A Study of the Implementation of Restorative Justice at a Public High School in Southern California

This thesis begins with an introduction and methodology that presents two major research questions: “Can restorative justice exist within a zero-tolerance framework,” and, “What are the challenges that stand in the way of implementing restorative justice ideologies fully at Glenside High School?” The author provides an autobiographical statement to give context to his positionality within this research. A comprehensive literature review highlights a brief history of restorative justice, a description of the harmful effects of punitive discipline, and results from different communities that have implemented restorative justice. The three major respondents are introduced in order to provide context to their positionality within this research. The author presents his research findings based on qualitative field notes from site visits to a public, Southern California high school in addition to responses from interviews with teachers and a restorative justice expert. The author concludes by arguing for the implementation of restorative justice in a widespread manner in individual schools, in addition to comprehensive teacher training in pre-professional programs for prospective teachers and the need to shift from “teach to the test” ideologies to holistic student development pedagogies

Higher Derivative Corrections and Central Charges from Wrapped M5-branes

We compute four-derivative corrections to the AdS supergravity actions arising from the near-horizon geometry of N M5-branes wrapped on either one or two Riemann surfaces. This setup features the novel presence of both gauged isometries as well as nontrivial hypermultiplets. We argue that the 5d Chern-Simons terms receive not only higher-derivative corrections but also contributions from Killing vector parameters, which we find must also be corrected. We check the central charges found by our supergravity methods against the dual field theory results and find perfect agreement at leading and subleading order in N. Along the way, we find higher derivative corrections to general AdS_5 and AdS_3x\Sigma_g geometries.Comment: 32 pages + 16 pages appendice

Selecting a Virtual World Platform for Learning

Like any infrastructure technology, Virtual World (VW) platforms provide affordances that facilitate some activities and hinder others. Although it is theoretically possible for a VW platform to support all types of activities, designers make choices that lead technologies to be more or less suited for different learning objectives. Virtual World platforms’ capabilities can be characterized in terms of the extent to which they are multiple or special purpose and the degree to which they support incorporation of few or many knowledge resources. Matching these capabilities with a framework for characterizing instructional approach and learning objectives provides a basis for selecting, piloting, and advocating use of particular VW platforms in specific educational contexts

VIRTUAL TEACHING CASES?AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

This research, when complete, will represent a prototype of the development of a virtual teaching case and the use and assessment of the initial versions of research instruments whose aim is the assessment of this new form of teaching case, or any type of teaching case, with regards to learning efficacy, gains, satisfaction, and environment. The purpose of this virtual teaching case (that is, a teaching case, embedded within a virtual world) is to leverage the rich heritage of casebased teaching while helping today’s students to learn by providing a more engaging environment where these students (experienced with multiplayer computer games and the Internet) can collaboratively practice project management skills such as planning scopes of work, schedules, and budgets—skills they have already learnt in class. In a virtual teaching case, students can experience the challenges of discovering problems; collaboratively creating, judging, and transforming resolutions; and reacting to changing circumstances

Teaching and Learning Collaboratively and Virtually

In this paper we describe five knowledge areas for IS educational activities called for in the MSIS 2006 Model Curriculum. The knowledge areas are business processes, emerging technologies, globalization, human–computer interactions, and the impacts of digitization. We then describe two graduate-level courses which pursue these activities — each from a different perspective. One perspective focuses on students learning concepts about virtual teams and collaboration technologies. Another perspective centers on students finding, implementing, and evaluating virtual team and collaboration technologies. We describe the results of educational activities we embedded within these courses that purportedly helped students learn about the five knowledge areas. Next, we share feedback from students. We close the paper by encapsulating our lessons learned

Ethics of Activity: South Asian Shia Working Life in Dubai

This dissertation explains how environmental conditions foster ethics of behavior common to various spheres of life-activity: leisure, work, and religious practice, for instance. The research conceives present-day Dubai—the site of research—as a work environment (populated 90% by working expatriates). The city’s particular orientation to labor is an aspect of its immersion in regional and global flows: economic and natural. Dubai has grown a) as a trade entrepôt and a node in global supply chains, and b) by producing manufactured landscapes that overcome harsh environmental conditions. To evaluate the phenomenon of natural-material and environmental forces that foster ethics common to various life activities, the research follows members of Dubai’s Shia Muslim community of Indo-Pakistani heritage, as they move through various sites of daily activity. In doing so, the data note how dispositions of members transcend across experiences. Constrained in Dubai, but globally connected through kinship ties and sectarian identity, members transform the experience of religious practice and downtime activities with qualities particular to worklife. Despite a variety of limitations on activity in Dubai that members characterize as majbūrī (compulsion), particular experiences of work and qualities of the environment magnify ethics of both excess and efficiency germane to Shia practice. The constructed environment also helps manifest a range of aspirations and anxieties that are expressed in leisure-time activities. Urban architectures here are both projections of desire and objects of concealment—obscuring feared realities—especially for those employed in construction firms or who provide construction-related services. These are thus forms of imagination attuned to ethics of the often-precarious pursuit of work. Finally, the research sees “constraint” as an ethic of migrant living and space management in Dubai, which fosters a form of “disciplined creativity” in religious expression and poetic performance, in the space of audio recording studios. The dissertation committee members were Anand Pandian (primary advisor), Veena Das, Steven Caton, Erica Schoenberger, and Ryan Calder

Evaluation of bio-optical inversion of spectral irradiance measured from an autonomous underwater vehicle

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can map water conditions at high spatial (horizontal and vertical) and temporal resolution, including under cloudy conditions when satellite and airborne remote sensing are not feasible. As part of the RADYO program, we deployed a passive radiometer on an AUV in the Santa Barbara Channel and off the coast of Hawaii to apply existing bio-optical algorithms for characterizing the optical constituents of coastal seawater (i.e., dissolved organic material, algal biomass, and other particles). The spectral differences between attenuation coefficients were computed from ratios of downwelling irradiance measured at depth and used to provide estimates of the in-water optical constituents. There was generally good agreement between derived values of absorption and concurrent measurements of this inherent optical property in Santa Barbara Channel. Wave focusing, cloud cover, and low attenuation coefficients influenced results off the coast of Hawaii and are used to evaluate the larger-scale application of these methods in the near surface coastal oceans

River-Based Surveys for Assessing Riparian Bird Populations: Cerulean Warbler as a Test Case

This is the published version. Copyright Eagle Hill InstituteBirds concentrated in riparian habitats are poorly sampled by traditional survey methods because of the difficulties associated with accessing these habitats. Our objectives were to test the effectiveness of river-based surveys to determine the status, distribution, and relative abundance for riparian bird species in Missouri and northern Arkansas, with special emphasis on Dendroica cerulea (Cerulean Warbler). Our canoe-based surveys revealed an average of 2.3 and 0.8 singing male Cerulean Warblers/river km along the Current River (128 river km surveyed), MO, and the Buffalo National River (96 river km), AR. Nonparametric estimates for repeated surveys of the same river stretches indicate that 69–79% of singing male Cerulean Warblers were detected. However, the bias associated with the estimate methodology and independent song rate data suggest those are conservative estimates. In comparison with land-based point-counts, this river-based protocol offers a quick and efficient assessment of Cerulean Warblers in riparian areas