Temporary Anchors, Impermanent Shelter: Can the Field of Education Model a New Approach to Academic Work?

Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We conclude that while this work has no guarantees and is never complete, we must keep trying to connect beyond our academic disciplines and ourselves, both to learn and to more effectively impact the world

Students as Leaders and Learners: Toward Self-Authorship and Social Change on a College Campus

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development

Students as Leaders and Learners: Toward Self-Authorship and Social Change on a College Campus

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development

Steal This Classroom: Teaching and Learning Unbound

In college classrooms, an urban high school, a public library, a playground, and a women’s prison, Anne Dalke and Jody Cohen share scenes where teaching and learning take them by surprise; these are moments of uncertainty, sometimes constructed as failure. They weave through their own voices those of students and colleagues, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary forms of teaching and learning. Classrooms are sometimes “stolen” by the complex systems surrounding and permeating the activities that take place there; Jody and Anne explore ways to steal them back. Examining what is hidden but present in such moments can turn them into breakthroughs, powerful learning for educators and students—revealing how failure itself might not be what it seems. Anne and Jody try out alternative tales, exploring a pedagogical orientation that is ecological in the largest sense, engaging teachers and students in re-thinking learning and teaching in classrooms, and in their larger lives, as complex, enmeshed, volatile eco-systems. Not solving the contradictions, but abstracting from the immediate, they offer a dialogue, telling hard stories and funny ones, involving others’ stories in response, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary work. They make concrete suggestions about how academic and other structures might open up; they also remain porous and interactive, inviting reader-participants to join in transfiguring what spaces of teaching and learning are and can be-and-do

Activation of sulfonate ester based matrix metalloproteinase proinhibitors by hydrogen peroxide

This study details the development of matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor prodrugs (proMMPi) that are activated in the presence of reactive-oxygen species (ROS). Conventional matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors (MMPi) utilize a zinc-binding group (ZBG) that chelates to the catalytic zinc(II) ion of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) to inhibit their activity. To create ROS-sensitive prodrugs, sulfonate esters were used as a protecting group for the ZBG to block their metal binding ability. Surprisingly, these sulfonate esters were found to be cleaved by H2O2 only when the ZBG contained an N-oxide donor atom moiety. Sulfonate ester derivatives of full-length MMPi based on these ROS-triggerable systems were synthesized. It was found that proMMPi with sulfonate ester protecting groups showed relatively high rates of cleavage in the presence of H2O2 to release the active MMPi. In vitro MMP inhibition studies confirmed a significant increase in inhibitory activity of proMMPi upon addition of H2O2, demonstrating the use of sulfonate esters to act as cleavable triggers for ROS-activated prodrugs