Teaching Artists Research Project

There have been remarkable advances in arts education, both in and out of schools, over the last fifteen years, despite a difficult policy environment. Teaching artists, the hybrid professionals that link the arts to education and community life, are the creative resource behind much of this innovation. Their best efforts are redefining the roles the arts play in public education. Their work is central to arts organizations' strategies for civic engagement and diverse audiences. Excellent research has shown that arts education is instrumental to the social, emotional, and cognitive development of thousands of young people. But little is known about teaching artists. The Teaching Artists Research Project (TARP) deepens our understanding of world of teaching artists through studies in twelve communities, and it will inform policy designed to make their work sustainable, more effective, and more meaningful. A dozen study sites were selected where funding was available to support exploration of the local conditions and dynamics in arts education: Boston, Seattle, Providence, and eight California communities (San Francisco/Alameda County, Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Humboldt County). A thorough literature review was conducted, and NORC conducted stakeholder meetings and focus groups, identified key issues and began designing a multi-methods study that would include surveys for both artists and program managers as well as in-depth interviews of stakeholders -- teaching artists, program managers, school officials, classroom teachers and arts specialists, principals, funders, and arts educators in a wide variety of venues.There are no professional associations and no accreditation for teaching artists, so a great deal of time was spent building a sample of teaching artists and program managers in every study site. The survey instrument was developed and tested, and then fielded on-line in the study sites sequentially, beginning in Chicago, and ending with the southern California sites. To assure a reliable response rate, online surveys were supplemented by a telephone survey. Lists of potential key informants were accumulated for each site, and interviewers were recruited, hired, and trained in each site. Most of the interviewers were teaching artists themselves, and many had significant field knowledge and familiarity with the landscape of arts education in their community. The surveys collected data on some fundamental questions:Who are teaching artists?Where do they work? Under what terms and conditions?What sort of education have they had?How are they hired and what qualifications do employers look for?How much do they make?How much experience do they have?What drew them to the field? What pushes them out?What are their goals?Qualitative interviews with a subsample of survey respondents and key informants delved deeply into the dynamics and policies that drive arts education, the curricula and pedagogy teaching artists bring to the work, and personal histories of some artists. The interviews gathered more detailed information on the local character of teaching artist communities, in-depth descriptions and narratives of teaching artists' experiences, and followed up on items or issues that arose in preliminary analysis of the quantitative survey data. These conversations illuminated the work teaching artists believe is their best and identified the kinds of structural and organizational supports that enable work at the highest level. The interview process explored key areas with the artists, such as how to best develop their capacities, understand the dynamics between their artistic and educational practice, and how to keep them engaged in the field. Another critical topic explored during these conversations was how higher education can make a more meaningful and strategic contribution toward preparing young artists to work in the field. The TARP report includes serious reflection on the conditions and policies that have affected arts education in schools, particularly over the last thirty years, a period of intense school reform efforts and consistent erosion of arts education for students. The report includes new and important qualitative data about teaching artists, documenting their educational background, economic status, the conditions in which they work, and their goals as artists and educators. It also includes new insights about how learning in the arts is associated with learning in general, illuminating findings from other studies that have suggested a powerful connection between arts education and positive outcomes for students in a wide range of domains

Investigatin Actin-Myosin Mechanics to Model Heart Disease Using Fluorescence Microscopy and Optical Trapping

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a hereditary disease in which the myocardium becomes hypertrophied, making it more difficult for the heart to pump blood. HCM is commonly caused by a mutation in the β-cardiac myosin II heavy chain. Myosin is a motor protein that facilitates muscle contraction by converting chemical energy from ATP hydrolysis into mechanical work and concomitantly moving along actin filaments. Optical tweezers have been used previously to analyze single myosin biophysical properties; however, myosin does not work as a single unit within the heart. Multiple myosin interacts to displace actin filaments and do not have the same properties as ensembles versus single molecules. We have engineered a more physiologically accurate optical trapping approach using a hierarchical cytoskeleton structure consisting of multiple myosin between two actin filaments that more closely models how myosin behaves within the heart. The model was verified using fluorescent microscopy, and we analyzed the biophysical properties of healthy myosin-actin complexes to lay the foundation for studying diseased models in the future. For the healthy myosin model, we have measured displacement profiles and force generation capacities using optical tweezers. This assay allows us to not only analyze myosin in a more physiologically relevant environment but also to study how multiple myosin interact within cardiac muscle cells

The Role of Stenting in Management of Isolated Symptomatic Basilar Artery Stenosis

Isolated basilar artery stenosis (BAS) is a rare etiology of ischemic neurologic conditions. First-line treatment of symptomatic stenosis is typically medical therapy as outlined in the Warfarin–Aspirin Symptomatic Intracranial Disease (WASID) trial and the Stenting versus Aggressive Medical Therapy for Intracranial Arterial Stenosis (SAMMPRIS) trial.1,2 We present the case of a male in his 60s with isolated BAS who failed maximal medical treatment but experienced a decrease in transient ischemic attacks and acute ischemic stroke occurrences after angioplasty and stenting

Impact of Stochastic Convection on the Ensemble Transform

Abstract The impact of stochastic convection on ensembles produced using the ensemble transform (ET) initial perturbation scheme is examined. This note compares the behavior of ensemble forecasts based only on initial ET perturbations with the behavior of ensemble forecasts based on the ET initial perturbations and forecasts that include stochastic convection. It is illustrated that despite the fact that stochastic convection occurs only after the forecast integrations have started, it induces changes in the initial perturbations as well. This is because the ET is a "cycling" scheme, in which previous short-term forecasts are used to produce the initial perturbations for the current forecast. The stochastic convection scheme induces rapid perturbation growth in regions where convection is active, primarily in the tropics. When combined with the ET scheme, this results in larger initial perturbation variance in the tropics, and, because of a global constraint on total initial perturbation variance, smaller initial perturbation variance in the extratropics. Thus, the inclusion of stochastic convection helps to mitigate a problem found in the practical implementation of the ET, namely, that of too little initial variance in the tropics and too much in the extratropics. Various skill scores show that stochastic convection improves ensemble performance in the tropics, with little impact to modest improvement in the extratropics. Experiments performed using the initial perturbations from the control ensemble run but forecast integrations using the stochastic convection scheme indicate that the improved performance of the stochastic convection ensemble at early forecast times is due to both "indirect" changes in the initial perturbations and "direct" changes in the forecast. At later forecast times, it appears that most of the improvement can be gained through stochastic convection alone

Against the World: International Protestantism and the Ecumenical Movement between Secularization and Politics, 1900-1952

The ecumenical movement was the major international expression of organized Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth-century. This dissertation reconstructs the intellectual origins of the movement and its principal institutions, showing how ecumenical ideas and practices were transformed in response to geopolitical cataclysms, such as World War I, the collapse of European order in the 1930s, the Cold War, and decolonization, that divided international Protestant and Orthodox elites in the North Atlantic and Asia. Focusing on church leaders and lay intellectuals like John Mott, Joseph Oldham, Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, Willem A. Visser’t Hooft, John Foster Dulles, and M. M. Thomas, the project shows how a new relation between Christian faith and politics emerged from Protestant-led efforts to internationalize religious authority. Seeking to manifest world unity through common faith, ecumenists successively redefined the meaning of Christianity in their efforts to secure international consensus on the public role of the church among a politically polyglot constituency that included liberals, conservatives, communists, and fascists. This dissertation argues that the ecumenical movement went through three stages between 1900 and 1952: the first oriented around building the Kingdom of God on earth (1900-1925), the second seeking the realize the worldwide church as the basis of universal community (1930-1950), and the third mobilizing Christians for political revolution (1946-1952). The focus of the dissertation – chapters 2 through 5 – concerns the rise and decline of the ecumenical project to realize the church, which I argue was the first systematic and internationally successfully effort to articulate “ecumenicity” as a form of Christian pluralism. I show how this project was grounded in a missionary theology of anti-secularism that attributed a breakdown of social and international order to modern civilization’s repudiation of God. First defined at a conference of the International Missionary Conference in 1928 as a new “system of life and thought” that had displaced other religions as Christianity’s chief global rival, “secularism” identified an enemy that Allied and German Protestants, estranged since World War I, could unite in opposing. Mobilizing dialectical theology against the “totalitarian” claims of the state and the cogito alike, ecumenical anti-secularists jettisoned the historicist theological liberalism on which earlier forms of Protestant internationalism was based. In the 1930s, organizations like the Universal Christian Council of Life and Work and the World Council of Churches institutionalized theological dialogue as a mode of submission to God’s sovereignty; for the architects of these bodies, Christian faith was the only possible basis of community life in an age of global fracture. A strategy of international consolidation that ascribed political polarization to spiritual alienation, the ascendant anti-secularism of the 1930s did not anathematize the Nazi-sympathizing Reich church but sought to incorporate it into a world Christian community prioritizing the subordination of “political” to religious loyalties. After 1948, however, the ecumenical program to realize the church collapsed as its leaders struggled to surmount the ideological divisions of the Cold War. While Eastern European church leaders attacked the World Council as a mask for Western imperialism, critics in the West attacked the Council as an agent or stooge of world Communism. To escape the ideological impasse of East and West, the movement turned to the Third World in search of a new basis of global Christian unity. Reinventing the ecumenical project in the postwar world, a younger generation of theologians from the global South argued that the universal fellowship of the church would be actualized not by overcoming politics, but by specifying political commitments in solidarity with the liberation struggles of the poor, the non-white, and the colonized. In this paradoxical denouement, those struggling to surmount internal political divisions embraced political action as the essential expression of religious faith, and Christianity, long declared to be the basis of social order, came to be seen as its revolutionary solvent. By locating the ecumenical movement within a history of the ideas that made its institutional functioning possible, this project breaks from common narratives that lodge the movement within trajectories of secularization that rely on problematic attempts to adjudicate the boundaries between theological and non-theological thought and practice

Understanding attitudes relating to regional drinking practices: An analysis of post mining communities in Doncaster

Drinking practices across Britain are not uniform and in each locality reflect the historical, socio-economic and cultural context unique to each specific part of the country. In South Yorkshire, the drinking cultures that exist in the area reflect the industrial heritage of the area, particularly the steel, rail and coal industries. The decline of traditional industries across Britain has had a significant impact on these drinking practices as Britain has transitioned from having an economy dominated by heavy industry to a post-industrial economy defined by Neoliberalism. The decline of the coal industry in Doncaster in particular has had a significant impact on the general everyday lives of people in communities that once had economies centred around the coal industry. This impact is reflected in the changes to drinking cultures. This study focuses specifically on two post-mining communities in the Doncaster Borough (Rossington and Denaby Main and Mexborough), which have faced significant change in the socioeconomic landscape due to the decline and eventual loss of the mining industry. Post-mining communities have been subject to significant study and analysis from an economic regeneration aspect, but there was an identified gap in literature regarding research that specifically focuses on drinking practices in these areas. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, the research utilised a constructivist grounded theory methodological approach, as gaining intimate familiarity with the research topic was of high importance, due to criticisms of past research having the preconceived notions or specific interests being imposed on them by the researcher. The grounded theory methodology was initially chosen due to the advantages it has when conducting research on under-researched topics such as attitudes to alcohol in post-mining communities. Twenty-four participants (five from Denaby Main and Mexborough and twenty-one from Rossington) were questioned about their attitudes to alcohol in semi-structured interviews in the case study areas. This study made significant use of reflexivity as a methodological tool to put to the forefront the complexities of conducting qualitative research. This became particularly important in documenting the impact of the political context at the time and how this may have impacted on how the participants engaged with the researcher (the Brexit campaign, Brexit Referendum and the post-referendum period). The research revealed that in both case study areas economic and cultural identities of the past have had a significant influence in shaping drinking practices. Drinking practices in the post-mining period have formed as a result to adapting to endogenous influences that have drastically changed the economy in the two areas. Whilst endogenous traditions such as maintaining closely-knit ties and respectability and sociability were emphasised by participants to have been maintained, the function of drinking associated with the mining industry (such as recovery) and institutions with links to the industry had declined. This decline in both the function of drinking and of institutions such as pubs and clubs had faced decline due to changing local socioeconomic context. Exogenous influences such as large supermarkets, an increasing presence in both areas from national off-licence franchises and increasing opportunities to engage in privatised leisure significantly influenced the strategies that participants used to adapt to post-industrial Doncaster. The study contributes to knowledge in this area by contributing knowledge of localised drinking practices within a post-mining context in South Yorkshire although a gap may still remain for future research regarding research into drinking practices in post-mining communities. The research emphasises the need for researchers and policy makers that engage in future research in communities similar to the two case study areas to engage in reflexive practice, specifically in the current political context

Development and characterisation of an alginate and expanded graphite based composite for thermochemical heat storage

Thermochemical heat storage is one of the most attractive technologies to store heat from solar thermal energy or waste heat from industrial processes for its high energy density and long-term storage capability. This research presents a novel expanded graphite/alginate polymer matrix encapsulated with hydrated salts as highly efficient thermochemical heat storage materials. Through the simple synthesis method, the composite material can be sized and shaped to fit multiple applications, and be easily scaled where needed. Through the reversible hydration and dehydration reaction, the incorporated CaCl2 salt can store and release heat. Thermal energy from solar thermal generators or low grade waste heat sources (< 200 °C) is appropriate for the dehydration of CaCl2. A salt loading value of 84% has been achieved with visible porosity maintained. Static heat is used to study the charge reaction, whereas a flow of humid air through a packed bed is used to study the discharge reaction where temperature uplifts between 10–14 °C were observed. A vermiculite/CaCl2 composite is used as a comparison in both reactions. Additionally, bulk density, surface porosity, surface area, moisture sorption and thermal conductivity are considered. The results show that the novel composite materials developed in this study can achieve better packing density and comparable energy density comparing to the conventional vermiculite/CaCl2 composite, but with higher thermal conductivity leading to enhanced energy efficiency