College of Education and Health Professions to Honor Faculty, Staff Members

This year’s faculty award winners:

Larry Aslin, advising. Aslin, an instructor of communication disorders, directs the college’s Speech and Hearing Clinic, in which graduate students conduct evaluation and treatment sessions under the supervision of licensed/certified audiologists and speech-language pathologists on the program faculty and staff. Aslin has taken over all undergraduate advising in the program to reduce the load for others. He developed advising materials, established an open-door policy for students, strengthened ties with the college’s advising unit, attended numerous advising workshops, set up the evaluation process for admission to the program, volunteered to teach the First Year Experience course for freshmen and developed the program’s eight-semester plan. This spring, he also won the University of Arkansas Outstanding Advisor Award for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Aslin is a licensed speech-language pathologist with the state of Arkansas and a member of the Arkansas Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Robert Costrell, research. Costrell holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in Education Accountability in the college’s department of education reform. The award honors his influential work on teacher pension policy. This work, with Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri, analyzes the incentives to work or retire embedded in the pattern of pension wealth accrual. The work, published in Education Next, for general readers, and Education Finance and Policy, for an academic audience, helped frame a recent national conference on teacher pension policy, co-organized by Costrell and hosted by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University. Costrell is guest editor for a forthcoming special journal issue for the conference papers. He is co-principal investigator of a $250,000 grant that helped fund the conference and his further research, including empirical analysis of the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System.

Prior to joining the college’s faculty in 2006, Costrell spent 21 years at the University of Massachusetts and seven years serving in major policy roles for three governors of Massachusetts. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.

Inza Fort, service. A professor of kinesiology, Fort’s record of service and leadership spans the university, the college and her department. She is currently chairing the university’s Faculty Senate and previously served as chair of the Campus Faculty and co-director of the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center. She is a member of the University of Arkansas Teaching Academy, whose members provide a variety of services to the teaching mission of the university. Fort has served at various times as interim director of the Human Performance Lab; undergraduate coordinator for the department of health science, kinesiology, recreation and dance; a Chancellor’s Lecturer; and curriculum director for the Center for Interactive Technology. She serves on more than 20 committees, chairing several, and also exemplifies the university’s priority of “students first,” serving on numerous honors theses, master and doctoral committees and writing hundreds of letters of support for students each year.

Fort holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Auburn University, another master’s degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a doctoral degree from the University of Arkansas.

Barbara Gartin, career. Gartin, a professor of special education, joined the faculty in 1989. She has co-authored three books: one on special education law, one concerning differentiation of instruction and one about developing professional and family partnerships. She has authored or co-authored more than 50 publications and made in excess of 100 presentations, sessions or workshops at international, national, regional and state conferences. Gartin has also been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator in grants totaling about $200,000. She has served as an officer in the Arkansas Council for Exceptional Children, Arkansas Subdivision on Mental Retardation, Arkansas Association on Mental Retardation, Region V Board of the Association on Mental Retardation, and twice as president of the International Division on Education in the American Association on Mental Retardation. She is currently the president of the Division on Developmental Disabilities. Gartin has received numerous honors and awards including her selection as fellow in the American Association on Mental Retardation in 2001. This year, she received the Burton Blatt Humanitarian Award from the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division on Developmental Disabilities.

Gartin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Marshall University and a doctoral degree from the University of Georgia.

Paul Hewitt, teaching. Hewitt is an assistant professor of educational leadership. He came to the University of Arkansas two years ago after completing a 35-year career in public education as a teacher, dean of students, assistant principal, principal and superintendent. The nomination for Hewitt described an innovative method he used to bring reality into his class that covered school personnel administration and supervision. His graduate students conducted a mock teacher hiring process in which they developed a list of qualities and characteristics of exemplary teachers, drafted interview questions designed to garner the information they needed for the hiring decision, developed an evaluation format and planned the structure of the interview. Hewitt took this traditional exercise a step further by working with other faculty in the college to provide elementary and secondary education students to play the part of job candidates, a process that had the additional benefit of helping these students prepare for real job interviews in their near future. Hewitt also invited people employed locally as school administrators to provide feedback to his students, resulting in an opportunity to mesh theory and practice into a reality-based activity.

Hewitt served as a superintendent for 17 years. In 1985, Hewitt was named to the Executive Educator 100, and in 1999 he received the Charlie Binderup Award from the California Small School Districts Association as Superintendent of the Year. He earned a bachelor’s degree from San Jose State University, master’s degrees from California State University at Los Angeles and Loyola-Marymount University and a doctorate from University of the Pacific.

John Pijanowski, Rising STAR (service, teaching, advising and research) for the best all-around new faculty member. Pijanowski is finishing his second year as an assistant professor of educational leadership. He was recently invited to write a book, Professional Responsibility and Ethics for Educators, due out in the late spring of 2010. His primary research interest is in ethics and school finance. During his career here and at North Carolina State University and Cornell University, he has authored or co-authored more than 25 publications, made 15 presentations at international and national conferences and directed grants totaling more than $1.5 million.

Pijanowski formerly worked with K-12 students as a teacher, school principal and regional summer school superintendent serving 21 school districts. As a college administrator, Pijanowski created and launched a partnership with 31 high schools to design and deliver teacher and staff development, dual credit programming, college transition activities and more than 100 online courses for high school students. During his tenure, this public school partnership program grew to become the largest and most comprehensive effort of its kind in the state of New York and was recognized nationally as an exemplary program. Pijanowski earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Cornell University.

Gary Ritter, STAR (service, teaching, advising and research) given to the outstanding all-around faculty member. Ritter holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in Education Policy in the college’s department of education reform. The nomination for Ritter described him as excelling in all four areas. In 2008, Ritter taught five courses, advised several public policy students and worked on several dissertation committees. In addition, he managed various statewide and national grant-funded research projects while co-authoring three refereed articles, including a methodologically innovative article on No Child Left Behind in The American Review of Public Administration, one of the top three public administration journals. He has two high-prestige publications forthcoming in 2009, a chapter in a Brookings Institution book and a refereed article in the Review of Educational Research. Through the Office for Education Policy in the College of Education and Health Professions, which he directs, Ritter engages in a great deal of service activities for the wider policy community. The office has issued numerous reports and policy briefs of use to Arkansas policymakers, sponsored a Little Rock conference on adequacy, and helped design, implement and evaluate teacher merit pay plans for two school districts and one charter school.

Ritter earned a bachelor’s degree from John Carroll University, a master’s degree from the University of Manchester and another master’s degree and a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

This year’s staff winners:

• Shannan Freeman, a secretary in the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing, won the award for service to students.
• Stephanie Gragg, a secretary in the Boyer Center for Student Services, won the dean’s choice award.
• Whitney Lee, an administrative assistant in the curriculum and instruction department, won the award for best new employee.
• Josh Raney, an administrative office supervisor in the department of rehabilitation, human resources and communication disorders, won the award for service to faculty.

“We are also very proud of our staff members who provide a high level of service to our students and our faculty members,” Greenwood said. “Many of them are the first or most frequent point of contact with students, and they do an excellent job of assisting students. The faculty join me in thanking them for their dedication.”