Relief Mural Projects

I will have student-created print works installed on the exterior walls of buildings on the campus of Wayne State University during the MAPC conference. Additionally, I will have the same prints installed around the campus of the University of Toledo, thus bridging the two cities and creating one big connected “Print City”. Students will create large woodblock prints that would be adhered to exterior walls of buildings. These large images will be printed on Japanese Kozo (rice paper). The life span of these murals depends directly on exposure to weather. The paper will be adhered to the chosen site using water soluble “wheat paste,” a mixture of flour and water. As these prints will be outdoors, their existence can best be described as ephemeral. If needed, the murals could easily be removed by power washing with water. Participating students will scout out potential sites and collaboratively come up with concept sketches for their murals. The students will be required to take into account the history of their site and create an image that is visually pleasing but also pays homage to the site. I believe that the murals will spur interest in the history of both cities. As a result of this event, students will become more engaged in fabric of the community in which they place the prints. This project will also prompt folks to walk around both cities in search of the murals, creating a transformed community of newly engaged art enthusiasts. Because people will be out walking the city sidewalks, the project will have a positive impact on the community and the businesses of that area

Student as Value Based Product: Reconceptualizing the Subjective Nature of Education

In this paper we consider how students are positioned in school classrooms and the effect positioning has on their ontological and social development. The creation of a powersanctioned objective reality, we argue, pervades student learning in contemporary U.S. classrooms, reducing knowledge students might otherwise acquire to socially acceptable conditions they assume in adulthood. Consequently, this creates a society in which antiintellectualism is normalized as learned codes of behavior are lived. Homogenization then isolates and alienates students as they are produced to fill the ranks of a skills-based workforce. Several factors work in tandem to ingrain students with a perceived objective consciousness, they include: top down educational policy, commodification of difference, distraction and normalization of the above mentioned codes of conduct, a sense of morality tied to citizenship, and civilized absurdity: students become mere abstractions of living experience as they accept life as citizen worker.Educatio

On Democracy and Critical Citizenship

In this essay I fuse narrative, social critique and critical understandings of schooling. Across the writing I argue for an increased critical awareness of print and other forms of news media. For the purposes of this paper I propose two major arguments that support critical awareness, they are: knowing what it means to be an informed citizen and practicing a critical democratic citizenship. As a springboard for discussing the major themes I review how print and other news media are used as propaganda and how a seemingly literate populace more easily accepts what are understood as social norms

Toward a Transformative Teaching Practice: Criticity, Pedagogy and Praxis

One method to teach a multicultural class: a teacher walks in to a room calls the class to order, steps to the lectern and begins to deliver knowledge. Socially acquired information is disseminated; that gained over years of study and experience. Another view: I walk into a class where my students are sitting quietly at their desks pen and paper at the ready and quietly ask: shall we form a circle? The students agree and after having done so I follow up with a generative (Freire, 1970): what are your current understandings of Diversity? In following the work of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Maxine Greene among others I undertake an auto-critical approach to the classes I teach. It is a given for me that students bring knowledge to the table, my classes become our classes; we engage in dialogue to interrogate our subject matter: culture and schooling in societies. As the classes I teach are designed for future educators we engage our discussions to push pedagogy and transform teaching

Salud a la Salud Mental (A Toast to Mental Health)

Joven Noble is a youth-development and leadership enhancement curriculum within Sequoia High School in Watsonville, Ca. that recognizes adolescents need for guidance during their physical, emotional and spiritual development into adulthood by engaging them in conversations regarding topics such as teen pregnancy and substance abuse. One of the deficits of the program is the lack of discussion centered around mental health. Youth are more likely to experience mental health challenges during their adolescence that can impair their long term development. In Santa Cruz County, 5 per 1,000 children ages 5-19 were hospitalized for mental health crisis treatment in 2016; rates were nearly twice as high among those children ages 15-19. This capstone was implemented as an educational workshop aimed to increase the likelihood of youth accessing services or stress reduction skills by providing them the tools if needs arise. As a result of the presentation youth are likelier to use coping skills, have lower negative stigma associated with mental illness and increased investment in their mental health. Half of the participants reported they would be likely to seek services if they were in crisis while the other half did not. The project met its intended outcome and would benefit from replication

Gross Anatomy: Collaborative Book

A panel discussion/reflection with several students who participated in a unique creative collaboration between two studio classes: printmaking and drawing. In the fall of 2012, lecturer Ben Pond and I taught Anatomy and Lithography courses respectively. Our students worked collaboratively on a large format (30”x22”), series of prints/drawings based on the theme “Gross Anatomy.” All students first created lithographs and then further embellished them using various drawing techniques. Three complete sets of print/drawings were created as a result of the collaboration, two of which were bound into hard-cover books. Students who participated in the creation of the book will give their insight into what it was like to be involved in such a project

Meteodiversity Index during the 20 th century in Europe

The aim of the project is to study how the Meteodiversity Index have distributed over Europe between 1950 and 2000. To develop the research, 7 meteorological variables have been obtained from the data of 23 meteorological stations across Europe. The paper includes an analysis of the sensitivity of the Meteodiversity Index to changes in the inputs. Then, the evolution of the Meteodiversity Index is studied, both by climate type, according to Köppen climate classification system, and by geographical location. Finally, in the light of the results, another analysis is performed to determine the relationship between the Meteodiversity Index and the climatic tendencies of Europe. Once all data is processed and analyzed, the conclusions of the research are presented and future work on this topic is proposed

Novel export and import pathways in S. cerevisiae identified by an engineered SUMO system

Nuclear transport receptors (NTRs) mediate the translocation of cargos between the cytoplasm and the nucleus. NTRs are classified either as importins or exportins according to the directionality of the cargo transport. To identify new interaction partners of so far poorly characterized NTRs from S. cerevisiae, we developed a novel protein purification approach based on an engineered SUMO-specific protease (SUMOvera protease) and its specific SUMO substrate (SUMOvera). SUMOvera can be used as a stable fusion tag in virtually all eukaryotic systems since it is not recognized by SUMO-specific proteases from yeast, plant, human, amphibian, insect and protozoa. In addition, the SUMOvera protease can be over-expressed in S. cerevisiae without causing toxicity unlike yeast and B. distachyon SUMO-specific proteases. The SUMOvera system has also an orthogonal specificity to the SUMOstar/SUMOstar protease pair to allow the purification of protein complexes with a defined stoichiometry in eukaryotic hosts. Using the SUMOvera system, we discovered that yeast Lph2 and Pdr6 mediate the nuclear export and import of different cargos. Specifically, we showed that Lph2 exports and binds to the translation initiation factor eIF4A in a Ran-GTP-dependent manner, and that Pdr6 recognizes Ubc9 as an import substrate as well as eEF2 and eIF5A as export cargos. Lph2 and Pdr6 have been only described as importins; however, our data indicate that they act as bidirectional NTRs that shuttle distinct sets of cargos in opposite directions through the nuclear envelope. Overall, we describe two novel bidirectional NTRs in S. cerevisiae in addition to Msn5. The reported findings suggest that bidirectionality in NTRs might be more common than previously assumed, and that there might be other bidirectional NTRs in different organisms that still need to be identified

On piecewise hyperdefinable groups

The aim of this paper is to generalize and improve two of the main model-theoretic results of "Stable group theory and approximate subgroups" by E. Hrushovski to the context of piecewise hyperdefinable sets. The first one is the existence of Lie models. The second one is the stabilizer theorem. In the process, a systematic study of the structure of piecewise hyperdefinable sets is developed. In particular, we show the most significant properties of their logic topologies

1919 as a Contested Threshold to a New World Order

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