Teachers as transformative agents and professional chameleons

Teachers play a key role in supporting equitable and quality education, as also advocated by the 2030 Agenda, leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes. To achieve this, they must develop themselves as transformative agents and change-makers, especially in a post-pandemic era. To this end, through a research project with municipal school teachers, activities were proposed to initiate a reflexive re-examination of the basic premises that characterize their professional action based on the ideas of Schön (particularly the concepts of reflection in and on action) and Mezirow (with respect to the concept of the ‘disorienting dilemma’). The findings highlight the need to develop a 'transformative resilience' that enables teachers to transform themselves into 'professional chameleons', i.e. evolving professionals capable of managing multiple levels with a reflective and research-based educational mindse

School Climate: Parents\u2019, Students\u2019 And Teachers\u2019 Perceptions

Because of the importance of individual perceptions, schools often assess how students or teachers or parents feel about their school, and school climate has often been associated with improved school achievement, but rarely they take into account all these \u201cactors\u201d at the same time. The main aim of this work is to compare the results obtained in a population study on school climate that involves students, parents, teachers and non-teaching staff. In this paper, we will present the results of parents\u2019, students\u2019, teachers\u2019 and no-teacher personnel's perception. We have administered 13,500 structured questionnaires addressed to students, parents, teachers, educational assistance personnel, involved in the four orders of schools (Pre-school, Elementary, Middle, High) of the province of Bolzano. Parental permission was obtained for young people. The present study has been conducted in the province of Bolzano, northern Italy, between January and April 2012. A School Climate Perception Questionnaire (SCPQ), that can be completed in 10 minutes, has been developed to assess environments and climate of all Italian language schools. In order to determine the interrelationships among the questionnaire items, a Principal-Axis Factor Analysis was performed. The final scale was used for Confirmatory Factor Analysis that was done to assess its construct validity. We will present the results regarding the school climate perceptions of teachers, parents and students and their comparison

Prefigurazioni professionali future: pratiche e processi di di-svelamento.

La professione educativa sta vivendo, anche alla luce delle recenti riforme legislative, delle politiche sociali e di bisogni socio-educativi emergenti, una stagione di cambiamento e di profonda trasformazione che richiede saperi e competenze r innovat i al l a luce del l a complessit\ue0 che caratterizza la societ\ue0 e l\u2019azione educativa stessa. All\u2019Universit\ue0 di Trieste, al fine di sostenere gli educatori-informazione nella definizione del proprio profilo professionale, \ue8 stato predisposto uno strumento-processo - il Personal Development Plan - quale misura di accompagnamento e orientamento narrativo volto alla costruzione delle prefigurazioni professionali future attraverso un processo biografico e criticoriflessivo

Selecting Projects for a Capstone Spacecraft Design Course from Real World Solicitations

The first decision that goes into setting the tone for a senior capstone spacecraft design course is the choice of the projects. There are several sources of ideas for design projects, including design competitions and topics set by various technical committees. A new source of design ideas comes from real world design projects. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u27s Office of Space Science originally released an Announcement of Opportunity in spring 2002 to solicit designs for a complete Mars mission. The Senior Capstone Spacecraft Design course in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University paralleled this proposal process for the spacecraft design projects for the 2002-2003 academic year. While the original announcement called for proposers to determine what kind of a flight mission they would conduct, eight specific, realistic flight missions were chosen and assigned to the eight teams in the class. Many of the important aspects of the original project were duplicated; however, a significant amount of material was deleted. This paper discusses the outcome of the year-long course, compares some of the designs developed by the students to the designs chosen in the actual NASA mission design, and draws conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of selecting a project based from a real solicitation

Short communication: Molecular genetic characterization of ovine αS1-casein allele H caused by alternative splicing

Abstract Sequencing of ovine CSN1S1*H cDNA showed an absence of exon 8 in comparison with GenBank sequences; the absence was confirmed by protein sequencing. We demonstrated that this allelic aberration is the result of a deletion of 4 nucleotides, the last 3 of exon 8 and the first 1 of intron 8, which are replaced by an insertion of 13 nucleotides in the DNA sequence. The insertion is a precise duplication of a part of the adjacent intronic sequence of CSN1S1*C″ . These sequence differences result in an inactivation of the splice donor sequence distal to exon 8, leading to upstream exon skipping during the serial splice reactions of the ovine CSN1S1*H pre-mRNA, and may affect the specific casein expression as well as protein characteristics

Data validation and uncertainty evaluation of the ESTER outdoor facility for testing of PV modules

In the paper the uncertainty analysis of the FTA Lab ESTER facility instrumentation is presented together with the procedure used to validate data outputs through measurements on a reference polycrystalline module provided by ISAAC-SUPSI. The reference module has been tested for several months and a procedure has been identified to sort the IV curves for translation at STC conditions. Blaesser method has been implemented and comparison between STC data from indoor measurements by ISAAC and translated outdoor curves produced quite satisfactory results

Constraints on Heavy Decaying Dark Matter from 570 Days of LHAASO Observations

The kilometer square array (KM2A) of the large high altitude air shower observatory (LHAASO) aims at surveying the northern γ-ray sky at energies above 10 TeV with unprecedented sensitivity. γ-ray observations have long been one of the most powerful tools for dark matter searches, as, e.g., high-energy γ rays could be produced by the decays of heavy dark matter particles. In this Letter, we present the first dark matter analysis with LHAASO-KM2A, using the first 340 days of data from 1/2-KM2A and 230 days of data from 3/4-KM2A. Several regions of interest are used to search for a signal and account for the residual cosmic-ray background after γ/hadron separation. We find no excess of dark matter signals, and thus place some of the strongest γ-ray constraints on the lifetime of heavy dark matter particles with mass between 105 and 109 GeV. Our results with LHAASO are robust, and have important implications for dark matter interpretations of the diffuse astrophysical high-energy neutrino emission

L’orientamento come habitus vivendi in un contesto di sviluppo permanente

The concepts of lifelong learning and guidance are closely interconnected with regard to a necessary reflection-guidance-action to support the different choices at several stages of the life course. Therefore, guidance must necessarily be conceived as an integrated process and developed both in the different contexts that each person goes through in the course of life (school, university and work) and with self-orientation practices capable of supporting a design attitude, of entrepreneurship of oneself in a life design process. In the essay, with regard to university guidance, the experience carried out at University of Trieste is presented through a tool-process, the Personal Development Plan (PDP), designed to support male and female students with respect to future professional prefigurations

Could nearby star-forming galaxies light up the point-like neutrino sky?

Star-forming and starburst galaxies, which are well-known cosmic-rays reservoirs, are expected to emit gamma-rays and neutrinos predominantly via hadronic collisions. In this Letter, we analyze the 10-year Fermi-LAT spectral energy distributions of 13 nearby galaxies by means of a physical model which accounts for high-energy proton transport in starburst nuclei and includes the contribution of primary and secondary electrons. In particular, we test the hypothesis that the observed gamma-ray fluxes are mostly due to star-forming activity, in agreement with the available star formation rates coming from IR and UV observations. Through this observation-based approach, we determine the most-likely neutrino counterpart from star-forming and starburst galaxies and quantitatively assess the ability of current and upcoming neutrino telescopes to detect them as point-like sources. Remarkably, we find that the cores of the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Circinus galaxy are potentially observable by KM3NeT/ARCA with 6 years of observation. Moreover, most of the nearby galaxies are likely to be just a factor of a few below the KM3NeT and IceCube-Gen2 point-like sensitivities. After investigating the prospects for detection of gamma-rays above TeV energies from these sources, we conclude that the joint observations of high-energy neutrinos and gamma-rays with upcoming telescopes will be an objective test for our emission model and may provide compelling evidence of star-forming activity as a tracer of neutrino production.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure