Exploring Culturally Responsive Teaching and Student-Created Videos in an At-Risk Middle School Classroom

As the United States public school classrooms encounter notable shifts in student demographics and increased access to technology, teachers face the dual challenges of cultural and digital differences as they attempt to build relationships with students and develop responsive and relevant instruction. Framed by culturally responsive teaching, this qualitative study explored how one middle school teacher and his students in two summer school English classes interacted with and responded to novel technology-based instructional approach that sought to connect the students’ lives outside of school to the classroom. The findings suggest that involving the students within this culturally responsive teaching approach using student-created videos informs the contribution of both the teacher and the students for connecting home and school contexts with a CRT framework

Colour Coherence in Photon Induced Reactions

Colour coherence in hard photoproduction is considered using the Monte Carlo event generators PYTHIA and HERWIG. Significant effects in the parton shower are found using multijet observables for direct and resolved photon induced reactions. The particle flow in the interjet region of direct processes shows a strong influence of string fragmentation effects.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX, 6 eps figures included, to appear in the proceedings of the workshop "Future Physics at HERA

My Sociology: The Challenge of Transforming Classroom Culture from a Focus on Grades to a Focus on Learning

This paper documents the pedagogical remodeling of an Introduction to Sociology course. The challenge is to transform the classroom culture, and ultimately the college culture, from a focus on grades to a focus on learning. This transformation is accomplished through a series of learning activities embodied in My Sociology resources, which have been designed to be not merely learner-centered but ego-centered. Seasoned professors have often commented that students seem to perk up when the lesson is about them. Taking advantage of this energy, the discussion of sociology in this course begins with a treatment of the self, and then branches out systematically to the global perspective. Preliminary experimental model research comparing this pedagogically remodeled teaching strategy to the traditional teaching model has shown the remodeled strategy to be statistically significantly more effective (p \u3c .001) than the traditional model of teaching. This course remodeling can be done with any academic course and can be applied to many specialty areas

Social Identity and Preferences

Social identities prescribe behaviors for people. We identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects’ choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient. When we make ethnic identity salient to Asian-American subjects, they make more patient choices. When we make racial identity salient to black subjects, non-immigrant blacks (but not immigrant blacks) make more patient choices. Making gender identity salient has no effect on intertemporal or risk choices.

Early Time Evolution of High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

We solve the Yang-Mills equations in the framework of the McLerran-Venugopalan model for small times tau after a collision of two nuclei. An analytic expansion around tau=0 leads to explicit results for the field strength and the energy momentum tensor of the gluon field at early times. We then discuss constraints for the energy density, pressure and flow of the plasma phase that emerges after thermalization of the gluon field.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; contribution to Quark Matter 2006; submitted to J. Phys.

Beauty Conquers the First Amendment - Members of the City of Los Angeles v. Taxpayers for Vincent

This note will demonstrate that Taxpayers may too easily empower local governments to ban unpleasant formats of communication in their efforts to beautify the community without first offering sufficient evidence that the infringement on the first amendment is necessary