Effects of Mentorship on Empathy Development and Civility in an Upper School Community

This action research project investigated the effects of mentorship on empathy development and civility in an upper school classroom. The environment was a Montessori upper school with 21 children ages 6 through 13. It is a newer classroom; however, there is a level of incivility and indifference in their social behaviors. Data was collected using an interactions matrix, pre and post surveys, classroom behavior tally, and the Developmental Environmental Rating Scale before and after the intervention. Results showed civility and joy greatly increased over time. Individuals’ understanding of empathy showed a positive change. Overall, the classroom became more civil and showed a better awareness of appropriate social behaviors. The action plan proposed creating a study focusing more intently on mentorship implementation using prepared activities for the mentors to share. Also suggested is conducting a study of relationship building within a classroom instead of across classrooms

Hulton Abbey Skeletal Digitisation Project JISC / Academy Distributed e-Learning (DeL) Programme II

The aim of this project was to produce a digitised record/resources from skeletal material recovered from a well publicised excavation of historical importance in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. This excavation took place at Hulton Abbey and produced a published book as part of its work. Whilst the initial aim of this project was to produce digitised resources which will be actively used for forensic science teaching at Staffordshire University and Reading University these can equally and readily be adopted by other organisations and institutions. In addition, due to the interdisciplinary interest in this work, the potential for re-purposing and re-use of these digitised resources is enormous. Due to the anatomical nature of the skeletal excavations there is potential for use in anthropological and biological (e.g. disease) studies and there is also historical and religious sociological and cultural applications as well as in photographic studies, computing and e-learning technologies

An Exact Chiral Amorphous Spin Liquid

Topological insulator phases of non-interacting particles have been generalized from periodic crystals to amorphous lattices, which raises the question whether topologically ordered quantum many-body phases may similarly exist in amorphous systems? Here we construct a soluble chiral amorphous quantum spin liquid by extending the Kitaev honeycomb model to random lattices with fixed coordination number three. The model retains its exact solubility but the presence of plaquettes with an odd number of sides leads to a spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry. We unearth a rich phase diagram displaying Abelian as well as a non-Abelian quantum spin liquid phases with a remarkably simple ground state flux pattern. Furthermore, we show that the system undergoes a finite-temperature phase transition to a conducting thermal metal state and discuss possible experimental realisations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure