Barbara Reed: Visionary Storyteller and Dramatist

Barbara Reed, now in her eighties, is an individual who, for over fifty years, has been a leader in both children\u27s drama and storytelling (for children and adults). It is because of her tenacious love of the performing arts that they flourish—albeit in some places more than others-for us today. Because of her, the imaginative lives of children and adults continues cyclically, each generation passing onto the next the rich experiences to be found in drama and storytelling

Philosophical Perspectives on Dramatic Art

Describes how the author facilitates drama experiences in the foundations of education courses that she teaches for preservice teachers. Suggests the course helps students gain an understanding of the philosophies of education, the rationale for arts in the curriculum, as well as multiple perspectives of dramatic art, by learning through experience

African American Literature: Books to Stoke Dreams

In addition to market forces, unconsciously damaging trends in many textbooks for teacher education have resulted in classroom trade book collections that represent children who are primarily white and middle class. While all children—whether from Argentina, Afghanistan, or Algeria—deserve to see themselves and their families in books, the focus of this article is on new publications that depict African Americans. Teachers who are committed to learning all they can about multicultural literature and culturally and gender relevant pedagogy become agents of change. Includes significant bibliography of Resources and list of Children’s Literature That Picture Children of African Descent

The Co-Creation of Value: Exploring User Engagement in User-Generated Content Websites

Organizational interest in user-generated content (UGC) websites is growing, as organizations face highly competitive markets, uncertain economic environments, and a growing user base accustomed to active engagement rather than passive acceptance of products and services. Organizations are now exploring ways to provide a platform (website) through which users generate and contribute content, resulting in a co-created experience between users and organizations. However, organizations interested in leveraging UGC websites are facing a new challenge – getting users to actively engage through content contribution, retrieval, and exploration. Thus, the research questions guiding this manuscript are: what factors influence an individual’s user experience in UGC websites and how does the user experience impact individual engagement behavior? This manuscript develops a theory of co-created value to examine how social interactions, operationalized as perceived dialogue, social accessibility, transparency, and risk, and technical features, operationalized as the perceived granularity, extensibility, integration, and evolvability, of a UGC website influence an individual’s user experience and subsequent engagement behaviors. A theoretical model is proposed and propositions are presented for the individual relationships. Implications and future directions for research are also discussed

Paul Laurence Who? Invisibility and Misrepresentation in Children\u27s Literature and Language Arts Textbooks

This article is a call-and-response-type conversation between two women—educators, mothers, lovers of words—on the representation of books about children of color in literature and language arts textbooks for preservice teachers. Scroggins shares anecdotes on the experience and real-life effects of invisibility, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation; her comments are italicized. Gangi reviews select textbooks and booklists. Both comment on the state of multiculturalism in children\u27s literature. Parts of this article were presented at the conference Color, Hair, and Bone: The Persistence of Race into the 21st Century, held at Bucknell University on September 27, 2002. Other parts are adapted from Encountering Children\u27s Literature: An Arts Approach, by Jane M. Gangi (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2004)

Elastic moduli approximation of higher symmetry for the acoustical properties of an anisotropic material

The issue of how to define and determine an optimal acoustical fit to a set of anisotropic elastic constants is addressed. The optimal moduli are defined as those which minimize the mean squared difference in the acoustical tensors between the given moduli and all possible moduli of a chosen higher material symmetry. The solution is shown to be identical to minimizing a Euclidean distance function, or equivalently, projecting the tensor of elastic stiffness onto the appropriate symmetry. This has implications for how to best select anisotropic constants to acoustically model complex materials.Comment: 20 page

Modeling Evacuation Risk Using a Stochastic Process Formulation of Mesoscopic Dynamic Network Loading

One of the actions usually conducted to limit exposure to a hazardous event is the evacuation of the area that is subject to the effects of the event itself. This involves modifications both to demand (a large number of users all want to move together) and to supply (the transport network may experience changes in capacity, unusable roads, etc.). In order to forecast the traffic evolution in a network during an evacuation, a natural choice is to adopt an approach based on Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) models. However, such models typically give a deterministic prediction of future conditions, whereas evacuations are subject to considerable uncertainty. The aim of the present paper is to describe an evacuation approach for decision support during emergencies that directly predicts the time-evolution of the probability of evacuating users from an area, formulated within a discrete-time stochastic process modelling framework. The approach is applied to a small artificial case as well as a real-life network, where we estimate users' probabilities to reach a desired safe destination and analyze time dependent risk factors in an evacuation scenario