My Superintendent Journey From Educator to Activist: An Autoethnography Across Three Decades

Superintendents rise to the highest level of professional educational leadership within local communities. National statistics show increasing turnover in that district-level position. Superintendents come and go, which means their accomplishments fade in time. Superintendents rarely tell their stories of successes, failures, pressures, expectations, challenges, or any experiences within their highly visible role. This gap shows a lack of access to superintendents’ perspectives, and that gap may affect current and aspiring superintendents’ potential. Given a two-century historical gap in the literature about educational leadership with few accounts from superintendents’ perspectives, my study described my journey through three superintendencies from 1993 to 2020. I used autoethnography, a reflective research method, which included systematic data analysis of a repository of personal artifacts combined with a confirmatory set of interviews from selected key informants involved with events connected to the artifacts or creating the artifacts. These interviews established veracity. The purpose of this three-article dissertation was to close a gap in the literature from superintendents’ perspectives on daily operations coupled with reforms, laws, and social needs. I achieved this purpose in the production of three articles. The first article detailed instrument development to manage the primary data, my artifacts, and a data collection instrument for interviews with selected participants associated with the artifacts. In the second article, I explained my findings and presented a framework applicable to superintendents’ role in curriculum leadership. Finally, I wrote an article for practicing superintendents that captured the overarching mission of the superintendency, which is to use both position and voice to advocate for the communities they serve. ii Superintendents’ silence about their experiences in their era of reforms, cultural changes, or daily confrontations and decisions leave a void in knowledge about this important role in public education. For this study, I used professional, self-identity as the lens for a reflexive autoethnography to fill that void. My work contributed a set of instruments for artifact analysis as well as presented a framework for superintendents’ curriculum leadership, and offered practical insights into the superintendents’ daily obligation as advocates for the communities they serve

A general implementation framework for tabled CLP

This paper describes a framework to combine tabling evalua- tion and constraint logic programming (TCLP). While this combination has been studied previously from a theoretical point of view and some implementations exist, they either suffer from a lack of efficiency, flex- ibility, or generality, or have inherent limitations with respect to the programs they can execute to completion (either with success or fail- ure). Our framework addresses these issues directly, including the ability to check for answer / call entailment, which allows it to terminate in more cases than other approaches. The proposed framework is experimentally compared with existing solutions in order to provide evidence of the mentioned advantages

Grounded theory for transition to and adoption of agile software development

Successful migration from traditional software development methods to Agile methods, as an organizational mutation, requires enough understanding of Agile transformation process and its related issues. Reviewing the literature revealed that software companies are struggling with many challenges during Agile transition process. However, there was no large-scale research study to elucidate various aspects and dimensions of the transition process. Also, less effort has been devoted to investigate the whole transition process. A Grounded Theory study with participation of 49 Agile experts from 13 different countries, mostly from USA and West Europe countries, and some from Asia and Australia, has been carried out to investigate the realities of Agile transformation. Adopted research methodology provided a systematic approach to discover various aspect of the transformation through a multi-level data analysis including open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding. Following a high disciplined approach, various concepts and categories have been identified and finally, the main concern of the participants, known as core category, has been discovered as the theory of Agile transition and adoption comprising four major parts: (1) Agile Transition Key Prerequisites, (2) Agile Transition Challenges, (3) Agile Transition Facilitators, and (4) Agile Transition and Adoption Framework. This study discovered the most important prerequisites that software companies need to provide before starting their transition to Agile approach including having convincing reason for change, defining business values, initial training, etc. Software companies have to do a preparation phase to provide these prerequisites before starting Agile transformation. It also identified the major challenges that software teams and companies are facing with when moving to Agile, including negative human aspects, inadequate and dysfunctional training, technical challenges, etc. These challenges have different roots and acts as impediments to the change. Also, this study discovered various change facilitators, including training, getting buy-in from practitioners, good coaching service, etc. Providing these facilitators help software teams to deal with the transformation challenges and increase chance of success. Finally, it proposed a substantive framework for transitioning to Agile approach. The proposed framework has particular features, discipline, and activities which promise usefulness for Agile transformation process in software companies regardless of size and project type. This framework particularly aims to promote sustainable change and being Agile instead of doing Agile. In general, this study developed the theory of Agile transition and adoption and discovered various aspects of the transformation. The findings of this study will serve to inform all software practitioners about transitioning to Agile software development

A Systems Theory-Based Framework for Environmental Scanning in Complex System Governance

The purpose of this research was to develop a Systems Theory-based framework for Environmental Scanning (ES) in Complex System Governance (CSG) using an inductive research design. Complexity and uncertainty are normal for external environments in which today’s systems (organizations) exist. These environmental characteristics provide impetus for researchers to focus on organizational planning for disruptive external forces that could threaten system stability and future system existence. The ES function supports the requisite governance metasystemic functions to be enabled, executed, and evolved sufficiently well to promote continuous system viability. In this research the functioning of ES was examined from a diverse literature-based perspective. The literature acknowledges the importance of the ES function, but its consistent development and its impact on system viability in a turbulent environment is not well developed from a Systems Theory-based perspective. This gap in knowledge was addressed in this research. This research examined metasystemic functions performed by ES across a broad literature base encompassing Systems Theory, CSG, Managerial Cybernetics, and ES from several fields of study. This research focused on the lack of explicit use of Systems Theory in ES functionality in metasystemic governance. This research presents a theoretical construct for the expansion of the functionality of ES in CSG that supports enhanced system viability. A rigorous research approach employing a constructivist Grounded Theory Method (GTM) was used to analyze the qualified research literature with a focus on Systems Theory to both consolidate and expand the known functionality of ES in CSG. This research provided a theoretical seventeen-function Systems Theory-based framework for ES in CSG. The overarching theory from this framework is that ES functions support complex system viability through regulation of internal and external variety that is induced by external changes. The literature-based identification of the ES functions demonstrates that ES operates in newly identified mechanisms, beyond the original identification provided by Keating & Katina (2016). A case study was undertaken to demonstrate face validation of the applicability of the emerging Systems Theory-based functions of ES in CSG in an applied setting where possible utility was developed. Topics for future research in ES functionality were identified

Supervising Offline Partial Evaluation of Logic Programs using Online Techniques

A major impediment for more widespread use of offline partial evaluation is the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining annotations for larger, realistic programs. Existing automatic binding-time analyses still only have limited applicability and annotations often have to be created or improved and maintained by hand, leading to errors. We present a technique to help overcome this problem by using online control techniques which supervise the specialisation process in order to help the development and maintenance of correct annotations by identifying errors. We discuss an implementation in the Logen system and show on a series of examples that this approach is effective: very few false alarms were raised while infinite loops were detected quickly. We also present the integration of this technique into a web interface, which highlights problematic annotations directly in the source code. A method to automatically fix incorrect annotations is presented, allowing the approach to be also used as a pragmatic binding time analysis. Finally we show how our method can be used for efficiently locating built-in errors in Prolog source code

The Power Within: The Influence of Spirituality on African American Female Adult Learners

This interpretive, qualitative study investigated the influence of spirituality in the lives six African American female adult learners. The following questions guided the research study:1) What role has spirituality played in the pursuit of educational goals of African American female adult learners? and 2)What influence has spirituality had on the development of these adult learners?An examination of the influence of spirituality in the areas of motivation, barriers, and adult development among college students framed the scholarly review of existing literature. The data collection methods included interviews, timeline and song lyric elicitations, and field notes.The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed.An inductive analysis was used to analyze the transcripts for codes, categories and themes. A variation of an arts-based approach, “found lyrics”, was also utilized to further re-present the data.Memoing, member checks, and peer debriefing were utilized during analysis to increase credibility and trustworthiness. The descriptions commonly accepted from existing literature present spirituality as a mechanism for meaning-making, a relation to a higher power, and an interconnectedness to all things. The findings were organized based on findings relative to each research question.Each participant held a Christian worldview. The four major themes, relative to the research first question, identified spirituality as:1) a source of motivation/inspiration; 2) a source of guidance; 3) a source of strength; and 4) a source of connection.The idea that spirituality is “the essence of who they are” was also a prominent theme offering insight into three key findings relative to the second research question.These key findings revealed: 1) Maternal influences significantly played a role in early experiences with spirituality and education; 2) Another category of motivator exists for the participants beyond the existing dichotomous internal and external categories; and 3) There was a movement beyond meaning-making into a greater personal awareness.Each theme and key finding is presented and discussed in detail

Parsing Expression Grammars Made Practical

Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) define languages by specifying recursive-descent parser that recognises them. The PEG formalism exhibits desirable properties, such as closure under composition, built-in disambiguation, unification of syntactic and lexical concerns, and closely matching programmer intuition. Unfortunately, state of the art PEG parsers struggle with left-recursive grammar rules, which are not supported by the original definition of the formalism and can lead to infinite recursion under naive implementations. Likewise, support for associativity and explicit precedence is spotty. To remedy these issues, we introduce Autumn, a general purpose PEG library that supports left-recursion, left and right associativity and precedence rules, and does so efficiently. Furthermore, we identify infix and postfix operators as a major source of inefficiency in left-recursive PEG parsers and show how to tackle this problem. We also explore the extensibility of the PEG paradigm by showing how one can easily introduce new parsing operators and how our parser accommodates custom memoization and error handling strategies. We compare our parser to both state of the art and battle-tested PEG and CFG parsers, such as Rats!, Parboiled and ANTLR.Comment: "Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2015)" - 167-172 (ISBN : 978-1-4503-3686-4