Compassion Fatigue: Stories/Artworks of an Art Teacher with a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

As art teachers engage with big ideas such as identity, relationships, power, and conflict in art lessons, students may share experiences of trauma with teachers. Art teachers aren’t being taught how to cope with student trauma, leading to compassion fatigue, burnout, and dropout. Teacher self-care is essential with the increase in trauma-informed education. I studied with a middle school art teacher in Columbus, Ohio who was experiencing compassion fatigue. Through a critical pedagogy and post-structuralist lens, I exchanged stories with her. To represent the teacher’s voice, I turned each interview question/response into a participant-voiced poem, and responded with a researcher-voiced poem. I created short stories written from a student perspective to demonstrate student trauma by combining true stories of the students and fiction. Themes included poverty, homelessness/parents with disabilities, suicide, and single-parent homes. To demonstrate compassion fatigue solutions, the teacher and I collaboratively created an artwork, using student artworks too. Findings discussed include recommendations for support, resources, time, structure, and professional development to sustain empathetic teachers. Art teachers with students experiencing trauma and teacher preparation programs benefit from this research. With resources and training, art teachers can become powerful agents in changing students’ traumatic circumstances and instilling student resilience

The WPS agenda and the 'refugee crisis': missing connections and missed opportunities in Europe

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has successfully constructed the figure of the conflict-affected woman as a subject worthy of attention, inclusion and protection on the part of the international community. This concern is especially palpable when she is physically present in a conflict zone. As the conflict-affected woman flees and seeks safety and security in Europe, however, she moves to the periphery of the area of concern of WPS policies and discourses. In this working paper, we demonstrate that forcibly displaced persons skirt the margins of the WPS agenda: refugees are present in WPS policies, but as the subjects of marginal and inconsistent concern. We interrogate the effects of this marginalisation, and suggest that including refugee questions in WPS policymaking and scholarship carries the potential to improve security provision for those who have fled to Europe, as well as to revive the transformative potential of the WPS agend

Collaborative Poetic Inquiry as Micro-Resistance: Reconciling Art Educators’ Identity Dissonance in Professional Spaces

Two teachers explore conflicts at the intersection of their personal and professional identities in public university spaces, examining reconciliation of identities in dissonance using collaborative poetic inquiry. Normative expectations permeate the academy, defined in the United States through White, male, middle class, non-disabled, able-minded, heterosexual, and Christian values, requiring teachers operating outside of these frameworks to perform in ways which place them in contradiction. This article proposes a collaborative, experimental poetic process to reflect on marginalized aspects of identity, intellectualize power dynamics involved in workplace conflicts, explore dynamics of privilege-oppression, and assess which parts of identity to sustain and which to reconcile to enable coexistence. Suggestions for art teacher outliers include finding tertiary relationships, creating collaborative poetic assemblages to bring clarification to workplace conflicts, and creating opportunities to reposition oneself within new narratives. This research provides a space for all teachers to build resilience in education spaces

Women, peace and security after Europe's 'refugee crisis'

Since its inception in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has conceptualised the conflict-Affected woman as a subject worthy of international attention, protection, and inclusion. In the wake of Europe's 'refugee crisis', this article examines how the remit of WPS has broadened from women in conflict zones to refugees in Europe's borderlands. A minority of European states now attend, in their WPS policy, to these conflict-Affected women on the move. This inclusion productively challenges established notions of where conflict-Affectedness is located. It exposes Europe as not always peaceful and safe for women, especially refugees who flee war. Conversely, the dominant tendency to exclude refugees from European WPS policy is built on a fantasy of Europe as peaceful and secure for women, which legitimises the fortressing of Europe and obscures European states' complicity in fuelling insecurity at their borders, cultivating an ethos of coloniality around the WPS agenda. The inclusion of refugees is no panacea to these problems. If focused solely on protection, it repositions European states as protective heroes and conflict-Affected women as helpless victims. The WPS framework nonetheless emphasises conflict-Affected women's participation in decision-making and conflict prevention, opening space for recognising the refugee women as political actors

Alternate endings: using fiction to explore design futures

Design research and practice within HCI is inherently oriented toward the future. However, the vision of the future described by HCI researchers and practitioners is typically utility-driven and focuses on the short term. It rarely acknowledges the potentially complex social and psychological long-term consequences of the technology artefacts produced. Thus, it has the potential to unintentionally cause real harm. Drawing on scholarship that investigates the link between fiction and design, this workshop will explore “alternate endings” to contemporary HCI papers. Attendees will use fictional narratives to envision long-term consequences of contemporary HCI projects, as a means for engaging the CHI community in a consideration of the values and implications of interactive technology

Curating conflict : political violence in museums, memorials, and exhibitions

Amidst the protest movements sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hand of police officers in Minneapolis in May 2020, anti-racist demonstrators have taken over prominent statues evoking people and systems that supported the enslavement of people of colour. In Richmond, Virginia, the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee became a site of confrontations between protesters and the police (Schneider 2020). Imposing themselves as co-curators of the statue, protesters covered the imposing pedestal in colourful slogans, drawings, and homemade memorials to African-Americans killed by the police. After June 4th, when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced the removal of the statue, protesters continued to actively re-interpret what the site stood for. Pointedly, on June 5th, two young African-American ballerinas posed at the foot of the memorial in pointe shoes, black leotards and skirts, and with raised fists. The photographs that captured the moment exclude Lee from the frame, focusing on the dancers and the graffiti. The moment was acclaimed as ‘a confluence of creative expression and black empowerment’ (Shaw 2020). Thanks to such interventions, the site was evolving from one primarily associated with the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederate States, to make space for the commemoration of black injury and the celebration of black resistance

Developing a control strategy for sequence variants

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Focus, Vol. 1 No. 1

A literary magazine of student writing published by the Department of English of Stephen F. Austin State College.https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/focus/1000/thumbnail.jp

Laboratory experiments and grain based discrete element numerical simulations investigating the thermo-mechanical behaviour of sandstone

Thermo-mechanical loading can occur in numerous engineering geological environments, from both natural and anthropogenic sources. Different minerals and micro-defects in rock cause heterogeneity at a grain scale, affecting the mechanical and thermal properties of the material. Changes in strength and stiffness can occur from exposure to elevated temperatures, with the accumulation of localised stresses resulting in thermally induced micro-cracking within the rock. In this study we investigated thermal micro-cracking at a grain scale through both laboratory experiments and their numerical simulations. We performed laboratory triaxial experiments on specimens of fine-grained sandstone at a confining pressure of 5 MPa and room temperature (20∘C), as well as heating to 50∘C, 75∘C and 100∘C prior to mechanical loading. The laboratory experiments were then replicated using discrete element method simulations. The geometry and granular structure of the sandstone was replicated using a Voronoi tessellation scheme to produce a grain based model. Strength and stiffness properties of the Voronoi contacts were calibrated to the laboratory specimens. Grain scale thermal properties were applied to the grain based models according to mineral percentages obtained from quantitative X-ray diffraction analysis on laboratory specimens. Thermo-mechanically coupled modelling was then undertaken to reproduce the thermal loading rates used in the laboratory, before applying a mechanical load in the models until failure. Laboratory results show a reduction of up to 15% peak strength with increasing thermal loading between room temperature and 100∘C , and micro-structural analysis shows the development of thermally induced micro-cracking in laboratory specimens. The mechanical numerical simulations calibrate well with the laboratory results, and introducing coupled thermal loading to the simulations shows the development of localised stresses within the models, leading to the formation of thermally induced micro-cracks and strength reduction upon mechanical loading