Writing out the storm : trauma and the work of composition.

The discourses of trauma and post-trauma have become pervasive in representations of life as it is lived in contemporary globalized culture. As new media technologies make the world more accessible, we become accustomed to overwhelming social, political, and personal circumstances, and we come to see trauma everywhere, all the time. My dissertation project responds to the presence of trauma in the writing classroom, as it appears purposefully in pedagogies designed to respond to it, and as it appears naturally through the interests and experiences of students and teachers who come into contact with national, natural, or personal disaster. Specifically, I question how ideas about trauma and post-trauma circulate in composition and rhetoric studies from other disciplinary sites like psychology, history, and trauma studies, as well as how these ideas are changed when invoked by composition and rhetorical scholarship. Drawing on theories of cultural and civic rhetorics by scholars such as Ralph Cintron, Steven Mailloux, and Nedra Reynolds, I investigate tropes of disaster and recovery across theses diverse disciplinary boundaries. My goal is to assess the strengths and limits of posttraumatic writing pedagogy that rely on these tropes and encourage students to respond to disaster through personal writing or variations on service learning education. Both of these approaches, I argue, can result in a musealizing of lived experience (Huyssen), or passively recording the painful details of students\u27 social and political lives at the expense of critical understanding. Such a view of experience ignores the social and material circumstances that initiate and sustain the conditions which make some individuals and groups more susceptible to trauma than others. I ground my investigation in a study of published articles, classroom archives, and personal interviews that record the experiences of teachers and students working at New Orleans area universities in the semesters after Hurricane Katrina. Through the middle chapters of my project, I focus on instructor narratives of post-Katrina life and classroom work, as well as archived student writing from several courses in the University of New Orleans\u27 Writing after Katrina Archive. These interviews and archival documents reveal how public, institutional, and disciplinary pressures resulted in policies and practices that reinforced an unreflexive turn toward expressive or service-oriented writing. More often than not, these pedagogies are justified in terms of student need (i.e. students need to tell stories in order to heal or students need to serve their communities in order to feel part of them). Importantly, while these records reflect the need for a better understanding of how writing classrooms might respond to disaster, they also show how some instructors and students challenge the urge to prioritize narratives of victimization. My project concludes by teasing out alternatives and positing an approach to critical writing pedagogy that offers strategies for teachers and students working in the context of disaster to resist the dominance of the musealized narrative through intersections of experience, empathy, and civic engagement

Mindfulness, Mental Health, and Wellness

Back in 2006, mindfulness training had achieved a foothold in health care with the popularization, a decade earlier, of Jon Kabat-Zinn's eight-week program, known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and was beginning to receive research attention. The companion pieces "My Experience with Depression: Just Showing Up Can Save a Life" and "Depression and the Practice of Law: Signs of Struggle and Avenues of Relief," crafted by Javier Lopez and Joshua Rooks, respectively, provide us with a personal account of depression and insights for more deeply understanding its nature and paths for relief. Eleanor Southers draws upon the importance of self-awareness in her article, "Building Strong Personal Relationships in Spite of Your Career," as does the GP Mentor column, "To Young Lawyers on Practicing Mindfulness," by Rudhir Krishtel, who also notes various benefits he realized through a daily meditation practice he wishes he had known when he began practicing law. [...]while many self-care practices can only be done by going somewhere, or doing something that may compete with the task at hand (for example, it would be challenging and perhaps inappropriate to listen to music, take a nap, or go for a jog in the middle of a client meeting), we can engage in the deliberate deploying of attention, whether through focusing on an object-such as the person we are talking to-and returning attention to the object when we notice mind wandering ("focused attention"), expanding awareness around the object of attention and noticing - among other things - the charge of emotions or telling non-verbal cues ("open monitoring"), or even wishing happiness to the people in our midst, especially when in court or in challenging interpersonal situations ("lovingkindness" practice). [...]the cultivation of greater mindful awareness through the intentional engagement of attention can be done anytime - even when taking a walk in nature, practicing yoga, connecting with another living being, slowing down the breath, or dancing, which, in turn, can enrich the quality of these experiences

Mindful Ethics - A Pedagogical and Practical Approach to Teaching Legal Ethics, Developing Professional Identity, and Encouraging Civility

Aristotle spoke of virtue and ethics as a combination of practical wisdom and habituation-an individual must learn from the application of critical reasoning skills to experience. Perhaps one of the earliest proclamations of the value of experiential learning, the Aristotelian view, reappears throughout history and is captured once again by the Carnegie Foundation\u27s Report on Legal Education, which includes a call for instruction that provides practical skills and ethical grounding to complement the teaching of legal analysis. The Carnegie Report continues to play a role in the ongoing discussion of the need to reform legal education; a debate that is currently driven by market demand and a legal profession in the midst of dramatic realignment. This debate has given rise to suggestions for reform in the areas of legal ethics and professional identity that are supported by reference to theories of moral psychology, cognitive psychology, and various innovative educational strategies. Mindful Ethics is an innovative approach to teaching legal ethics; the short-term goal is to better prepare law students to deal with the reality of practice, to assist in the development of their professional identity, and to provide lawyers with additional tools for responding to the ethical challenges inherent in the practice of law. The longterm, overarching goal is to impact the manner in which the legal profession functions and plays its critical role in society as protectorate of the rule of law. This Article will discuss the methodology by which Mindful Ethics integrates professional responsibility and mindfulness such that lawyers and law students gain a broader insight into their own ethical decision-making. It will also explore recent neuroscience findings concerning the influences of mindfulness practices on the brain. Finally, it will conclude that Mindful Ethics serves as both a life skill and a tool for legal practice that has the potential to dramatically assist one in anticipating and avoiding the ethical pitfalls of legal practice and maintaining civility and professionalism, especially in light of the increasing pace of the practice owing to rapidly evolving technologies. Indeed, Mindful Ethics may provide an individual with the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it and to modulate and channel emotions in a civil manner towards a productive outcome

Bromostibine complexes of iron(II): hypervalency and reactivity

The halostibine complexes [CpFe(CO)2(SbMe2Br)][CF3SO3] and [CpFe(CO)2(SbMe2Br)][BF4] both contain significant interactions between the anion and the formally neutral Sb(III) ligand, which simultaneously displays Lewis acidic and Lewis basic properties. The unexpected secondary product [CpFe(CO)(Me2BrSb-?-Br-SbBrMe2)] is formed in the presence of excess ligand, the strongly associated Br– anion bridging the two Sb donors to form a four-membered FeSb2Br ring.<br/

WHEN PRINCIPLED REPRESENTATION TESTS ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW

The decision in Stropnicky v. Nathanson completely disregarded the professional and personal considerations that drive the attorney’s decision whether or not to accept a case, focusing exclusively on societal concerns with eliminating discrimination. In doing so, it overlooked a long-lived deference accorded attorneys in the decision of whether to accept or decline a client’s case and the legitimate rationale underlying such deference. In deciding Stropnicky, a case of first impression in Massachusetts, the Commission entered a growing debate on whether lawyers and law firms are subject to public accommodation laws.This article addresses how the Stropnicky decision intrudes into the important discretion historically accorded lawyers in deciding whether to represent a client. Part I of this article presents a concise review of the professional responsibility rules that pertain to the attorney’s duties and prerogatives in the selection of a client. Part II proposes an analytical framework for assessing the internal and external factors which underlie such discretion as articulated by the professional responsibility rules. Part III focuses on the ways in which laudable antidiscrimination principles may collide with the professionalism concerns that accord discretion to attorneys in deciding whether or not to represent a prospective client. Part IV applies the analytical framework set forth earlier in the article to the facts in Stropnicky. Finally, the conclusion suggests how antidiscrimination principles can coexist with ethical and professional considerations that support discretionary client selection decision-making without compromising either principle

The Science of Mindfulness and the Practice of Law

Strikingly, like physical exercise, the more time servicemembers spent engaging in mindfulness exercises, the more they benefited. [...]while stress may degrade well-being, mindfulness training protects against this. Strikingly, the benefits from KabatZinn's exercises were maintained for more than a year after the program's formal end, and patients reported continuing the exercises on their own. Since that pioneering study, hundreds of studies have been conducted on MBSR and are now being aggregated into "metaanalyses" to compile results from thousands of participants. Reductions in physiological ailments and symptoms of chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and arthritis have been reported. [...]there is growing evidence that mindfulness training improves wellness in the body. [...]Epel suggested in her paper that "A present attentional state may promote a healthy biochemical milieu and, in turn, cell longevity" (Elissa S. Epel, Eli Puterman, Jue Lin, et al., "Wandering Minds and Aging Cells," Clinical Psychological Science, 2013 (1:1), at 75-83)

Using Bendable and Rigid Manipulatives in Primary Mathematics: Is One More Effective Than the Other in Conceptualising 3D Objects from Their 2D Nets?

The usefulness of manipulatives in the primary maths classroom has been frequently asserted. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two different types of manipulatives, bendable and rigid, as aids for the conceptualisation of 3D solids from 2D nets (fold-outs of solid geometrical shapes) within the NSW Stage 2 Mathematics Curriculum. Contrary to initial expectations, the bendable nets, although more attractive to pupils, did not prove superior to the rigid variety. In fact, the most noticeable advances in conceptualisation followed teaching experiences using the rigid nets. Although this was a preliminary study and the sample sizes were too small to support solid conclusions, it is suggested that the data were sufficiently robust to warrant further investigation. We suggest that the lower than expected results for the bendable nets may be explained, partially, by the reduced conceptual demands made by these more ‘obvious’ shapes. Correspondingly, the greater mental visualisation required when working with the rigid nets may have produced heightened student conceptualisation

Mindfulness Training for Judges: Mind Wandering and the Development of Cognitive Resilience

The benefits of mindfulness practices for lawyers have been the subject of broad discussion within the profession for a number of years. Increasingly, this discussion has expanded to include judges and the work of the judiciary. In this article we explore more deeply the relevance of mindfulness to judges, and in particular, how it can support their resilience, health, and well-being, as well as their cognitive functioning. We hope to educate and support judges who would like to gain greater mastery over their cognitive capacity and emotional well-being. Recognizing that the full breadth of this subject is beyond an article of this length, we focus on a primary vulnerability to which we are all susceptible but which can be especially consequential for judges in their high-stakes world of decision making: mind wandering. We consider some ways this vulnerability may limit judges’ performance and well-being and review a growing body of scientific research, which examines the benefits of mindfulness training to mitigate this vulnerability by helping to bolster attention and working memory capacity. We then offer simple mindfulness practices, which have been found to be useful in developing attention and working memory capacity, which we term “skills” as they may be developed through ongoing mindfulness practice

Deploying Mindfulness to Gain Cognitive Advantage: Considerations for Military Effectiveness and Well-being

Mindfulness involves paying attention to present moment experience without discursive commentary or emotional reactivity. Mindfulness training (MT) programs aim to promote this mental mode via introduction to specific mindfulness exercises, related in-class discussion, and ongoing engagement in mindfulness exercises. MT is being increasingly offered to high-demand, high-stress military/uniformed and civilian cohorts with a wide array of reported benefits. Herein, we begin by discussing recent theoretical models regarding MT’s mechanisms of action from a cognitive training/cognitive neuroscience perspective, which propose that MT engages and strengthens three key processes [e.g., 1]. These are: 1) attentional orienting, which is the ability to select and sustain attention on a subset of information while remaining undistracted; 2) meta-awareness, which is the ability to monitor one’s ongoing experience with an awareness of doing so; and 3) decentering, which is the ability to view one’s experience at a psychological distance so that biases, mind-sets, and interpretations are viewed as mental processes rather than accurate depictions of reality. Next, we review evidence of MT’s beneficial effects on cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of human behavior, which are aligned with military frameworks describing the human dimension [e.g., 2]. We then discuss attitudinal impediments to broad adoption of MT in military settings, and propose counterarguments so as to facilitate its implementation. We end by arguing that MT should be considered a key cognitive training tool by which to achieve cognitive advantage in the service of improved operational readiness and effectiveness, as well as greater resilience and well-being in military/uniformed cohorts