CareerAdvance® Implementation Study Findings through FY 2018

This report examines the implementation of the third year of HPOG II services in a five-year grant cycle, including post-HPOG sustainability planning for CareerAdvance®. This report focuses on how and why the program has changed and adjusted to meet the requirements of HPOG II, while responding to the needs of the participants being served, the local job market, and the partners working together to implement and sustain the program. First, this report briefly describes the organizations partnering to implement the HPOG II version of CareerAdvance®. It then examines changes made to the program components, including the eligibility requirements, recruitment, assessment, and selection process, support services, training options, and other program elements. Also, it describes the HPOG II FY 2018 (September 1, 2017-August 31, 2018) cohorts enrolled in training, including assessment scores and detailed demographic information on the participants and their families, as well as program completion and certification attainment of all HPOG II participants (April 2016-August 31, 2018). A final section addresses CareerAdvance® sustainability planning issues, options and opportunities. This report draws from previous CareerAdvance® reports, information on the HPOG II program participants and their families, and interviews with CAP, Tulsa Tech, Family and Children Services, and Tulsa Community WorkAdvance leadership and staff.Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource

Cultivating the In-Between: Sponsors, Growers, and the Cultural Landscapes of Urban Agriculture in Contemporary Chicago

This dissertation theorizes a model for understanding agricultural land in an urban setting and ways of “seeing” landscape in depth and beyond only the visual. The model is based on how interstitial urban spaces – spaces inserted between intersecting infrastructural elements or as temporary installations between phases of development - are occupied and transformed into influential urban agricultural sites. I found that the two types of interstitial sites reflect and ultimately reproduce the objectives and practices of sponsors and growers beyond the bounds of an individual place. Urban agriculture has been characterized as consisting of spaces of learning, of community building, of resistance, or of neoliberal policy effects. Likewise, interstitial urban sites have been examined from the perspective of their roles as placeholders, emerging, ephemeral, or temporary spaces in service of development or natural systems. However, the intersection of these two bodies of literature is largely uninvestigated, especially in terms of characterizing the influence that agriculture taking place in interstitials can have on surrounding areas. My dissertation addresses this thinner area of scholarship in spatial influence of urban agriculture by shifting perspective: rather than studying social program as an end, this work contemplates program motivation as part of a collection of forces defining a space and its longer-term influence on other, nearby spaces. Urban agriculture has often operated on the margins, co-opting otherwise unused spaces; this dissertation theorizes two types of urban agricultural sites, spatial and temporal interstitials, as ways to characterize these spaces. My work describes the landscapes that result from sponsor and grower objectives and finds how urban agriculture’s presence affects engagement with food cultivation beyond these interstitial spaces. Different site types have different influences on their surroundings, with temporal interstitials being dispersive, releasing behaviors and knowledge, while spatial interstitials are more often attractive, inviting non-participants to site to learn and experience spaces of agriculture. My research relies on archives, contemporary publications, interviews, and a detailed method of embodied site analysis to trace the advent and possible erasure of urban agricultural sites. I investigated factors that contributed to their durability and diffusion impact. Two sets of case studies illustrate the interstitial models and the possibility of transformation from one type to another while highlighting similarities in how sponsor and grower values become written in the landscape and dispersed beyond the site borders. The theoretical model developed from my field work proposes that interstitial spaces of urban agriculture release an energy in the form of the entangled values of sponsors and growers across a larger population than those directly engaged in cultivation. This influence is observed in expanded or satellite sites that attract new users, neighbors, and programs enhancing local knowledge and collaboration. This research ties together the cultural landscapes of urban agriculture with the decisions about site location, program and participants and shows how these decisions result in different types of interstitial agricultural spaces with differing impacts on their surroundings

An Exploration of Emotional Intelligence in Community College Leadership

This study explored emotional intelligence as it related to community college leadership. Three community colleges agreed to participate in the study. The researcher assessed the emotional intelligence of supervisors. The employees rated their perceived leadership practices of their supervisors. The researcher utilized a correlation method to determine if relationships were found between the variables; emotional intelligence of supervisors and perceived leadership practices. A correlation method was utilized to determine if any relationship existed between assessed emotional intelligence scores of the supervisors and leadership development hours. A descriptive analysis was utilized to determine if a participating community college embedded emotional intelligence concepts in their leadership training. The results indicated that no significant relationship was found between emotional intelligence and their perceived leadership practices. The results indicated that no significant relationship was found between assessed emotional intelligence scores and their leadership development training. The researcher found no emotional intelligence concepts in leadership development material that was submitted for analysis

Teaching Freshman Composition: A Manual for Beginning Instructors

A thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of English by Cynthia Howton Anderson on July 28, 1983

Teaching Freshman Composition: A Manual For Beginning Instructors

A thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of English by Cynthia Howton Anderson on July 28, 1983

The Politics of Pollution, Another Fallout of Acid Rain

The threat of acid rain is a side effect of the switch to coal as a major fuel for producing energy in the United States. Despite the existence of technology to reduce the pollutants that cause acid rain, the emissions of sulfur and nitric oxides are likely to increase because among several factors of political resistance to regulatory controls. The politics of pollution pit energy production and economic growth against environmental quality. Developing a regulatory policy is further complicated by the difficulty of isolating specific environmental effects attributable to acid rain apart from natural causes within the ecosystem. The question facing policy makers is whether the politics of pollution and the inherent difficulties of environmental research can be overcome before protecting the environ from the effects of acid rain is no longer an option

Creating and Manipulating Formalized Software Architectures to Support a Domain-Oriented Application Composition System

This research investigated technology which enables sophisticated users to specify, generate, and maintain application software in domain-oriented terms. To realize this new technology, a development environment, called Architect, was designed and implemented. Using canonical formal specifications of domain objects, Architect rapidly composes these specifications into a software application and executes a prototype of that application as a means to demonstrate its correctness before any programming language specific code is generated. Architect depends upon the existence of a formal object base (or domain model) which was investigated by another student in related research. The research described in this thesis relied on the concept of a software architecture, which was a key to Architect\u27s successful implementation. Various software architectures were evaluated and the Object-Connection-Update (OCU) model, developed by the Software Engineering Institute, was selected. The Software Refinery environment was used to implement the composition process which encompasses connecting specified domain objects into a composed application, performing semantic analysis on the composed application, and, if no errors are discovered, simulating the execution of the application. Architect was validated using both artificial and realistic domains and was found to be a solid foundation upon which to build a full-scale application composition system