Women's Experiences of Educational Leadership in Public School Systems: a Feminist Life History Approach

There is a need for research that provides an opportunity for female leaders to tell their stories as they function as educational leaders. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experiences of females in the top administrative roles of public education and how they negotiate between being a female and a leader. I examined four women who have obtained leadership positions in several sizes of public schools and in various stages of their careers. They all held different leadership positions within public education. Life history methodology was used with a feminist theoretical framework to illuminate the issues of gender and the multiple identities they continuously live. Multiple data collection activities, such as interviews, observations, personal artifacts, and historical data strengthened the research study.Findings and Conclusions: The life experiences of the women played an important role in their becoming educational leaders. Each participant experienced internal and external difficulties within their leadership roles. Gender was found to be a factor for these educational leaders. This study sheds new light on gender issues in educational leadership. First, the participants' family relationships with their fathers and siblings seemed to have a connection to them becoming leaders, as well as the time period in which the women situated themselves, highlighting certain events that served as a catalyst for their becoming leaders. Secondly, my study emphasized the womens' own agency through early leadership experiences and their using multiple resources to overcome difficulties by actively formulating their own identity. Third, multiplicity and contradictions in their identity demonstrates that women's work in leadership is complicated and an ongoing process, exemplifying that these women's identities are a work in progress.School of Teaching and Curriculum Leadershi

Parental Views on Sexual Education in Public Schools in a Rural Kentucky County Eastern Kentucky University

Despite Kentucky having almost twice the national birth rate with 50 births per 1,000 female population ages 15-19 (County Health Rankings, 2015), the implementation of comprehensive sexual education in Kentucky public schools remains a controversial topic. This study examined parental attitudes regarding comprehensive sex education curriculum in a rural Kentucky middle school. A survey was distributed to a convenience sample population of parents (N=100) whose children were enrolled in a rural Appalachian middle school in grades 6th thru 8th. Data were analyzed using Chi square and multi-variate techniques. Of the 63 participants, 58.7% believed that sex education should begin in middle school. Of the 73% (n=46) of respondents who believed abstinence-plus should be taught, 58.7% (n=27) were between the ages of 26 and 35, and 28.3% (n=13) were between the ages of 36 and 45. Differences in attitudes towards sex education was strongly influenced by both age and education level

Managing suicidal ideation in a breast cancer cohort seeking reconstructive surgery

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135255/1/pon4017_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135255/2/pon4017.pd

ICSM CHC White Paper II: Impacts, vulnerability, and understanding risks of climate change for culture and heritage: Contribution of Impacts Group II to the International CoSponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change

Climate change is already impacting multiple types of heritage across all regions of the world. Future climate change poses increased risks to heritage globally, including losses and damages to heritage of current and future generations and particularly severe impacts on the intangible cultural heritage of Indigenous communities. Climate change impacts on heritage are not being studied consistently nor systematically, which is reflected in heritage coverage in IPCC assessments and special reports. There is a global imbalance in the number of publications assessing the impact of climate change on heritage between different regions. Regional, national and sub-national disparities are also observed (example of Australia East vs. West). As a result, it is difficult to know if what we know about the impact of climate change on heritage is just a reflection of where the science is funded rather than where or when heritage is being affected by climate change. Impacts of climate change on the broader economic benefits (besides tourism), and social and cultural value of heritage are neither investigated nor reviewed globally and rarely explored regionally or locally. Disparities in climate change / heritage publications appear to be determined by research funding, income inequality (within and between countries), colonial legacy (research ties and relationships between former colonies and colonising countries), legal systems of heritage protection (imbalance between natural and cultural heritage depending on the country/region), local vs. international interest in heritage, the language of publication (focus on English excluding other significant scientific languages such as French, Spanish, or Japanese). Improvement of data reliability and resolution allows for more nuanced reconstructions of impacts of past climatic events, facilitating historically important factors of societal adaptation processes proportional to those changes. Yet they do not provide straightforward solutions for contemporary anthropogenic climate change as the scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Alignment of climate change risk terms may facilitate collaboration between climate science and heritage research fields and enhance the likelihood of uptake by large climate change assessments like the IPCC. Innovative methods, especially those which are ideal for assessing social and cultural vulnerability, are needed to integrate the value of intangible cultural heritage with assessments of climate change risk. There is opportunity for climate change / heritage research to embrace transformational, inter- and transdisciplinary, and decolonial principles to address a range of the research and practice challenges as the field matures

The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission

Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currently scheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of the decade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is a strong science case for extending the current Warm Mission to December 2020. Spitzer has already made major impacts in the fields of exoplanets (including microlensing events), characterizing near Earth objects, enhancing our knowledge of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, understanding the properties and structure of our Milky Way galaxy, and deep wide-field extragalactic surveys to study galaxy birth and evolution. By extending Spitzer through 2020, it can continue to make ground-breaking discoveries in those fields, and provide crucial support to the NASA flagship missions JWST and WFIRST, as well as the upcoming TESS mission, and it will complement ground-based observations by LSST and the new large telescopes of the next decade. This scientific program addresses NASA's Science Mission Directive's objectives in astrophysics, which include discovering how the universe works, exploring how it began and evolved, and searching for life on planets around other stars.Comment: 75 pages. See page 3 for Table of Contents and page 4 for Executive Summar

Hyperoxia impairs alveolar formation and induces senescence through decreased histone deacetylase activity and up-regulation of p21 in neonatal mouse lung

Alveolar development comprises the transition of lung architecture from saccules to gas-exchange units during late gestation and early postnatal development. Exposure to hyperoxia disrupts developmental signaling pathways and causes alveolar hypoplasia as seen in bronchopulmonary dysplasia affecting preterm human newborns. Expanding literature suggests that epigenetic changes due to environmental triggers during development may lead to genetically heritable changes in gene expression. Given recent data on altered histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity in lungs of humans and animal models with airspace enlargement/emphysema, we hypothesized that alveolar hypoplasia from hyperoxia exposure in neonatal mice is a consequence of cell cycle arrest and reduced HDAC activity and up-regulation of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor, p21. We exposed newborn mice to hyperoxia and compared lung morphologic and epigenetic changes to room air controls. Further, we pretreated a subgroup of animals with the macrolide antibiotic azithromycin (AZM), known to possess anti-inflammatory properties. Our results showed that hyperoxia exposure resulted in alveolar hypoplasia and was associated with decreased HDAC1 and HDAC2 and increased p53 and p21 expression. Further, AZM did not confer protection against hyperoxia-induced alveolar changes. These findings suggest that alveolar hypoplasia due to hyperoxia is mediated by epigenetic changes affecting cell cycle regulation/senescence during lung development