head of NIDA and later of the WHO drug programs, Elsie Pinkston who was an early proponent of
operant training by parents in social work settings, Eugene Gendlin who was a colleague of Carl Rogers and developed data-based
assessment of "touchy-feely" psychotherapies, inclduing his "focusing" method, Stuart Kauffman who is
a leader in complexity research, Lou Seiden who was a founder of modern psychopharmacology, Hazel Murphy who demonstrated
brain plasticity in adult cats as well as young cat, dogs, rabbit, and monkeys, Eckhard Hess who was a colleague of
Konrad Lorenz and among a wide variety of research interests teased out the factors in egg hatching synchrony and was a founder
of pupillometry, and my doctoral advisor Israel Goldiamond, known as an operant purist, with applications ranging from
stuttering to bulimia and a crusader in favor of constructional rather than pathological approaches to treating behavior problems. I studied for a certificate in order to teach human sexuality when Wardell Pomeroy (second author
of both Kinsey studies) was the Dean and one of our teachers at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
I took art history and studio courses while a faculty member at Roosevelt University. I am a Chautauquan one week each
summer. Since 1979, I have taught at Norwich University, Trinity College, and Roosevelt University
(where I had tenure). I have done research in visual system and taste in cats, treatment with stutterers and heroin
addicts, and operated pigeon and rat labs. My experience includes work with autistic children, working for Matt Israel to
develop accepable methods to punish self-injurious behavior, and providing complete control and data acquisition for operant
research at the UVM Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory. I developed systems used world-wide for measuring maximum oxgen
uptake ( VO2 max) in the early days of personal computers and also connected breathing valves and gas handling with
a mass spectrometer for evaluating different therapies for alleviating COPD and asthma. I teach in the Psychology Department at St Jospeh College-
History and Systems, Human Development, Human Sexuality, Psychology of Fear, Psychology of Art, and Behavior Analysis.
I am the program director for the Liberal Studies progam, which was envisioned as an
on-line degree program but never had enough courses to fly that way. I teach
the core course in liberal studies LBST120, advise students, and teach the final course, LBST499. For about twenty years, I have been a parent volunteer
teaching nature and ecology in the Fayston Elementary School. The Four Winds Nature Institute trains the parents and other
comunity volunteers, and then the parents come into the classroom, coordinating with the teachers there. The five year rotating
curriculum is keyed to Vermont science standards, but is notable for getting the students outside for observations of the
classroom material. My other work includes
owning a book shop and video rental store, building a house, programming computers and developing operant equipment for research
labs, Freemasons, and art history. I sing in my church choir, the local community chorus, and as a regular member of
the chorus in the Green Mountain Opera Festival. My wife is a psychiatrist; I have four daughters born from 1985
to 2005. This web site was started to communicate to students,
friends, and family about my recovery from a stroke in 2005 (see tab). Now I use it to stash all sorts of information
where people (like me) can have easy access to it. Rick
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LINKS
MainSt JosephCollege web site. Welcome from the President Blackboard, the platform used for most courses. Sign in as student, with password student. Click on
the sample course to help you decide if on-line learning will work for you. http://bb.sjc.edu Turnitin organizes
students' papers, and makes sure they are in a format which the instructor can access and read from any computer. It
also does plagiarism checks. Ten Commandments is my essay, based on 35 years working with computers,
on how to use them more efficiently. Get more work done for less effort by setting up your screen and keyboard correctly
etc See
Computer Wisdom tab at left
Lectures
from my Psychology of Fear course. Much of life is oriented toward
getting what we want. But fear is the ubiquitous multi-faceted emotion which accompanies all we do to avoid and to escape
things we do do not want. The weekly theme and lectures start with the F sound- Forest and Farm Fear, Phobias, Final
Fear, Fantasy Fear, Physiology of Fear, Foreign Fear, Federal Fear, etc. The course was readings, lectures, discussions,
and short papers. I start with First Fears -about how we learn basic fears. Lecture 2 Fun Fear has stills
from horror movies in class we watch excerpts. See tab at left for rough drafts of the
lectures.
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Major Freedom through Hybrids . St
Joseph College has three main divisions: . The Women's College is mostly daytime classes
for live-on-campus and commuter students. . The Weekend program for Adult Learners
is mostly evening and weekend courses. . The Graduate School offer Master's degree
programs. . We say that Liberal Studies gives you Major Freedom. The three
kinds of hybrids provide you with flexibility and choice. . A. You can take courses
on-line, or you can take classroom courses on campus. . B. Many courses are
hybrids of teaching technology- Blackboard-based, video, PSI, collaborative, backyard laboratory, and many
more. . C. Liberal study is multidisciplinary. You choose your courses
from a wide range, making up you own major, or integrating many fields of knowledge into a coherent education to help
you in your professional, academic, and personal worlds. Four Winds Nature Institute Four Winds professional
staff members train parents. Parents go into the elementary school classroom and teach a five-year revolving curriculum
on nature and ecology. I have been a parent volunteer in this program at the Fayston Elementary School for about twenty
years. Fayston School has scored as high as fifth in all New England on Science NECAPS, in part due to the Four Winds
program.
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Reason and Rhetoric: Bickering for Humanity As part of LBST120 Foundations
Course, students will watch seven feature films. All are great films, award winners, great acting, faculty favorites.
The primary focus of the films is how persuasive arguments are constructed, flow, and resolve. Rhetoric is classically the
first Liberal Art. The secondary theme is modern scientific debate- evolution, genes, cosmology. (Liberal arts have outgrown
rhetoric, grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.) LBST120 in an on-line course.
Students must borrow, buy, or rent these films. I can copies to lend if necessary. I will screen the films on-campus
for students and course visitors if requested. Rick Rayfield, Instructor Inherit
the Wind(1960) 128 mins.
Courtroom giants Darrow vs Bryan.
Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly .
Great book, great play, great film.
Evolution on trial while the country watches.
Twelve Angry Men (1957) 96
mins
Ordinary citizens on a jury.
Henry Fonda and all-star cast directed by Sidney Lumet.
Everybody who sees this film gets pulled in,
and everyone is moved. What is justice?
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
108 mins
Family persuasion AA Katharine Hepburn,
Spencer Tracy, Sidney
Portier
Interracial love disrupts a well-educated liberal family.
Lion in WInter (1968) 135 mins
Royal family bickering AA Katharine Hepburn,
Peter O’Toole are King and queen with razor tongues
arguing over which son should succeed. Proof (2004) 99
mins
Campus furor on sanity & genius Gyneth Paltrow
Jake Gyllenham Anthony Hopkins
A mathematical proof needs checking and an author.
Rivetting. Copenhagen(2002) 117 mins
Nobel physicists argue the universe Tony Award winner
by Michael Frayn, Brilliant playwright (Noises Off)
imagines with clarity two geniuses and rivals, Bohr and Heisenberg, arguing
atomic politics and subatomic rules. Gattaca
(1997) 106 mins
Evidence of what is human in genetically twisted future
Ethan Hawke wants to be an astronaut,
but his hippie parents did not get their genes cleaned.
Contact Admissions, or Program Director Rick
Rayfield rrayfield@sjc.edu
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Download these files of interest
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