Holland City News, Volume 76, Number 8: February 20, 1947

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1947/1007/thumbnail.jp

Recent advances in petri nets and concurrency

CEUR Workshop Proceeding

Troubling a Troubled Role: A Poststructurally Inflected Autobiographical Inquiry Into “Literacy Specialist”

In the United States, Literacy Professional roles are becoming increasingly popular in public middle and high schools. Presumed to impact student achievement in literacy as well as impact teachers’ continued professional learning and growth through job-embedded experiences, the role is increasingly utilized towards the adoption of policies, practices, and curriculums. As such, literacy professionals are increasingly positioned as change agents. As it is shaped by audit culture, neoliberal ideology, and accountability/standardization rhetoric, considerations of professional subjectivities of literacy professionals who are bombarded with impossibilities of working toward those neoliberal, measurable outcomes of “more efficient and effective” are difficult to find in the current body of literature. Thus, the professional identities and subjectivities of ‘Literacy Specialist’ is a fruitful site for investigation. Feminist poststructural theories of discourse, power, identity, and subjectivity are utilized to re/view possible ways knowledge, “truth,” and subjects are produced in language and cultural practices. Since poststructural theories foreground our awareness of structuring impulses and their relation to the social order, this research seeks to explore my own interpretations of “lived experiences” in a literacy specialist role in order to work the tensions by analyzing constructions of self historically and contextually within the role. To do so, poststructurally influenced autobiographical modes of inquiry were utilized. Such versions of autobiography not only challenge Enlightenment assumptions about autobiography as a full and “accurate” representation of a “self,” but also allow for an exploration of my own subjectivities within the discursive regimes in which the role of “literacy specialist” typically operates. This research is situated within a perspective that pushes back on assumptions about research and methodology which give the notion of findings purchase. Rather, I offer “unconclusions” regarding the ways structures of Response to Intervention, literacy practices, and literacy curriculum operate through dominant discourses to position both literacy professionals and students. Tracing discourses in such a way opens spaces to re/view processes of power/knowledge relations at work. Further, by tracing those discourses through to the subjectivities of teachers and students, spaces are opened to ask questions about literacy and literacy practices that have perhaps not previously been considered

Chimpanzee material culture: implications for human evolution

The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Pongidae) among all other living species, is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor less than five million years ago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools. Of the primates, and even of the other Great Apes, they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users. Chimpanzees meet the criteria of working definitions of culture as originally devised for human beings in socio-cultural anthropology. They show sex differences in using tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees and human societies living by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow, at least for food-getting. Different communities of chimpanzees have different tool-kits, and not all of this regional and local variation can be explained by the varied physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely customs based on non-functionally derived and symbolically encoded traditions. Chimpanzees serve as heuristic, referential models for the reconstruction of cultural evolution in apes and humans from an ancestral hominoid. However, chimpanzees are not humans, and key differences exist between them, though many of these apparent contrasts remain to be explored empirically and theoretically

The Annals of Iowa, Spring 2009, Vol. 68, no. 2

A quarterly journal of Iowa authors and their works produced by State Historical Society of Iowa

Where Have All the Robins Gone? Power, Discourse, and the Closing of Robbinsdale High School

This descriptive historical case study, presented as a sort of means of coming to terms with the past, details a 1980 to 1982 declining-enrollment decision-making process which led to the closure of one of three high schools in the suburban, midwestern Robbinsdale Area Schools. Following the district’s expansion from a first-ring suburbia with small-town roots to include further westward second-ring additions, this school-closing dilemma provided fertile ground for a conflict pitting the old middle and blue collar classes on the district’s east side against the new middle and professional classes on its west side. History, tradition, community identity, and community bonds locked horns with modernity, as educational, cultural, and class issues, as well as administrative missteps, including participative democracy run amok, all intertwined during the year-long battle over which high school to close. Although all sides placed great faith in scientific, factual, and objective outlooks, it seemed impossible for these to calm the underlying forces. The concluding triumph of the new middle class over the old middle class through the unexpected, last-minute 1982 closure of the district’s flagship school, Robbinsdale High, brought with it a sense that an injustice had occurred, one based on power and privilege, leaving lasting scars on a community. An expansive literature review offers an historical overview of school consolidation, including rural consolidation, over the past 100 years, with specific attention to the management of declining enrollment in the late 20th century. The study incorporates this previous research on school consolidation, the views of 41 interview participants, as well as the critical theoretical perspectives of Habermas (1975), Foucault (1980), Apple (1990), Eagleton (1991), and Brookfield (2005), to inform and analyze this school-closure process. The story is portrayed as a social and critical history of struggle within a community, with particular focus on class interests, power, and the control of discourse. The study concludes that within school-consolidation decisions, leaders should reconsider the value of smallness, respect the limitations of technical rationality, balance business and efficiency models with social and human considerations of fairness and equity, and honor the sacredness of place, local culture, values, history, and tradition

Everyday Perseverance & Meaningful Toil: Mapping the (In)distinguishable Process of Recovery Post-hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, Louisiana

For nearly a century, anthropological scholarship on disaster has contributed to advancing emergency preparation and management, however examination focusing on survivors’ return and responses in the aftermath of catastrophe, specifically the ways in which residents work to recover—if at all—remains far from comprehensive, especially in urban, post-industrial settings. Following calamity, what remains? What is disturbed? What becomes reconstructed? Who repairs the tattered social fabric or restores the built environment? And how do these processes transpire? These questions summarize the research interests of this dissertation, which examines the place-making practices not of experts or administrators, but, rather, those enacted by (extra) ordinary community members of the Lower Ninth Ward post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Specifically, this investigation of place-making in the aftermath of disaster focuses on four main practices: residents-led tours, civic engagement, community establishments/ businesses, and commemorative events. Although these practices and the places residents’ make through these efforts entail ephemerality, I maintain that this toil is particularly meaningful in distinguishing how survivors confront loss, disorientation, and trauma while simultaneously cultivating healing in their lives, livelihoods, and landscape. The findings of this project include that the multiple and fragmentary practices of residents promote a return to the everyday in Katrina\u27s wake and these commingled ways of operating, reveal the adaptive and empowering response of collective autonomy. People\u27s sense of place is a well-studied theme by scholars from diverse disciplines, yet there is much to learn from analyzing this critical dimension of the human condition within a post-disaster context. In gathering data with both long-established ethnographic techniques (prolonged ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation) and innovative, geographic information systems (GIS), this research makes a distinct contribution to the anthropological knowledge and literature focused on sociocultural and spatiotemporal transformation following disasters. This cross-disciplinary approach serves as a novel means for anthropologists to holistically explore the intertwining dynamics involved when previously familiar aspects of life become significantly disrupted including, but are not limited to: environmental, linguistic, historic, political, spiritual, and symbolic. Consideration of these aspects of the lives of those living in the wake of disaster illuminates complexity of remaking home while legitimizing the desire to return to it – especially urgent matters in this era of global climate change

A wild web: The tangled history of attitudes toward wildlife in a dynamic New England culture, 1945--1985

Attitudes toward wildlife are considerably more complex than one might suspect. This dissertation started with a hypothesis that population growth would correlate with increasing negative attitudes toward wildlife, but historical evidence only partially supports this hypothesis. Information about the frequency and types of wildlife references appearing in newspapers between 1945 and 1985 was gathered from a systematic sampling of six New Hampshire newspapers that represented towns with differing growth trends. While analysis of quantitative data minimized any correlation between growth and negative attitudes, qualitative data from newspaper articles, archival sources, government reports, books and articles, and other sources provided evidence that growth-related changes did have some effect on attitudes toward wildlife. Therefore, this research evolved to look more carefully at the effects of growth, and to identify what additional cultural elements played a role in shaping attitudes toward wildlife. Elements identified and explored include: growth, changes in agriculture, environmentalism, trends in outdoor recreation, and relationships with domestic companion animals. The general finding was that the history of local attitudes toward wildlife is a complicated web of intersecting cultural elements that have affected attitudes in diverse ways