The Myth of the Unteachable: Youth, Race and the Capacity of Alternative Pedagogy

My research consisted of three years of qualitative inquiry, including 62 interviews with members of the Department of Education, school administrators, teachers and students, as well as a yearlong ethnography at a transfer school that I chose because of its history of success with the city\u27s hardest- to-reach youth. To my knowledge, mine is the first formal study of New York City transfer schools. Transfer schools are New York City\u27s public alternative schools, which serve over-age, under- credited high school students (i.e. students who are behind in school). These students experience many challenges and interruptions to their education, including homelessness, incarceration, immigration, financial hardship (that can require students to work during school hours), being (teen) parents, drug addiction, and having to care for sick or dying family members, to name a few. There are presently 44 transfer schools in the city, and the overwhelming majority of students who attend them are poor youth of color. I engage existing scholarship on education policy, social reproduction, and critical race theory, and prioritize the voices of students and teachers in my analysis. In The Myth of the Unteachable: Youth, Race and the Capacity of Alternative Pedagogy, I make three main arguments. First, I describe how schools contribute to the reproduction of race and class inequalities. However, my data show that when economically disadvantaged students of color are instructed to locate their own academic failures in the historical context of an education system that has consistently produced unequal outcomes, those students can learn to see the difference between their personal failures, and the failures of the school system, and this helps them to regain the self-esteem necessary to make significant educational progress. Second, I show how accountability-era (2001-present) education policies like the Bush administration\u27s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Obama administration\u27s Race to the Top (RTT) undermine public education and especially frustrate the work of transfer schools that serve at-risk youth. Contributing the case of transfer schools to extant scholarship on the more general harms of NCLB and RTT, I follow education policy from the national to the local level, describing how policies trickle down to affect individual transfer schools, teachers and students in damaging and destructive ways. Lastly, using psychoanalytic theory, I apply the concept of working alliance to student-teacher relationships, articulating how these relationships affect student outcomes. In educational contexts, working alliance refers to generative and productive relationships between teachers and students. The development of a working alliance entails achieving consensus about what school is for, and how learning occurs. This requires agreement about goals and tasks, and is especially strengthened by the development of interpersonal bonds between students and teachers. I describe how working alliances can be achieved, and illustrate how the development of these alliances increased student retention and achievement

Kondo effect in a few-electron quantum ring

A small quantum ring with less than 10 electrons was studied by transport spectroscopy. For strong coupling to the leads a Kondo effect is observed and used to characterize the spin structure of the system in a wide range of magnetic fields. At small magnetic fields Aharonov-Bohm oscillations influenced by Coulomb interaction appear. They exhibit phase jumps by $\pi$ at the Coulomb-blockade resonances. Inside Coulomb-blockade valleys the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations can also be studied due to the finite conductance caused by the Kondo effect. Astonishingly, the maxima of the oscillations show linear shifts with magnetic field and gate voltage.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Aharonov-Bohm oscillations of a tunable quantum ring

With an atomic force microscope a ring geometry with self-aligned in-plane gates was directly written into a GaAs/AlGaAs-heterostructure. Transport measurements in the open regime show only one transmitting mode and Aharonov-Bohm oscillations with more than 50% modulation are observed in the conductance. The tuning via in-plane gates allows to study the Aharonov-Bohm effect in the whole range from the open ring to the Coulomb-blockade regime.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Understanding adhesion at as-deposited interfaces from ab initio thermodynamics of deposition growth: thin-film alumina on titanium carbide

We investigate the chemical composition and adhesion of chemical vapour deposited thin-film alumina on TiC using and extending a recently proposed nonequilibrium method of ab initio thermodynamics of deposition growth (AIT-DG) [Rohrer J and Hyldgaard P 2010 Phys. Rev. B 82 045415]. A previous study of this system [Rohrer J, Ruberto C and Hyldgaard P 2010 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 22 015004] found that use of equilibrium thermodynamics leads to predictions of a non-binding TiC/alumina interface, despite the industrial use as a wear-resistant coating. This discrepancy between equilibrium theory and experiment is resolved by the AIT-DG method which predicts interfaces with strong adhesion. The AIT-DG method combines density functional theory calculations, rate-equation modelling of the pressure evolution of the deposition environment and thermochemical data. The AIT-DG method was previously used to predict prevalent terminations of growing or as-deposited surfaces of binary materials. Here we extent the method to predict surface and interface compositions of growing or as-deposited thin films on a substrate and find that inclusion of the nonequilibrium deposition environment has important implications for the nature of buried interfaces.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to J. Phys.: Condens. Matte

Socially optimal contribution rate and cap in a proportional (DC) pension system

In our model, the government operates a mandatory proportional (DC) pension system to substitute for the low life-cycle savings of the lower-paid myopic workers, while maintaining the incentives of the higher-paid far-sighted ones in contributing to the system. The introduction of an appropriate cap on pension contribution (or its base)—excluding the earnings above the cap from the contribution base—raises the optimal contribution rate, helping more the lower-paid myopic workers and reserving enough room for the saving of higher-paid far-sighted ones. The social welfare is almost independent of the cap in a relatively wide interval but the maximal welfare is higher than the capless welfare by 0.3–4.5 %.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Archaeology in 2022: Counter‐myths for hopeful futures

Archaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat retrograde and racist narratives that remain pervasive in the public sphere. At the same time, the field has a deep‐seated conservative bastion toward which many scholars retreat, arguing for an “objective” past that is free of political implications or interpretive ambiguity. As anarchist archaeologists, we see the myth of the objective past as one of many interconnected myths that have provided the basis for an archaeology that reifies and proliferates the current social order. We deconstruct myths relating to capitalist and colonialist ideologies of “human nature,” the assumed inevitability of the current order, and fatalistic commitment to dystopian or utopian futures. As alternatives, we present counter‐myths that emphasize the contingent and political nature of archaeological praxis, the creative and collaborative foundation of communities, the alternative orders that archaeology uncovers, and the role of a hopeful past for constructing the possibilities of different futures