Weaving the Braid of Culturally Responsive Leadership Within Policy and Governance to Improve Indigenous Student Success

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) explores a Problem of Practice (PoP) that highlights the need for why the Board of Education and the Senior Administration team within the Raven Bay School Division (RBSD, pseudonym) would benefit from using a culturally responsive leadership approach when making decisions and how this may be achieved through policy and governance to guide their practice. The goal of this OIP is to examine why this leadership approach would be relevant for the Board of Education and the Senior Leadership team when they are making any policy and governance decisions, as it relates to Indigenous Education and how this leadership approach could positively support the improvement of educational outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous learners across the RBSD. The recommended solutions found within this OIP are intended to show how the RBSD can weave together a culturally responsive braid of policy and governance to address their goal of improving Indigenous learner outcomes found within their strategic. If this OIP is implemented, the solutions could be turned into strategies that work towards positively closing the current achievement gap that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners within the RBSD. Thus, beginning to shift the negative narrative of the culture of low expectations for Indigenous learners within the RBSD to a positive narrative of equity and success through the lens of culturally responsive leadership. Keywords: Aboriginal, Aboriginal Learning, Aboriginal Rights, Assimilation, Colonization, Culture, Decolonization, Educator, Emotional Intelligence, Ethical, Experiential Learning, First Nations, First Peoples, Holistic Education, Indigenizing Education, Lifelong Learning, Reconciliation, Social Emotional Learning, Transformative Change, Worldvie

Preservation of a Vietnam War-Era Slide Collection: A Master’s Project to research, catalogue, digitize and exhibit the photo-documentary collection of Kenneth L. Swain Jr., United States Air Force Veteran

The purpose of this master’s project thesis is to explore and implement the necessary professional museum practices to care for and preserve the private Vietnam War-era slide collection of Kenneth L. Swain Jr., an Air Force veteran. Through museum practices presented by leading museum professionals, the slide collection was examined and a plan implemented for slide care and maintenance. In conjunction with the preservation of this slide collection, an exhibition was curated in honor of Swain’s unique photo-documentary slide collection

On correlation between protein secondary structure, backbone bond angles, and side-chain orientations

We investigate the fine structure of the sp3 hybridized covalent bond geometry that governs the tetrahedral architecture around the central C$_\alpha$ carbon of a protein backbone, and for this we develop new visualization techniques to analyze high resolution X-ray structures in Protein Data Bank. We observe that there is a correlation between the deformations of the ideal tetrahedral symmetry and the local secondary structure of the protein. We propose a universal coarse grained energy function to describe the ensuing side-chain geometry in terms of the C$_\beta$ carbon orientations. The energy function can model the side-chain geometry with a sub-atomic precision. As an example we construct the C$_\alpha$-C$_\beta$ structure of HP35 chicken villin headpiece. We obtain a configuration that deviates less than 0.4 \.A in root-mean-square distance from the experimental X-ray structure

Knots in interaction

We study the geometry of interacting knotted solitons. The interaction is local and advances either as a three-body or as a four-body process, depending on the relative orientation and a degeneracy of the solitons involved. The splitting and adjoining is governed by a four-point vertex in combination with duality transformations. The total linking number is preserved during the interaction. It receives contributions both from the twist and the writhe, which are variable. Therefore solitons can twine and coil and links can be formed.Comment: figures now in GIF forma

Elastic Energy and Phase Structure in a Continuous Spin Ising Chain with Applications to the Protein Folding Problem

We present a numerical Monte Carlo analysis of a continuos spin Ising chain that can describe the statistical proterties of folded proteins. We find that depending on the value of the Metropolis temperature, the model displays the three known nontrivial phases of polymers: At low temperatures the model is in a collapsed phase, at medium temperatures it is in a random walk phase, and at high temperatures it enters the self-avoiding random walk phase. By investigating the temperature dependence of the specific energy we confirm that the transition between the collapsed phase and the random walk phase is a phase transition, while the random walk phase and self-avoiding random walk phase are separated from each other by a cross-over transition. We also compare the predictions of the model to a phenomenological elastic energy formula, proposed by Huang and Lei to describe folded proteins.Comment: 12 pages, 23 figures, RevTeX 4.

Gauge Invariance and Finite Temperature Effective Actions of Chern-Simons Gauge Theories with Fermions

We discuss the behavior of theories of fermions coupled to Chern-Simons gauge fields with a non-abelian gauge group in three dimensions and at finite temperature. Using non-perturbative arguments and gauge invariance, and in contradiction with perturbative results, we show that the coefficient of the Chern-Simons term of the effective actions for the gauge fields at finite temperature can be {\it at most} an integer function of the temperature. This is in a sense a generalized no-renormalization theorem. We also discuss the case of abelian theories and give indications that a similar condition should hold there too. We discuss consequences of our results to the thermodynamics of anyon superfluids and fractional quantum Hall systems.Comment: Revtex, multico