Media literacy instruction in today’s classrooms: A study of teachers’ knowledge, confidence, and integration

Teachers play a critical role in helping to ensure that students leave school with the skills needed to not only be critical consumers of media, but to also be thoughtful and knowledgeable producers of mediated messages. Despite the important role of teachers in media literacy education, we still know very little about teachers’ knowledge of and experiences with media literacy in the classroom. This information is a critical piece in understanding how to best support teachers as they integrate media literacy education within PreK-12 classrooms. The current study seeks to add to the growing body of research in this area by examining secondary teachers’ knowledge of media literacy, confidence incorporating it in classes, and actual integration of media literacy education in courses. Results of a survey of 71 teachers found a relationship between knowledge, confidence, and integration of media literacy. Implications of the study results are discussed

Experiences of the Left in Power: State Formation, Class Formation and the Production of Space in Urban Bolivia

PhDThis thesis traces the experiences of urban working-class groups in the cities of El Alto and Santa Cruz during the government of Evo Morales through the dynamics of state formation, class formation and the production of space. Using material gather in over 100 semi-structured interviews and participant observation during seventeenmonths of fieldwork in the cities of El Alto, La Paz and Santa Cruz, it seeks to analyse the experience of different working-class groups under what I frame as the passive revolution of Morales’ government. Critical support for Morales in the city of El Alto continues, even as conditions of precarity, informality and poverty persist for many of the working-classes there. In Santa Cruz, the working-classes were never mobilised to the same extent and remained outside the influence or the interest of Morales’ government. Faced with adverse conditions, working-class organisations here have followed more pragmatic forms of politics, building local alliances with different political and state actors to pursue more limited localised goals. This thesis thus attempts to contribute, on the one hand, to theoretical perspectives on passive revolution as a process that is constantly contested through class struggle and being reinforced by different modes of statecraft. It also, on the other hand, illuminates the quotidian realities of the urban working-classes under the leftwing government of Evo Morales, arguing that the possibility of political action is simultaneously affected by processes of class formation and the subjective experience of class of different groups in different places as well as by processes of transformism.ESRC grant number ES/J500124/1

Lady researchers : mapping urban community and learning spaces

This paper documents a collaborative research project with middle and high school young women during an afterschool program at Children and Urban Family Movement (CFUM) in Des Moines, Iowa. A research team consisting of members from the School of Education, Community and Regional Planning, Human Development and Family Studies, and Extension and Outreach from Iowa State University partnered with CFUM to provide programming for gender-specific youth called Design Dialogues. The research team, with the help of ISU Undergraduate Facilitators, conducted six discussion groups with middle and high school youth. During the fall of 2015, The Whyld Girls, also known as Lady Researchers, literally and figuratively “mapped” their community and learning spaces during each activity

Quantum incompressibility of a falling Rydberg atom, and a gravitationally-induced charge separation effect in superconducting systems

Freely falling point-like objects converge towards the center of the Earth. Hence the gravitational field of the Earth is inhomogeneous, and possesses a tidal component. The free fall of an extended quantum object such as a hydrogen atom prepared in a high principal-quantum-number stretch state, i.e., a circular Rydberg atom, is predicted to fall more slowly that a classical point-like object, when both objects are dropped from the same height from above the Earth. This indicates that, apart from "quantum jumps," the atom exhibits a kind of "quantum incompressibility" during free fall in inhomogeneous, tidal gravitational fields like those of the Earth. A superconducting ring-like system with a persistent current circulating around it behaves like the circular Rydberg atom during free fall. Like the electronic wavefunction of the freely falling atom, the Cooper-pair wavefunction is "quantum incompressible." The ions of the ionic lattice of the superconductor, however, are not "quantum incompressible," since they do not possess a globally coherent quantum phase. The resulting difference during free fall in the response of the nonlocalizable Cooper pairs of electrons and the localizable ions to inhomogeneous gravitational fields is predicted to lead to a charge separation effect, which in turn leads to a large repulsive Coulomb force that opposes the convergence caused by the tidal, attractive gravitational force on the superconducting system. A "Cavendish-like" experiment is proposed for observing the charge separation effect induced by inhomogeneous gravitational fields in a superconducting circuit. This experiment would demonstrate the existence of a novel coupling between gravity and electricity via macroscopically coherent quantum matter.Comment: `2nd Vienna Symposium for the Foundations of Modern Physics' Festschrift MS for Foundations of Physic