Public school art teacher autonomy in a segregated city: Affordances and contradictions

Over the past two decades, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a lot of change. First there was the opening of magnet schools, and other gestures at reform, followed by school closures and the flourishing of charter schools. In this essay, two former Chicago art teachers, one who taught in a prominent college prep magnet high school on the north side, and one who taught in an under-resourced neighborhood high school on the south side, examine the commonalities of their otherwise divergent experiences, particularly with regard to the freedom allotted to both them and their students by the administrative affordances in their respective situations. While the schools were starkly different in numerous respects, the surprising ability of both teachers to lead collaborative projects that they and their students found engaging, partly through reaching outside the bounds of the institution, may offer an example of teacher autonomy and emergent pedagogy that seems particularly relevant to the public school setting

Extended Reissner-Nordstr\"om solutions sourced by dynamical torsion

We find a new exact vacuum solution in the framework of the Poincar\'e Gauge field theory with massive torsion. In this model, torsion operates as an independent field and introduces corrections to the vacuum structure present in General Relativity. The new static and spherically symmetric configuration shows a Reissner-Nordstr\"om-like geometry characterized by a spin charge. It extends the known massless torsion solution to the massive case. The corresponding Reissner-Nordstr\"om-de Sitter solution is also compatible with a cosmological constant and additional U(1) gauge fields.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figures, minor changes, references adde