Approaches to teaching writing

About the book: Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher education lecturers and tutors teach writing to their students. Containing a range of diverse teaching strategies, the book offers both practical activities to help students develop their writing abilities and guidelines to help lecturers and tutors think in more depth about the assessment tasks they set and the feedback they give to students. The authors explore a wide variety of text types, from essays and reflective diaries to research projects and laboratory reports. The book draws on recent research in the fields of academic literacy, second language learning, and linguistics. It is grounded in recent developments such as the increasing diversity of the student body, the use of the Internet, electronic tuition, and issues related to distance learning in an era of increasing globalisation. Written by experienced teachers of writing, language, and linguistics, Teaching Academic Writing will be of interest to anyone involved in teaching academic writing in higher education

Toward a Critical Theory Of Female Criminality

Twentieth-century theories about female criminality are the weakest link in conventional criminology, representing the most conservative and unscientific thinking about human nature and social organization. Traditional thinking about female criminality reflects the general inability of conventional theorists to examine categories of sex, race, and class oppression as determined by the basic social structure of a particular society and as they relate to deviance and crime. The result has been that female deviance has been analyzed solely in light of assumptions about women\u27s biological nature. Whether there is indeed something distinctive about female crime which can be explained apart from a more general theory is problematic. Nevertheless, the recent resurgence of a radical materialist criminology, which roots the problem of crime in the underlying conditions of social production, suggests a methodology for analyzing the relationship between female crime and the rate of female participation in the labor force in advanced capitalist society

Disaggregating Student Outcomes by Race and Income: Educational Equity in Oregon

This research seeks to answer an emerging question in public school debates: whether race is just a proxy for income when it comes to disparities in educational outcomes among Oregon’s K-12 students. This research set out to respond to this question, and draws from public school data records to answer the question. We investigated student test scores across three different environments: elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. We also investigated student graduation rates from high school. The pattern of findings is absolutely clear: regardless of the site or type of disparities, when we compare how low-income students fare, all outcomes for students of color are weaker than that of White students. Similarly, when we compare outcomes for higher-income students, all outcomes of students of color are weaker than that of White students. We conclude that educators must address elements of racism across their institutions to ensure that race-related disparities are comprehensively addressed. Phase 2 of this research will investigate these same questions for specific school districts in Oregon

Rethinking Services with Communities of Color: Why Culturally Specific Organizations Are the Preferred Service Delivery Model

Racial disparities in social, education and health services continue unabated despite efforts to address them. At the margins of the service delivery system are lesser-known and minimally researched programs known as “culturally specific organizations” that have been developed by and with communities of color. These are organizations that have been developed by a specific community of color and continue to serve that same community of color. This article shares the insights of three leaders in racial equity, who have been immersed in Portland-based organizations for many years: two as organizational leaders and one as an academic research partner. The paper details the organizational assets, the research that provides emerging evidence of their contributions, and the resistance faced by its advocates. Additionally, original qualitative research contributes to this article: insights of the lived experience of leaders of color, and notes gathered over the years of presentations and dialogues in the region have been analyzed. Three additional assets are identified, adding to the seven assets that emerged in the literature. The article closes by identifying the implications that such organizations hold for education, research and practice

Using the Sirocco File System for high-bandwidth checkpoints.

The Sirocco File System, a file system for exascale under active development, is designed to allow the storage software to maximize quality of service through increased flexibility and local decision-making. By allowing the storage system to manage a range of storage targets that have varying speeds and capacities, the system can increase the speed and surety of storage to the application. We instrument CTH to use a group of RAM-based Sirocco storage servers allocated within the job as a high-performance storage tier to accept checkpoints, allowing computation to potentially continue asynchronously of checkpoint migration to slower, more permanent storage. The result is a 10-60x speedup in constructing and moving checkpoint data from the compute nodes. This demonstration of early Sirocco functionality shows a significant benefit for a real I/O workload, checkpointing, in a real application, CTH. By running Sirocco storage servers within a job as RAM-only stores, CTH was able to store checkpoints 10-60x faster than storing to PanFS, allowing the job to continue computing sooner. While this prototype did not include automatic data migration, the checkpoint was available to be pushed or pulled to disk-based storage as needed after the compute nodes continued computing. Future developments include the ability to dynamically spawn Sirocco nodes to absorb checkpoints, expanding this mechanism to other fast tiers of storage like flash memory, and sharing of dynamic Sirocco nodes between multiple jobs as needed

The Native American Community in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile

This report is the result of three years of work of true partnership between the Native American community, the Coalition of Communities of Color and Portland State University. The Portland Indian Leaders’ Roundtable, an alliance of 28 local Native American organizations, tribal organizations and Native focused programs within larger institutions, took a lead role in the implementation of the Native American research. Elders of the community reviewed the work and provided invaluable knowledge and historical context. Our main priority is to advocate for policy decisions that improve outcomes for the Native American community. We hold institutional reform and the formation of a powerful racial equity advocacy coalition as central to improving outcomes. This report builds an important knowledge base from which to advocate and to educate. Educating our community and the community at large about the Native American community is crucial to achieving racial equity

The Latino Community in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile

Our report, The Latino Community in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile uncovers an array of racial inequities across the systems of income, employment, education, juvenile justice, corrections, child welfare, philanthropic giving, housing, immigration, research practices (particularly population measurement), wealth, health, health insurance coverage, racial harassment, public service and voter registration. These systems maintain our second-class status and serve to limit our current well being and the prospects for a bright future for our children

Multiple roles of 1,4-diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octane in the solvothermal synthesis of iodobismuthates

Hybrid bismuth-containing halides are emerging as alternative candidates to lead-containing perovskites for light-harvesting applications, as Bi3+ is isoelectronic with Pb2+ and the presence of an active lone pair of electrons is expected to result in outstanding charge-carrier transport properties. Here, we report a family of one binary and three ternary iodobismuthates containing 1,4-diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octane (DABCO). These materials have been prepared solvothermally and their crystal structures, thermal stability and optical properties determined. Reactions carried out in the presence of bismuth iodide and DABCO produced (C6H12N2)BiI3 (1), which consists of hybrid ribbons in which pairs of edge-sharing bismuth octahedra are linked by DABCO ligands. Short I...I contacts give rise to a three-dimensional network. Similar reactions in the presence of copper iodide produced (C8H17N2)2Bi2Cu2I10 (2) and [(C6H13N2)2BiCu2I7](C2H5OH) (3), in which either ethylated DABCO cations, (EtDABCO)+, or monoprotonated DABCO cations, (DABCOH)+, are coordinated to copper in discrete tetranuclear and trinuclear clusters, respectively. In the presence of potassium iodide, a unique three-dimensional framework, (C6H14N2)[(C6H12N2)KBiI6] (4), was formed, which contains one-dimensional hexagonal channels, of approximately 6 Å in diameter. The optical band gaps of these materials, which are semiconductors, range between 1.82 and 2.27 eV, with the lowest values found for the copper-containing discrete clusters. Preliminary results on the preparation of thin films are presented

Striosome–dendron bouquets highlight a unique striatonigral circuit targeting dopamine-containing neurons

The dopamine systems of the brain powerfully influence movement and motivation. We demonstrate that striatonigral fibers originating in striosomes form highly unusual bouquet-like arborizations that target bundles of ventrally extending dopamine-containing dendrites and clusters of their parent nigral cell bodies. Retrograde tracing showed that these clustered cell bodies in turn project to the striatum as part of the classic nigrostriatal pathway. Thus, these striosome-dendron formations, here termed "striosome-dendron bouquets," likely represent subsystems with the nigro-striato-nigral loop that are affected in human disorders including Parkinson's disease. Within the bouquets, expansion microscopy resolved many individual striosomal fibers tightly intertwined with the dopamine-containing dendrites and also with afferents labeled by glutamatergic, GABAergic, and cholinergic markers and markers for astrocytic cells and fibers and connexin 43 puncta. We suggest that the striosome-dendron bouquets form specialized integrative units within the dopamine-containing nigral system. Given evidence that striosomes receive input from cortical regions related to the control of mood and motivation and that they link functionally to reinforcement and decision-making, the striosome-dendron bouquets could be critical to dopamine-related function in health and disease