Examining Attention to Leadership When Hiring School Administrators in a High Poverty, Ethnically Diverse School District: A Case Study

The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to understand the hiring practices of a school district when considering a principal and how the school district attends to leadership within those hiring practices. The central premise of the study was leadership matters and is second to teaching in student achievement. However, the historical record paints a picture of less than adequate attention to effective hiring practices and a limited scope when addressing leadership. A small school district in California was selected to participate in the study. The design incorporated mixed methods to analyze the hiring practices through a survey of site administrators (principals and assistant principals), interviews of the Superintendent, and interviews of two principals. Similar to what was found in the review of literature, the school district did not align all of the hiring practices to what they valued in leadership and lacked in performance-based instruments when hiring. However, the results of the study indicated how the school district valued leadership and this may have been a contributing factor in student achievement. Through the review of literature and the study, the researcher developed an understanding of the complexity of the leadership construct and provides a synthesis of how key leadership studies fit together to provide a framework for hiring school administrators

BUILDING BLOCK OF THE WORLD, BUILDING BLOCK OF YOUR IDENTITY: MULTILINGUAL LITERACY SOCIALIZATION OF HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS

This study investigates multilingual literacy socialization of Finnish heritage language learners (HLLs) in homes and a Finnish heritage language (HL) school in the United States. Participants included eighteen parents, fifteen students, and three Finnish HL teachers. Five HLLs aged 5 to 11 were chosen as focal cases. This study used ethnographic and microethnographic methods, with language socialization as the major theoretical lens and new literacies as a complementary theory. The study conceptualizes language and literacy socialization in an HL context as manifesting in three processes: family and classroom language policies, translanguaging practices, and language and literacy practices across languages and media. Additionally, the study considers HLLs’ construction of multilingual identities. Field notes and videos of language and literacy events in the two contexts, literacy-related artifacts, vocabulary and reading assessments in English and Finnish, and background survey and interview data were considered to understand participants’ language and literacy practices. The study demonstrates that parents and teachers engaged in similar socialization strategies: setting strict Finnish-only policies, curbing students’ translanguaging, and engaging children in traditional, print-based literacies in Finnish. Contextual factors, such as students’ English-medium schoolwork and non-Finnish parents’ lack of Finnish proficiency restricted these efforts. HLLs influenced these socialization processes by renegotiating family and HL classroom language policies, translanguaging in their interactions, and engaging in literacy practices, especially digital literacies, that promoted English at the expense of the HL. Such influences often ran counter to the parents’ and teachers’ efforts. Findings also indicated that learners constructed fluid, multilingual identities within different contexts and situations. The study contributes to socialization research and HL education research by examining a less commonly taught HL, Finnish in the United States. The study corroborates recent scholarship on language socialization, which has begun to uncover children’s strong influence and agency in socialization processes. The study also highlights the importance of digital literacies in young HLLs’ lives. The need for teacher education and P-12 educators to recognize HLLs as part of linguistic diversity in schools, and ways for parents and teachers of HLLs to support HL maintenance while recognizing HLLs’ multilingual, multinational identities are discussed

The Grotesque Menagerie

The Grotesque Menagerie is an exploration of domestic and gender roles of the American West. The burlesque and the grotesque are used as the dissection tools throughout this manuscript to examine these roles, and in so doing pervert both the ideal and the abject. As the author, these poetic explorations and dissections leave me stuck in an odd androgyny: I am suspect of my own feminist preclusions and oddly obliged to interact with the established patriarchal tropes of the western poetic cannon. I do not reject the canon as a symbol of patriarchal power; I do not request the role of woman to be forefront; I am, at once, transfixed and emasculated. This androgyny is mirrored by the main character, a carnival barker or master of ceremonies, Whispering Ted. Ted is a female hysteric: at once attempting to embrace and subvert gender roles while being haunted by the perversion of the domestic ideal. Hysteric in Freudian terms, or as Mary Russo explains in her text The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity, Ted is “ungrounded and out of bounds, enacting her pantomime of anguish and rebellion” (Russo, 9). However, as the Burlesque degrades from the intention of woman as gender equal to woman as sexual object, as the intellectual attempts of this manuscript begin to unravel under the perceived and demanded audience gaze, so too does Ted unravel, both physically and emotionally. Ted embodies the voice of the author struggling to maintain both feminine and masculine roles, enacting the tearing discrepancies between forces. The Grotesque Menagerie is grotesque in three critical understandings of the term. The term grotesque was an exceedingly fortunate misnomer of sculptures and paintings uncovered in apertures during the excavation of Nero’s Domus Aurea. Grotto-esque, cave-like, earthy, dark, visceral: all traditional, if not Freudian, images and symbols for womanhood. Though I would not claim the Menagerie overtly feminist, the exploration of female sexuality inherent in the exploration of the domestic is unavoidable; the archetypes of cavernous female will surface because I cannot completely subvert the history of my language or poetics. However, post-Romantic grotesque is tied to the Freudian understanding of the unheimlich: the uncanny. From the German heimlich meaning the familiar, the home, we would consider the unheimlich as the opposite: the terrifying and horrifying elements of gothic or horror narratives. However, unheimlich implies heimlich and therefore the disorienting coupling of unfamiliar within the familiar. The Menagerie embraces these further implications of the uncanny, the unknown darkness implicit in home and domesticity. Simultaneously, and somehow not venturing far from the uncanny understanding, the third grotesque is tied to that which is outrageous: comedy, hilarity, and Camp. Both the uncanny (gothic) and humorous (carnival) grotesques are based in the abjection of identity and body brought to a point of spectacle, which both undermines and reinforces the existing social structure. As the poet Lara Glenum explains in her text Notes on Women & the Grotesque, the grotesque is: “[A] hybrid body, its capacity at once monstrous and dizzyingly vertiginous, repulsive and seductive, male and female represents our appetite to endure and conceive and transform everything, despite the often hideous contours of our existence.” (Glenum, “Notes on Women and the Grotesque”) The Menagerie embodies this hydra-like grotesque in its deliberate transmogrification of the domestic scene and the traditional female role. My poems imply or enact transcendence achieved through mutilation and body horror; marital and motherly tenderness achieved through pain and violence; and sentimental idealistic love discovered through unfaithfulness and masturbation. These poems are a deliberate and necessarily cacophony of oppositions. The Menagerie uses the structure and contrivance of a performed burlesque to embody the spectacle of the Carnival grotesque, but also to understand the multiple failures of overcoming the masculine/feminine divide the history of Burlesque embodies. What we understand as the Burlesque differs almost wholly from the Burlesque of the 1860s, or Thompsonian Burlesque. Lydia Thompson’s burlesques, though socially outrageous, were based in sex as the striptease of our contemporary Neo-burlesque, but instead worked to parody gender and social roles. Thompsonian performers usurped gender-roles not by flaunting their genitalia but by simultaneously taking on and mocking the roles of men, as Robert Allen expounds in his seminal work on the Burlesque: “[F]emale burlesque performers were never trying to present a convincing, realistic portrayal of a man onstage. Instead, they were utilizing their masculine attire as a sort of fetish object, in fact emphasizing their feminine sexuality by contrasting it with the markers of masculinity.” (Allen, 29) This parody questions the contrivance of genders, mocking the artificiality of both. Travesties were perpetuated by women/men who constantly broke the laws not only of social norm but of theatrical production. The characters not only acknowledge the audience, but interacted with the audience, commenting on their own unusual costume, gender swapping, and overall artifice. The characters were simultaneously observed and observers, ultimately working to implicate the observer with the production. Ted embodies this complex duality of the burlesque acknowledging gender roles, subverting them, testing them, and dragging the audience along. Therefore, the manuscript attempts the same. The Menagerie follows the same trajectory as the Burlesque historically, eventually succumbing to the projected expectation of the audience. If a woman is defined by her genitalia, what else will suffice in her exhibition? After interacting with her fellow troupe members, Ted, and Ted’s subsequent lyrics, becomes seduced by the audience and the spectacle of herself. In this surrender to the moment of dual vision, Ted loses her vision, idealistically, physically, and metaphorically. The voice is lost, as well as the equality, and what was an attempt at social subversion only serves to reassert the norm. The manuscript ends with a failure of reinvention of self outside of the gaze. Within the realm of lyric understanding, the complex nature between audience and burlesque influences my writing of, and Ted’s interaction with, the lyric

Identification and Characterization of a Pressure Seal in South-Central Oklahoma

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Public health nurses' perceptions of duty during an influenza pandemic : a qualitative study / by Janice Tigert Walters.

For this study, a grounded theory qualitative design was used to explore public health nurses’ perceptions of their professional duty to care during a severe influenza pandemic or an infectious disease outbreak where there would be some degree of personal risk. This study examined their underlying personal values, beliefs and morals as well as their professional ethics and understanding of a duty to care. This research was specifically interested in the conflicts they anticipated experiencing between their personal female care-giving roles and family responsibilities (female identity) and their professional nursing obligations (professional identity). A purposeful sample of twenty-two public health nurses from five Ontario health units were interviewed using an open-ended semi-structured questionnaire. A theoretical framework was developed from the prevalent themes that emerged during the data analysis. A grounded theory is offered for how public health nurses develop their self-identity from a core, female and professional identity and how their self-identity can “reassort” over the course of their lives based on situational influences. The self-identity that is dominant in a nurse at the time of a public health crisis will affect her perception of duty. Public health nurses will be significant human health care resources during a severe influenza pandemic or any public health crisis involving an infectious disease. This study offers important information on identity construction for employers, governments and policy makers to consider as they plan for future pandemics or other outbreaks to ensure the strongest public health nursing response when needed

A VALUE PLATFORM ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE ON CUSTOMER ACCESS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Customer access information technologies (CAITs) provide a link between a firm and its customers. Firms invest in CAITs to reduce costs, increase revenues and market share, lock in existing customers and capture new ones. These benefits, however, are notoriously difficult to measure. This paper proposes an evaluative method for CAlT deployment called value platform analysis, that is based on a conceptual model drawn from the theory of retail outlet deployment in marketing science. The model focuses on the impact of CAIT features and environmental features on transactions generated by the CAIT. Specific econometric models are developed for deployment. Hypotheses regarding the likely impact of automated teller machine (ATM) location design choices and environmental features on ATM transactions are evaluated. The results indicate that there are a number of key features influencing ATM performance. Two distinct ATM deployment scenarios emerge: one for servicing a bank's own customers, and another for providing transaction services for customers for a fee.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Ulkosuomalaisten lasten luku- ja kirjoitustaitojen kehittyminen suomen kielellä

Ulkosuomalaislapsilla on usein vaikeuksia kehittää luku- ja kirjoitustaitoja eli luki-taitoja suomen kielellä, etenkin ympäristöissä joissa valtakielen asema on erittäin vahva, kuten Yhdysvalloissa. Esittelen tässä artikkelissa tuloksia maaliskuussa 2017 Marylandin yliopistossa hyväksytystä väitöskirjatutkimuksestani. Sen teema on amerikansuomalaisten lasten sosiaalistuminen monikielisyyteen etenkin lukemisen ja kirjoittamisen kautta. Amerikansuomalaisten lasten parissa, kotona ja Suomi-koulussa kerättyjen tietojen perusteella vanhemmat ja Suomi-koulun opettajat pyrkivät varmistamaan lasten kielen ja luki-taitojen kehityksen kielenohjailulla, eli sääntelemällä mitä kieltä kotona ja Suomi-koulussa saa käyttää, sekä ohjaamalla lapsia perinteisten luku- ja kirjoitustehtävien pariin. Lasten oma toiminta, kuten englannin käyttäminen kotona suomalaisen vanhemman kanssa tai englanninkielisten videopelien pelaamiseen käytetty aika rajoittivat suomen kielen kehitystä. Lopuksi pohdin erilaisia tapoja parantaa käytänteitä sekä kotona että Suomi-kouluissa luki-taitojen kehittämisen tukemiseksi.nonPeerReviewe