Beyond the Catch-22 of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward a More Pragmatic Approach for Dealing with Power

This study examines a two-year effort to engage groups of inner-city students in community engagement projects at Social Action Charter High School, SACHS, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this project, graduate student volunteers coached small groups of students working on community change projects, collecting data on what happened over time. Kahne and Westheimer (2006) identified a key challenge to projects of this kind. On the one hand, social action projects seem able to enhance students’ belief in their own capacity to solve community problems only if adult allies make sure the students do not encounter any significant barriers to success, although this misleads them, albeit unintentionally, about the realities of unequal power in society. On the other hand, authentic engagements with real-world institutional power tend to reduce students’ confidence and their desire to participate in social action in the future. Thus the “catch-22” in our article’s title. This article shows how one of the groups we worked with at SACH discovered a middle way between Kahne’s and Westheimer’s two extremes. Even though the students were not able to overcome the power they encountered, they nonetheless found creative and pragmatic ways to accomplish significant tasks. We argue that the students’ experience shows a possible avenue for educators to move beyond the catch-22

Beyond Dependency: Strategies for Saving Foundations

We have generally tried to depend on the force of argument to win the day against the structural forces that have driven this decline. Yet foundations generally operates from a position of relative weakness in schools of education: we provide service to programs but generally do not have our own strong programs. We “take” enrollment from other departments, but do not “give” enrollment to them or bring independent enrollment to the school. This leaves foundations in a position of dependency. The core argument of this paper is that we need to move beyond dependency toward a vision of foundations as, at least in part, a provider of robust (if collaborative) programs of its own, and we discuss a range of strategies designed to foster the development of such programs. Amidst the current environment, we believe that foundations will find it increasingly difficult to make our arguments stick without the associated power to make ourselves heard

Dynamical coupled-channel model of meson production reactions in the nucleon resonance region

A dynamical coupled-channel model is presented for investigating the nucleon resonances in the meson production reactions induced by pions and photons. The model is based on an energy-independent Hamiltonian which is derived from a set of Lagrangians by using a unitary transformation method. By applying the projection operator techniques,we derive a set of coupled-channel equations which satisfy the unitarity conditions within the channel space spanned by the considered two-particle meson-baryon states and the three-particle $\pi\pi N$ state. We present and explain in detail a numerical method based on a spline-function expansion for solving the resulting coupled-channel equations which contain logarithmically divergent one-particle-exchange driving terms resulted from the $\pi\pi N$ unitarity cut. We show that this driving term can generate rapidly varying structure in the reaction amplitudes associated with the unstable particle channels. It also has large effects in determining the two-pion production cross sections. Our results indicate that cautions must be taken to interpret the $N^*$ parameters extracted from using models which do not include $\pi\pi N$ cut effects.Comment: 73 pages, 20 figure

New bounds on light millicharged particles from the tip of the red-giant branch

Stellar energy loss is a sensitive probe of light, weakly coupled dark sectors, including ones containing millicharged particles (MCPs). The emission of MCPs can affect stellar evolution, and therefore can alter the observed properties of stellar populations. In this work, we improve upon the accuracy of existing stellar limits on MCPs by self-consistently modelling (1) the MCP emission rate, accounting for all relevant in-medium effects and production channels, and (2) the evolution of stellar interiors (including backreactions from MCP emission) using the MESA stellar evolution code. We find MCP emission leads to significant brightening of the tip of the red-giant branch. Based on photometric observations of 15 globular clusters whose bolometric magnitudes are inferred using parallaxes from Gaia astrometry, we obtain robust bounds on the existence of MCPs with masses below 100 keV.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

SEQUENCING DESIGN DNA: A SET OF METHODOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS FOR SEQUENCING SOCIO-TECHNICAL DESIGN ROUTINES

With the introduction of new digital and physical tools into the workplace, the process of design has dramatically changed over the past few decades. Thus, design processes have evolved into many forms which vary, not only between organizations, but within organizations, and even within teams over time. These myriad “mutations” of the design process call for a new method to identify patterns of design activity and their change in order to deeply understand the design process. In this paper we suggest a new method for identifying patterns of activity in design teams. Such activity involves composites of distributed interactions – both socially and across digital and physical artifacts. We argue that these identifiable patterns comprise the DNA of design routines. To capture these patterns, we extend the sequence analysis techniques that are commonly used in genetic research to capture a design team’s interactions with both digital and physical tools over time

Space Utilization for the Boulder Cemetery

The purpose of this project in Boulder, Montana was to determine how much usable space was left in the cemetery for future burials and to locate old burial sites where headstones no longer exist.https://digitalcommons.mtech.edu/stdt_rsch_day_2013/1001/thumbnail.jp

An Integrative Approach to Portfolio Evaluation for Teacher Licensure

The purpose of our overall research agenda is to develop and evaluate a methodology for the assessment of teachers in which experienced teachers, serving as judges, engage in dialogue to integrate multiple sources of evidence about a candidate to reach a sound conclusion. The project that provides the venue for this research agenda is the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), which is developing a portfolio assessment system to assist participating states in making a decision about teacher licensure. To develop the theoretical foundation necessary to support and evaluate such dialogic and integrative assessment practices, we turn, in part, to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, as a complement to psychometrics. In this article, we characterize and assess the processes in which judges, trying out an integrative approach to portfolio evaluation for the first time, engage as they collaboratively construct and document their conclusions, and we locate this work in the larger research agenda. The premise of this project, which is being carefully evaluated in the course of inquiry, is that these integrative practices cannot only lead to an epistemologically sound evaluation of teaching but also promote an ongoing professional dialogue of critical reflection on teaching practice.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43358/1/11092_2004_Article_162852.pd

Optimal statistic for detecting gravitational wave signals from binary inspirals with LISA

A binary compact object early in its inspiral phase will be picked up by its nearly monochromatic gravitational radiation by LISA. But even this innocuous appearing candidate poses interesting detection challenges. The data that will be scanned for such sources will be a set of three functions of LISA's twelve data streams obtained through time-delay interferometry, which is necessary to cancel the noise contributions from laser-frequency fluctuations and optical-bench motions to these data streams. We call these three functions pseudo-detectors. The sensitivity of any pseudo-detector to a given sky position is a function of LISA's orbital position. Moreover, at a given point in LISA's orbit, each pseudo-detector has a different sensitivity to the same sky position. In this work, we obtain the optimal statistic for detecting gravitational wave signals, such as from compact binaries early in their inspiral stage, in LISA data. We also present how the sensitivity of LISA, defined by this optimal statistic, varies as a function of sky position and LISA's orbital location. Finally, we show how a real-time search for inspiral signals can be implemented on the LISA data by constructing a bank of templates in the sky positions.Comment: 22 pages, 15 eps figures, Latex, uses iopart style/class files. Based on talk given at the 8th Gravitational Wave Data Analysis Workshop, Milwaukee, USA, December 17-20, 2003. Accepted for publication in Class. Quant. Gra

Mapping our Universe in 3D with MITEoR

Mapping our universe in 3D by imaging the redshifted 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen has the potential to overtake the cosmic microwave background as our most powerful cosmological probe, because it can map a much larger volume of our Universe, shedding new light on the epoch of reionization, inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and neutrino masses. We report on MITEoR, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that greatly reduce the cost of such 3D mapping for a given sensitivity. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy both to enable automated precision calibration and to cut the correlator cost scaling from N^2 to NlogN, where N is the number of antennas. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious HERA project, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies using an order of magnitude more antennas, each with dramatically larger collecting area.Comment: To be published in proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems & Technolog