Exploring Pedagogical Leadership in Alberta’s Early Childhood Education and Care

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) focuses on young children’s early learning and well-being, as mighty learners and citizens. Making curriculum decisions that reflect guiding principles that view children as active, co-constructors of knowledge is challenging work. This way of working requires integrating theoretical and practice-based knowledge in pedagogical processes to create meaningful learning opportunities that reflect children’s everyday experiences and encourages children’s theory building. Pedagogical leaders play a vital role in the pedagogical process by creating transformative shifts in EC practice and curriculum decision making. Now seems to be the moment when views of ECEC leadership are broadening to include a focus on leading practice and learning,and inspires a vision that situates pedagogy as the core of leadership. This research examined the not yet well-defined and sometimes misunderstood role of the pedagogical leader in ECEC in Alberta by exploring participants’ perspectives on leading practice within ECEC teams. Wenger\u27s Social Learning Theory (1998) helps to situate pedagogy and leadership, and their emerging connectedness within the context of the ECEC. Building on Wenger\u27s notion of a community of practice described as an assembly of people with a common pursuit to interact to improve learning (Wenger, 1998), highlights the collaborative nature of shared meaning making. Wenger’s (1998) notions of communities of practice was an apt lens to explore the dynamics of pedagogical leadership within ECEC centers. This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews, a focus group dialogue, and a follow-up questionnaire to explore how pedagogical leaders described the pedagogical practices used to support and engage EC educators in curriculum decision making. Findings illustrated how formal leadership often began with practice experience and recognition of leadership potential, as participants drew parallels between the pedagogical process used with children to the process used while supporting educator in curriculum meaning making. Findings also illustrated the various conceptions of leaderships, levels of formal leadership that emerge within organizations and the pedagogical enactments that leaders use. Participants detailed the need for formal and informal learning opportunities to further animate their work. The implications for practice focus on creating formalize pathways to leadership; expanding local practice circles for pedagogical leaders to collaborate with one another, and professional learning opportunities focused on pedagogy and leadership specific to ECEC contents

¿Por qué poca desigualdad fomenta el crecimiento: el ahorro y la inversión de los pobres

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se tratan las maneras en que los acontecimientos macroeconómicos pueden presionar a los bancos y, en casos extremos, conducir a crisis bancarias. Esto puede ocurrir de muchas maneras y no se trata ningún mecanismo específico. Estas causas macroeconómicas de la vulnerabilidad y las crisis de los bancos tienen implicaciones importantes para los regímenes regulatorios y para la política macroeconómica misma. Buena parte del análisis hace hincapié en la necesidad de fijar la política monetaria teniendo en mente la situación del sistema bancario nacional.

AMPHIBIAN DISTRIBUTION IN THE GEORGIA SEA ISLANDS: IMPLICATIONS FROM THE PAST AND FOR THE FUTURE

We summarized amphibian distributions for 12 coastal islands in Georgia, USA. Occurrence among islands was correlated with life history traits, habitats, island size, distance to other islands, and island geological age. Species’ distributions were determined from published literature. Island sizes and vegetation types were derived from 2011 Georgia Department of Natural Resources habitat maps, which included both federal and state vegetation classification systems. Species occurring on more islands tended to have greater total reproductive output (i.e., life span >4 years, and annual egg production >1,000 eggs) and adults had tolerance of brackish environs. Larger islands had great­er area of freshwater wetlands, predominantly short hydroperiod (<6 months). Species tied to long hydroperiod wetlands (>6 months) were more restricted in their distribution across islands. Overall, larger islands supported more species, but the correlation was weaker for geologically younger Ho­locene islands (age <11,000 years). While Euclidean distance between islands does not necessarily preclude inter-island dispersal, inhospitable habitat for amphibians (brackish tidal marshes and creeks interspersed with wide rivers) suggests that inter-island dispersal is very limited. The paucity of recent occurrence data for amphibians in this dynamic coastal region, let alone standardized annual moni­toring data, hinders efforts to model species’ vulnerability in a region susceptible to sea level rise and development pressure. The most common survey method, standardized amphibian vocal surveys, will detect Anuran reproductive efforts, but is unlikely to ascertain if breeding was successful or to detect salamanders. While it will not replace actual population data, consideration of critical life-history traits and breeding habitat availability can be used to direct management to support long-term species per­sistence in changing environs. Even common amphibians in coastal conservation areas of Georgia are vulnerable to increasing population isolation caused by unsuitable habitat

Structuring Services and Facilities for Library Instruction

published or submitted for publicatio

Deploying Jupyter Notebooks at scale on XSEDE resources for Science Gateways and workshops

Jupyter Notebooks have become a mainstream tool for interactive computing in every field of science. Jupyter Notebooks are suitable as companion applications for Science Gateways, providing more flexibility and post-processing capability to the users. Moreover they are often used in training events and workshops to provide immediate access to a pre-configured interactive computing environment. The Jupyter team released the JupyterHub web application to provide a platform where multiple users can login and access a Jupyter Notebook environment. When the number of users and memory requirements are low, it is easy to setup JupyterHub on a single server. However, setup becomes more complicated when we need to serve Jupyter Notebooks at scale to tens or hundreds of users. In this paper we will present three strategies for deploying JupyterHub at scale on XSEDE resources. All options share the deployment of JupyterHub on a Virtual Machine on XSEDE Jetstream. In the first scenario, JupyterHub connects to a supercomputer and launches a single node job on behalf of each user and proxies back the Notebook from the computing node back to the user's browser. In the second scenario, implemented in the context of a XSEDE consultation for the IRIS consortium for Seismology, we deploy Docker in Swarm mode to coordinate many XSEDE Jetstream virtual machines to provide Notebooks with persistent storage and quota. In the last scenario we install the Kubernetes containers orchestration framework on Jetstream to provide a fault-tolerant JupyterHub deployment with a distributed filesystem and capability to scale to thousands of users. In the conclusion section we provide a link to step-by-step tutorials complete with all the necessary commands and configuration files to replicate these deployments.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

The Institution As A Citizen: How Colleges and Universities Enhance Their Civic Roles

This paper is premised on the assumption that civic responsibility is the contemporary version of higher education\u27s historical outreach mission. With that as an understanding, it considers how best colleges and universities can fulfill this commitment of service to external communities, broadly defined to include local, national, and international concerns. The paper offers typologies of ways that institutions structure academic outreach, responsive curricula, land-grant and extension school programs, faculty professional service, coordinating student volunteerism and encouraging public access to campus for athletic or cultural events. Institutions interested in enhancing their civic role can take from this paper strategies for enhancing an institution\u27s civic life. They can use this paper as a yardstick for their own practice

An Examination of Multi-Institutional Networks

The purpose of this paper is to identify techniques for designing and maintaining effective multi-institutional collaborative projects that will also encourage the success of each individual institution. It contains recommendations regarding the formation and management of the networks. First, it reviews project goals and desired outcomes, with consideration of whether collaboration should be a means or an end. Next, the paper turns to strategies for forming and managing networks, with particular attention to the selection and role of a “project leader.” It then considers the role and responsibility of institutional participants, reviewing criteria for network participation and arguing in favor of a highly selective admissions process