Strategies for Systemic Change:Youth Community Organizing to Disruptthe School-to-Prison Nexus

The school disciplinary landscape across the United States changed significantly through the enactment of policies that criminalize students’ behaviors during the 1990s and 2000s. Schools began to involve the police and criminal legal system in school disciplinary issues that used to be handled by school administrators. This shift led youth of Color1 to increasingly come into contact with the juvenile legal system through school suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to alternative schools—what we characterize as the school-toprison nexus. Conceptualizing the school-to-prison pipeline as a nexus, or interlocking system of power over youth, allows us to understand how the criminalization of youth is a systemic problem that demands structural change and interventions across multiple levels of analysis and settings, including local schools, school districts, police departments, and state policies. Although important research has documented the ways that Black and Latino youth are referred to the juvenile legal system through punitive school policies, there has been less attention to the actions youth are taking to critique and dismantle these policies. Youth community organizing (YCO) against the school-to-prison nexus represents an arena of youth activism that deserves further attention and analysis. In this chapter, we define YCO as groups that create spaces for young people to think critically about their everyday social conditions, identify root causes of social problems, and build political power and voice to create policy solutions and change in their communities (Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006; Kirshner, 2015; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul- Adil, 1999)

The complexities and challenges of introducing electronic Ongoing Achievement Records in the pre-registration nursing course using PebblePad and hand-held tablets

This paper reports on a small pilot study aimed at eliciting the lecturer and student experience of using PebblePad to record the students' Ongoing Achievement Record (OAR) using hand-held tablets, at one university in England. Android tablets were purchased and attempts were made to transfer the OAR into the PebblePad system in an attempt to enhance the student experience of feedback from their via PebblePad, embed PebblePad learning technology in the practice component of the curriculum, enable the student to more readily engage in reflection and feedback with their personal tutor, practice education link and mentor, develop skills in the use of PebblePad and pilot the use of PebblePad in developing the Ongoing Achievement Record. Focus groups were carried out with students nurses (n=6) and lecturers (n=5) where participants were asked to discuss the successes and challenges of using PebblePad for the Ongoing Achievement Record, and suggest ways in which this strategy may be implemented more widely. Through a thematic analysis of the focus groups three broad themes of 'timing', 'technology literacy' and 'the technology' were identified. The findings from the study indicated that whilst this was not a positive experience on the whole for a number of reasons, there are lessons that can be learnt when attempting to introduce new ways of engaging with technology to enhance the student experience. Recommendations for implementing such an approach in the future are also presente

Collaborative Crop Research Program

For over 30 years, The McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) has explored solutions for sustainable local food systems through agricultural research. The program grew out of the Foundation's Plant Biology Program, which was founded in 1983, and reflects the Foundation's long-time commitment to place-based grantmaking and learning from those working on the ground. In 2014, the Foundation engaged The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) to develop a historic overview of the CCRP to capture its origins and evolution over the last 30 years. To develop this narrative, TPI interviewed past and current Board members, staff, consultants and grantees who had been involved at various stages in the lifespan of the program, and reviewed existing documents, reports and meeting notes.The report that follows is to serve as part of the "institutional memory" of The McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program. Its heavy reliance on individual recollections may detract from its precision, but such reflections bring to life the program's three decades of commitment, collaboration, and adaptation in an effort to contribute to a world where all have access to nutritious food that is sustainably produced by local people. While not an evaluative document, key moments of influence and impacts are noted along the way

South Carolina: Round 1 - State Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.South Carolina has its work cut out for it. As a state with one of the highest poverty rates and poorest health outcomes indicators, one thing stakeholders from all perspectives agree on is the need for improvement in the state's health status. Successful implementation of the ACA in South Carolina -- for those who believe that is the goal -- will require building greater public understanding of the ACA and enrolling all who are eligible in a state in which government distrust is high and public insurance program take-up rates have traditionally been low. It will also require a shift in position on the Medicaid expansion option. As long as the state's poorest uninsured remain without assistance, the aims of the ACA to promote widespread access to health care will never be realized

5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity

LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism. 2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage (CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups. Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring

The story so far... the use of children’s literature in facilitating preschoolers’ awareness of, and sensitivities to social justice issues

[Abstract]: This paper will outline and discuss qualitative research into the above topic at the time of the ARECE 2007 conference. The PhD research project will be at the point of beginning to synthesise findings; hence the title 'The story so far…' The aims of the research, guided by interpretative perspectives, hermeneutics and a constructive paradigm, are: To investigate ways in which children’s literature (picture books) can help preschoolers’ to reflect upon, clarify and articulate their awareness of, and sensitivities to social justice issues; To explore whether preschoolers can critically examine children’s literature to identify social injustices; To identify transformative and productive ways of sharing the teaching/learning experience that work to enhance preschool children’s awareness and understanding of social justice issues through storytime sessions. The research design is Participatory Action Research. This paper will discuss the research process so far: the topic’s background and literature review, purposeful participant recruitment, methodology, data gathering and initial findings and how they may contribute to early childhood education as a whole and specifically to teaching for social justice. However, this research story is a work in progress as data gathering was only recently completed and synthesis and thorough analysis are now in progress. As the title suggests this research story is 'To be continued …

Re-Viewing the Mass Communication Education Curriculum. Case for Language/Linguistics, Communication Synergy.

Curriculum review of any academic curriculum is one way of demonstrating the dynamism of such discipline. Mass Communication as a dynamic discipline is one such beneficiary of curriculum review. In line with Iwuchukwu’s (2010) earlier submission that no graduate of any academic level or discipline worth’s more than the curriculum that produces him/her, it was an observed inability of some practicing journalists, especially, those in the print. To handle ethical issues, which was traced to a lacuna in the curriculum that led to the introduction of the course, ethics. This paper seeks to unveil another obvious lapse among mass communication practitioners cutting across, print, broadcast and electronic media. It further highlights that such lapses as incompetence in language use, both at the phonetic, phonological semantic. Syntactic stylistic and even psycholinguistic to be a direct fall out of a perceived lacuna in the present mass communication education curriculum especially in Nigeria. We contend that a review of the present curriculum is glaringly imperative recommending not only the inclusion of more language/linguistic courses but also a stronger synergy between language/linguistics and mass communication. This is our opinion could be boosted with a course "Language and Communication not only though to all mass communication students at all levels, but it being recognized as another Sub-field of specialization by mass communication graduates who wish to further their stadium at the postgraduates levels as in the case in the University of Calabar