Characterizing Groundwater-Surface Water Interactions in Great Smoky Mountains National Park using Hydrologic, Geochemical & Isotopic Data

Groundwater-surface water interactions can substantially influence the quality of surficial water bodies and are thus important when investigating ecological health of and climate change impacts on an area. However, data collection can be hindered when the location is remote and/or legally protected. This paper presents a methodology to implement minimallyinvasive field techniques at a remote and protected location that allows preliminary identification of the relationship between groundwater and surface water. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was selected as the study area as it is subjected to some of the highest rates of acid deposition in the country. Ecological damage is evident in several areas, including Ramsay Prong, a typical fourth-order stream located on the Tennessee side of the park. Ramsay Prong is evaluated on the basis of discharge, water quality, geochemistry, and stable isotopes at six points along the channel. It should be noted that increasing drought conditions occurred in the basin over the course of this study, providing an opportunity to evaluate the situation of low baseflow. Results indicate that storage capacity in the headwaters is insufficient to supply typical baseflow volume during extended dry periods, whereas sufficient alluvium exists at the bottom of the catchment to capture and recharge the basin water supply. A shallow fracture network likely provides long flowpaths for water to travel toward the basin bottom. Furthermore, baseflow is supplied by interflow as well as shallow groundwater storage; the portion of baseflow comprised by interflow increases with increasing antecedent precipitation. Diffuse groundwater recharge occurs mainly in the headwaters where steep slopes dominate the topography, while focused recharge occurs in bedrock depressions within the reaches and at the end of the channel. These observations, coupled with geochemical and isotopic data, indicate that neutralization of acidic inputs is best accomplished in the lower elevations of the basin. It is recommended that future studies investigate the ecological impacts of reduced precipitation in terms of acid neutralization capabilities along Ramsay Prong

Dangers of generic pedagogical panaceas: implementing sevice-learning differently in diverse disciplines

Descriptions of service-learning in the literature tend to position it as a powerful pedagogic tool as well as an exemplar of ‘best practice’ applicable across all disciplines and institutional contexts. Furthermore service-learning is couched as a moral imperative. In the South African context, this moral imperative is translated into policy pronouncements driving institutions of higher education to demonstrate responsiveness to the transformation needs of broader society. In this article, two departments, Philosophy and Environmental Science, at one university are used as case studies to interrogate what enables the uptake of service-learning as a pedagogic tool. Drawing on the work of Fairclough, this paper identifies the dominant discourses at play and considers how they constrain or enable the uptake of service-learning. We advocate for the infusion of service-learning in curricula, but argue that institutional culture, disciplinary values and the structure of knowledge impact on its uptake and should not be dismissed in the implementation process

Introduction: Pre-service TESOL Teachers Speak Out About edTPA

We are stalwart advocates of public school education, and not just because we hold dear the notion of all citizens having access to the body of knowledge and critical thinking skills that they will use for the rest of their lives. We support it because we love it. There is nothing quite like walking through the doors of a bustling public school, and immediately being hit with the slightly musty smell of aging linoleum floors, seeing the sometimes crumbling but often lovingly decorated walls, and hearing what sounds like the chaotic noises of the students. When we step closer, however, we usually hear and see something that isn’t so much chaotic, but rather, remarkable: growth-in-action. We see children– younger or older– who represent a plethora of cultures, speak many languages, and come from all walks of life. Within earshot or line of vision of these children, we see someone else, too. We see someone who cares deeply about learning, someone who has probably spent hours upon hours drawing up lesson plans and grading papers, and most importantly, someone who sincerely cares about these children, and thinks and worries about them far beyond the confines of the classroom. We call that person the teacher

edTPA? Good Grief!

Over the course of six months, edTPA went from being an abstract jumble of letters thrown around to describe some assessment that we were going to have to do at some point before graduation (yes, the conversations were that uncertain) to a very concrete mountain that each member of my cohort was expected to climb triumphantly, in spite of the fact that the road to the top was still in the process of being built. In the beginning, I tried to pretend it didn’t exist, in the middle I found myself grappling with how to best fit into a model that didn’t seem to appreciate who I was as a teacher, and in the end I accepted that I had to jump through the hoop of fire at the end of the road if I wanted the medal of state certification hung round my neck. In psychology, they’d say I went through the five stages of grief and loss—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Now how’s that for a resounding endorsement for edTPA

A Polyphonic Approach to the \u27Dark Side\u27 of Making Video Games

This paper considers the video game industry and how it is represented through social media blogs and tweets. It aims to disentangle the polyphony of voices communicating through different stories about what it means to work in the gaming industry. The multiple voices found within the blogs and tweets weave a complex and contested narrative about the carnivalesque way in which video games are made, poignantly illustrating the good, the bad, and the ugly. Using the work of the Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 1993), and particularly his notions of monologic and dialogic stories and narratives (McKenna, 2010), the paper seeks to understand what these voices are communicating within the anecdotes, stories and descriptions contained in blogs and tweets. It uses components of literary theory associated with Bakhtin (1984, 1993) to connect the monological dimension of what is communicated (the micro-level world of the blogger) with the dialogical dimension (the industry, socio-political, ideological and other voices) which are communicated through the blogs and tweets

The use of turnitin in the higher education sector: Decoding the myth

Plagiarism needs to be addressed to maintain academic standards and to safeguard the integrity of the academic project. With the evolving digital world, conventional methods of addressing plagiarism are gradually being dismissed in favour of new technologies. Unfortunately, there is a general misunderstanding about what such technologies do. This paper was written from a PhD study, and looks at how such misunderstandings emerge across the higher education sector of one country. Institutional policies and other documents related to plagiarism were analysed from public universities across South Africa, and this was then augmented with interviews with members of institutional plagiarism committees. The results of the study revealed that technology is a key facet in these universities’ attempts to reduce the incidents of plagiarism, and that Turnitin is the most favored text-matching tool. However, the software is misunderstood to be predominantly a plagiarism detection tool for policing purposes, ignoring its educational potential for student development. The implication is that, if Turnitin is primarily used as a policing tool, students are not only denied access to nuanced pedagogical interventions that might develop their academic writing, but its misuse could also change students’ behavior in undesirable ways

Introduction: Pre-service TESOL Teachers Speak Out About edTPA

We are stalwart advocates of public school education, and not just because we hold dear the notion of all citizens having access to the body of knowledge and critical thinking skills that they will use for the rest of their lives. We support it because we love it. There is nothing quite like walking through the doors of a bustling public school, and immediately being hit with the slightly musty smell of aging linoleum floors, seeing the sometimes crumbling but often lovingly decorated walls, and hearing what sounds like the chaotic noises of the students. When we step closer, however, we usually hear and see something that isn’t so much chaotic, but rather, remarkable: growth-in-action. We see children– younger or older– who represent a plethora of cultures, speak many languages, and come from all walks of life. Within earshot or line of vision of these children, we see someone else, too. We see someone who cares deeply about learning, someone who has probably spent hours upon hours drawing up lesson plans and grading papers, and most importantly, someone who sincerely cares about these children, and thinks and worries about them far beyond the confines of the classroom. We call that person the teacher

The MMM Initiative

We’ve determined that information collected and distributed by and on news and social media outlets has manifested in political biases of its users. It is clear that this issue has subsequently led to political polarization and ethnic prejudice. To combat this problem, we have devised an online informational package and an interactive experience to teach people how to use it. Our website provides the resources to check personal biases and recognize ethnic prejudices. The seminar encourages people to apply and spread their newfound knowledge. We conducted interviews with experts, surveys, and an extensive literature review. Through our research and feedback from over 40 partners, we have found that access to social media literacy education is virtually non-existent — hence the need for a comprehensive, easily digestible informational package. It\u27s not enough to create a package, we also need people to see it. Our interviews with experts tell us that the best way to engage students is through interactive experiences. Therefore, we supplemented these educational tools with an experience that consists of a community group and the extensive use of partners to promote our package to their respective networks. Our resources use text, visuals, videos, conversation, and other interactive elements to educate users on how the use of media can exacerbate ethnic prejudices. To measure the attitude change of our viewers, we created a set of surveys concerning media usage and its relationship with bias. We also tracked the attendance of the seminar so that we could understand how widespread our message is. Hundreds of people have accessed our website with an accumulation of over 2,000 views. We expect this to continue growing exponentially as word of its existence continues to spread. Our project has a global reach with at least 15 countries and 25 states reached

Maximum Covering Subtrees for Phylogenetic Networks

Tree-based phylogenetic networks, which may be roughly defined as leaf-labeled networks built by adding arcs only between the original tree edges, have elegant properties for modeling evolutionary histories. We answer an open question of Francis, Semple, and Steel about the complexity of determining how far a phylogenetic network is from being tree-based, including non-binary phylogenetic networks. We show that finding a phylogenetic tree covering the maximum number of nodes in a phylogenetic network can be be computed in polynomial time via an encoding into a minimum-cost maximum flow problem

From affirmative to transformative approaches to academic development

Much academic development work, whether it be student, academic staff, institutional or curriculum development, is undertaken from an affirmative rather than a transformative approach (Luckett, L., and S. Shay. 2020.“Reframing the Curriculum: A Transformative Approach.” Critical Studies in Education61 (1): 50–65). To be transformative, academic development has to reframe the problem beyond one of poor student retention and throughput. We need to make sense of the conditions from which issues such as poor retention and throughput rates emerge, rather than focusing on mitigating the effects of such conditions within the status quo. Drawing on Fraser’s concept of parity of participation, we suggest that if academic development is to engage in transformative approaches, it needs to adjust the scale of the problem and challenge underpinning assumptions, and thereby review the fitness of universities, curricula and academic development practices for a pluralist society. In sum, a transformative approach to academic development work will entail conceptualising academic development as a political knowledge project