Governor Shaw As a Politician

Biography of Leslie Mortier Sha

Governor Shaw As a Politician

Biography of Leslie Mortier Sha

Social Kind Generics and the Dichotomizing Perspective

Generics about social kinds (or GSKs) frequently propagate descriptions that carry normative force (i.e., \u27women are emotional\u27). Some philosophers of language attribute this to their tendency to transmit essentialist beliefs about social kinds. According to these accounts, utterances of GSKs implicate that there is something in the nature of social kinds that causes them to possess the properties described, and that individual members of these social kinds therefore ought to exhibit (or be expected to exhibit) these properties. Here, I draw on empirical evidence to suggest an alternative account. According to my framework, an utterance of a GSK implicates a distinction between the social kind described and its salient conceptual opposite, producing what I call a dichotomizing perspective. For example, ‘women are emotional’ suggests that men are not. Importantly, such distinctions frequently persist in the societal common ground as a function of social power, in part due to their alignment with hierarchical social structures between dichotomized social kinds. This enables such GSKs to perpetuate biased patterns of attention, expectation, and behavior even in the absence of essentialist belief

Reformulating Outrage: A Critical Analysis of the Problematic Tort of IIED

The intentional infliction of emotional distress ( IIED ), also known as the tort of outrage, is a relatively new cause of action, first appearing in the legal academic literature during the 1930s. Since that time, IIED has gained widespread acceptance and is now recognized in all U.S. jurisdictions, with most courts invoking the definition set forth in the Restatement (Second) of Torts. Despite this general acceptance of the tort, courts routinely assert that IIED is a disfavored cause of action. Courts appear wary of holding defendants liable for plaintiffs\u27 emotional injuries and therefore seek to discourage such claims. In their efforts to cabin the application of IIED while preserving it as a valid cause of action, the Restatement authors and the courts have created a confused tort that means entirely different things to different judges and thus serves disparate functions in the courts of various states. In a minority of jurisdictions, courts express disfavor by limiting IIED claims to instances of outrageous and blatantly wrongful conduct for which the plaintiff has no other viable theory of redress. For example, if a defendant\u27s conduct can support a defamation claim, these courts will not allow the plaintiff to maintain an IIED claim for the same conduct. In effect, these courts define IIED such that it never overlaps with any other tort. Recent formulations of this position characterize IIED as a gap-filler, or a residual tort

The dichotomy in the determinacy of certain two-person infinite games with moves from {0,1}

We investigate certain well-known games from the field of set theory; namely, certain two-person games of perfect information with small complexity and with small infinite length. We consider games with moves from the natural numbers and games with moves from {0,1}. We show that the determinacy of open games with length o·n and with moves from {0,1} is true regardless of the existence of large cardinals for n ≥ 2. We show that this is not true, however, for some more complex games: For k ≥ 3 and n ≥ 2, the determinacy of P0k games with length o·n and with moves from {0,1} is equivalent to the determinacy of P0k games with length o·n and with moves from o, which in turn requires the existence of large cardinals. We also examine the question of whether for classes Gamma properly between S01 and P03 , large cardinals are required for the determinacy of Gamma games with length o·n and with moves from {0,1} for n ≥ 2

RECONCILING THE CIVICS TEST WITH INQUIRY-BASED INSTRUCTION: MAKING THE BEST OF WHAT SEEMS LIKE JUST ONE MORE THING

This dissertation consists of three articles that focus on teaching, learning, and testing in civic education. Each article provides insights into how instructional practices in teaching and learning intersect with a state-mandated civics test. Article One, “Is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Test Worthy of Being Included as a High School Graduation Requirement? A Closer Look at Implications for Kentucky,” is mixed methods sequential explanatory study on the implementation of the civics test requirement within two specific Kentucky school districts using student-level assessment data. Findings indicate that opportunities not only to learn civic content, but also learn it in an authentic way, increases the likelihood students will perform better on a civics assessment, such as the Naturalization Test. Article Two, “Can the Civics Test Make You a Good Citizen? Reconciling the Civics Test with Inquiry-Based Instruction,” (Fraker, Muetterties, G. Swan & K. Swan, 2019) is an exploratory article framed by the question “is there a way to teach the factual knowledge needed to pass the civics test using an inquiry approach?” The article sets the stage for further research and lays out, using the Inquiry Design Module (IDM) process (Grant, Lee, & Swan, 2017), an embedded-action inquiry blueprint to combat the struggles teachers face when trying to implement the civics test in a meaningful way. Article Three, “Putting Inquiry to the Test: A Case of Ambitious Social Studies Teaching,” is an exploratory qualitative study that used an embedded, single-case study to target one teacher’s approach on how to implement a state-mandated test using an inquiry approach. This case study analysis considers the data through the lens of the key elements of questions, tasks, sources, and ambitious teaching, which revealed evidence that naturally began to tell a story about one teacher’s use of inquiry to meet the requirements of the fact-based test. This study also revealed that implementing an inquiry-based approach is a highly nuanced endeavor requiring a teacher who can employ the principles of ambitious teaching