Reconfiguring the national canon: The Edinburgh edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield

This paper looks at how the new two volume edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, helps us to reassess the creativity of Katherine Mansfield. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson’s essay on the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield makes clear how in recent years Mansfield has been ‘brought home’ to New Zealand by way of establishing her reputation as a writer of world significance. Those mid twentieth-century years of cultural nationalism, when Frank Sargeson could write that ‘Mansfield imposed this feminine thing on New Zealand’, and Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his milestone Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse could suggest that Mansfield has ‘something like shame for her country’, have long gone. Mansfield has been (re)instated as the country’s foremost writer; her proto-feminism is seen as one of her many qualities, and her in-between location as both a New Zealand writer and an Anglo-European modernist as a defining strength. Mansfield was a diasporic writer; so too for a number of years was Janet Frame. Both Mansfield and Frame are the most innovative and experimental writers New Zealand has produced. And both, of course, were women. The relation between these elements common to both writers, and their significance for New Zealand literary history, is something that still remains to be fully explored

Transcending invisibility through the power of story: an analysis of the life journey of Mr. John, a rural school custodian, as told by his granddaughter

Public school leaders routinely overlook the talents and contributions of blue-collar support staff that can and do play viable roles in the success of schools. Somewhat ironically, a common piece of advice given to first year teachers by more experienced mentors is, Get to know the school secretary and custodian everybody knows they really run the school. Although this phrase is commonly bantered about by educators and informal school lore accords it the status of truth, the school leadership research literature is virtually silent about the contributions such workers can make. In Texas, where there are over one thousand school districts, many of which are rural and stepping stones for career track administrators, it is these community members who work as the secretaries, bus drivers, and custodians that many times serve as the cultural glue helping these districts survive. These invisible workers make important contributions to the coherency of the culture and mission of the school. My white maternal grandfather worked as a custodian in a rural school district for more than fifty-three years. Within the past five years, in the course of conversation, two casual acquaintances volunteered information regarding my grandfathers contributions as a custodian in that school district that later I realized were instrumental in the sense of the project coming to me (Cole & Knowles, 2001). As a rural school custodian with a third grade education, my grandfather lived with multiple oppressive forces in his life. The lack of opportunity for education, the low socio-economic status of his rural family, the marginalization that society deals to those persons who choose dirty work (Meagher, 2002), and the sometimes overt, but often just an unintentional, power struggle with school leadership were all oppressive forces in his life. Whether he consciously realized it or not, my grandfathers behavior (as evidenced by informant conversations) revealed this oppression. He survived, even thrived, and dealt with this oppression through the most effective means he knew of and obviously honed throughout his lifetime. My grandfather used humor as a means of survival. My grandfather was a master storyteller. This is his story

What women know: Perceptions of seven female superintendents

An anomalous concentration of female superintendents in mostly rural South Texas prompted this inquiry. South Texas faces critical shortages in personnel due to impending retirement and turnover of existing school administrators and superintendents (Wesson & Marshall, 2012). It is difficult to recruit and retain the best talent necessary to solve tough school improvement challenges—high dropout rates, high poverty, low student achievement, and complex multi-cultural issues—in high needs, Hispanic majority, primarily rural school districts (Trevino Jr., Braley, Brown, & Slate, 2008; Wesson & Marshall, 2012). Krüger (2008) stated women are stronger educational leaders than men. Females seek and obtain leadership credentials for the express purpose of impacting education for students (Young & McLeod, 2001). Schools of all sizes and levels with female administrators achieved higher student success than schools with male administrators, according to a 7000 campus Texas study, in the 2006-2007 academic year (Roser, Brown, & Kelsey, 2009). In every ethnic group, women earn more doctoral degrees in education than men; women earn bachelors and masters degrees in education in proportion to their representation in the field; and women have more years of teaching experience than men (Shakeshaft, Brown, Irby, Grogan, & Ballenger, 2007). Women also outnumber men in education administration preparation programs (Petrie & Lindauer, 2001). Yet women are not ascending to the superintendency in proportion to their representation in the education profession (Shakeshaft et al., 2007). This naturalistic study of seven female superintendents in South Texas, including leaders in large and small rural districts, illuminated perceptions and experiences of female school leadership through portraiture and lent insight into common themes of aspiration and motivation

Student's perceptions of plagiarism

While plagiarism by college students is a serious problem that must be addressed, students generally overestimate the frequency of plagiarism at their schools and blame students they do not know for the majority of incidents. This study looked at students’ estimations of the frequency of plagiarism at a large urban college and explored how that varied over the full range of types of plagiarism, from using another author’s ideas to submitting an entire document copied verbatim from another author’s work. Analysis of student responses to survey items revealed they believe other students are far more likely than them to commit each type of plagiarism and they recognize that some types of plagiarism are more serious than others. The opportunity to reduce incidents of plagiarism by providing students with accurate information about plagiarism at their schools is discussed in the context of social norms theory

Importance of the Active Site "Canopy" Residues in an O_2-Tolerant [NiFe]-Hydrogenase

The active site of Hyd-1, an oxygen-tolerant membrane-bound [NiFe]-hydrogenase from Escherichia coli, contains four highly conserved residues that form a “canopy” above the bimetallic center, closest to the site at which exogenous agents CO and O_2 interact, substrate H_2 binds, and a hydrido intermediate is stabilized. Genetic modification of the Hyd-1 canopy has allowed the first systematic and detailed kinetic and structural investigation of the influence of the immediate outer coordination shell on H_2 activation. The central canopy residue, arginine 509, suspends a guanidine/guanidinium side chain at close range above the open coordination site lying between the Ni and Fe atoms (N–metal distance of 4.4 Å): its replacement with lysine lowers the H_2 oxidation rate by nearly 2 orders of magnitude and markedly decreases the H_2/D_2 kinetic isotope effect. Importantly, this collapse in rate constant can now be ascribed to a very unfavorable activation entropy (easily overriding the more favorable activation enthalpy of the R509K variant). The second most important canopy residue for H_2 oxidation is aspartate 118, which forms a salt bridge to the arginine 509 headgroup: its mutation to alanine greatly decreases the H_2 oxidation efficiency, observed as a 10-fold increase in the potential-dependent Michaelis constant. Mutations of aspartate 574 (also salt-bridged to R509) to asparagine and proline 508 to alanine have much smaller effects on kinetic properties. None of the mutations significantly increase sensitivity to CO, but neutralizing the expected negative charges from D118 and D574 decreases O_2 tolerance by stabilizing the oxidized resting Ni^(III)–OH state (“Ni-B”). An extensive model of the catalytic importance of residues close to the active site now emerges, whereby a conserved gas channel culminates in the arginine headgroup suspended above the Ni and Fe