The Accounting EducatorThe Newsletter of the Teaching and Curriculum Section
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A Message from the ChairDear T&C Section Members: I wanted to tell you about this year's activities. Some wonderful new initiatives began, and some recent ones have continued. First, we established a Distinguished Service Award for individuals in recognition of notable contributions to accounting education, research and practice and in honor of outstanding service to educators and the Teaching and Curriculum Section. We did not intend this award to occur annually; rather only when the award committee feels it is appropriate. We will give the award at the August 2002 Annual Meeting. Second, in an effort to encourage new faculty members to conduct Scholarship in accounting education we established a $500 Outstanding Research award specifically for assistant professors. Each year a T&C Committee will review the articles published in the accounting education journals during the previous year and determine whether one is worthy of an award. This year the committee selected Carolyn Strand's article "Using the Team-Learning Model in a Managerial Accounting Class: An Experiment in Cooperative Learning" with Kathryn Lancaster. We also continued our initiative to give a $250 award to the best accounting education manuscript presented in each region. Our Regional Directors selected the recipient from among the manuscripts the Director and the reviewers selected for presentation at the regional meeting. This year we were happy to make the awards at all seven regional meetings. The list of winners appeared in the last T&C newsletter. In addition, we began efforts to host a reception for T&C members at each region. The Midwest Region, under the Direction of Barbara Eide and Bonnie Klamm, held an ice cream social after the Region's reception on Friday night. We hope we can duplicate their success at other regions next year. We also continued the process of naming associate directors to work each year with the Director to ease the transition from one year to the next. That process is solidly in place. We also had quite a few committees hard at work this year. You can find their interim reports in the last newsletter and final reports in this newsletter. Jeff McMillan did a terrific job running the Program Committee for paper presentations at the Annual Meeting. With the changeover to electronic submissions, Jeffrey had a new and challenging experience. Thank you, Jeff, for all your hard work. We had established a Pre-Meeting Seminar Committee (Richard Ott and Julia Karcher, chairs) to recommend interesting topics for CPE sessions before the annual meeting. They have done so and I appreciate their efforts. The Research Committee (Dennis Bline, chair) has made some interesting contributions to the "Have you seen" column of the newsletter and have some worthwhile projects underway. The Pedagogy Committee (Susan Wolcott, Chair) decided to survey accounting administrators about the sources they use to generate educational objectives, including the AICPA Core Competency Framework. The results of their work should be available shortly. They plan to present their findings at regional meetings, the annual meetings and in a journal. The Assessment Committee (Thomas Calderon and Brian Patrick Green, chairs) established best practices criteria and surveyed accounting administrators. They plan to prepare a monograph for distribution to T&C members and other interested parties. So, you can see that we have some interesting materials we will have available for us in the near future. Recently we sent out an announcement about our "New Faculty Handbook." We received a great response and hope to distribute copies at the annual meeting and by mail shortly. We owe a great deal of credit to Lynn Griffin for her initial efforts and to Don Wygal for his tremendous work in bringing that handbook to completion. The Section also established a new website this past fall. We look forward to Gail Cook's assistance as our new webmaster in keeping the website up to date on a frequent basis. The website and email distributions are increasingly becoming our primary vehicles for communicating with our section members. In closing, I know Dasaratha Rama, Bill Cummings, and Roselyn Morris join me in welcoming Frank Buckless as the new member of our Executive Committee. We all look forward to a successful year. Sincerely, |