Montessori Education and a Neighborhood School: A Case Study of Two Early Childhood Education Classrooms

Project SYNC (Systems, Yoked through Nuanced Collaboration) details perspectives of a community of stakeholders committed to the enhancement of early childhood (i.e., prekindergarten through grade 3) education. Although there is a growing number of public-school programs informed by the Montessori philosophy, Montessori educational experiences often take place within affluent communities. SYNC aimed to enhance the prekindergarten through grade 3 educational experiences for traditionally underserved students by transforming two traditional early childhood classrooms to Montessori settings within a diverse, Title I school. Montessori pedagogy, curricula, and materials aligned with the school’s dedicated commitment to social justice. The study, one in a series, explored the impact of Montessori education on a neighborhood school community as evidenced through stakeholder opinions, project implementation, and teacher attitudes. Project data illustrate that a Montessori educational experience created learning opportunities that supported children from culturally and ethnically diverse communities in a traditional, Title I elementary school

More than Hoop Jumping: Making Accreditation Matter

This study provides a discussion of faculty perspectives on the impact of national accreditation on a teacher education program. Research questions from a three-year investigation examined the influence of accreditation on how teacher educators approach their work and whether meeting accreditation requirements contributes to ongoing, systemic self-reflection. Self-study survey data identified faculty perspectives on the influence of accreditation on planning, instruction, curriculum development, assessment, and collaboration. Accreditation as a form of self-study reveals both strengths and the inherent challenges of meeting the sometimes competing goals of accreditation requirements and meaningful examinations through self-reflection. Study implications underscore the need for conscious efforts to maintain self-reflection as central to program improvements and considerations for teacher educators’ work

Private Enforcement of Statutory and Administrative Law in the United States (and Other Common Law Countries)

Our aim in this paper, which was prepared for an international conference on comparative procedural law to be held in July 2011, is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States, and, to the extent supported by the information that colleagues abroad have provided, of comparable phenomena in other common law countries. Seeking to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement in the United States. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement play out, aspects of which should be central to the choice of an enforcement strategy and, in the case of private enforcement, are critical to the efficacy of a private enforcement regime. We then turn to the business of institutional architecture, describing the considerations—both in favor of and against private enforcement—that should affect the choice of an enforcement strategy. We lay out choices to be made about elements of a private enforcement regime, attending to the general legal landscape in which the regime would operate, particularly court access, as well as how incentives for enforcement interact with the market for legal services, which has important implications for private enforcement activity. We situate these legislative choices about private enforcement in the context of institutions that shape them. Finally, we seek to demonstrate how general considerations play out by examining private enforcement in two policy areas: legislation proscribing discrimination in employment, and laws protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive practices. A long appendix containing our questionnaire addressed to scholars in other countries, with the respondents’ answers interpolated, has been omitted but is available online

A Coda on Supplemental Jurisdiction

Response to Thomas C. Arthur and Richard D. Freer, 40 Emory Law Journal 963, Fall 199

A Coda on Supplemental Jurisdiction

Response to Thomas C. Arthur and Richard D. Freer, 40 Emory Law Journal 963, Fall 199

Teacher Observations Using Telepresence Robots: Benefits and Challenges for Strengthening Evaluations

Project SCOUT (School Classroom Observations Using Telepresence) details findings from a pilot project where observers used a telepresence robot designed to capture teaching episodes. The study examined: 1) participants’ ability to review classroom teaching and determine teaching quality using a telepresence format; 2) whether a telepresence robot allowed observers to review the specific teaching competencies they would otherwise evaluate during in-person observations; and 3) the success of the telepresence robot in evaluating specific pedagogical environments (i.e., Montessori classrooms). Survey and observation data from two focal classrooms highlight the benefits of telepresence tools by allowing flexibility and the potential for a wider audience of observers using real time data collection. Limitations of a telepresence robot include challenges in its ability to capture classroom nuances necessary for evaluation, coaching, or supervisory support. Those who use a telepresence robot must be particularly sensitive to using a technology that might cause privacy and safety concerns for children and their families, particularly for marginalized communities

’Team GB’ and London 2012: The Paradox of National and Global Identities

This article explores the problems associated with ’national identity’ in the UK and examines the tensions arising between the international and local dimensions of the games through examples of domestic (UK) and international (Brazil, Chicago) media coverage of the key debates relating to London’s period of preparation. The chapter proposes a conception of London 2012 as exemplar of an event poised to generate insights and experiences connected to a new politics of ’cosmopolitan’ identity; insights central to grasping the cultural politics of contemporary urban development-and the paradoxes of national identity in current discourses of Olympism. Properly speaking, cosmopolitanism suits those people who have no country, while internationalism should be the state of mind of those who love their country above all, who seek to draw to it the friendship of foreigners by professing for the countries of those foreigners an intelligent and enlightened sympathy. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Topographic control of asynchronous glacial advances: A case study from Annapurna, Nepal

Differences in the timing of glacial advances, which are commonly attributed to climatic changes, can be due to variations in valley topography. Cosmogenic 10Be dates from 24 glacial moraine boulders in 5 valleys define two age populations, late-glacial and early Holocene. Moraine ages correlate with paleoglacier valley hypsometries. Moraines in valleys with lower maximum altitudes date to the lateglacial, whereas those in valleys with higher maximum altitudes are early Holocene. Two valleys with similar equilibrium-line altitudes (ELAs), but contrasting ages, are \u3c 5 km apart and share the same aspect, such that spatial differences in climate can be excluded. A glacial mass-balance cellular automata model of these two neighboring valleys predicts that change from a cooler-drier to warmer-wetter climate (as at the Holocene onset) would lead to the glacier in the higher altitude catchment advancing, while the lower one retreats or disappears, even though the ELA only shifted by ~120 m