Training Adaptive Teachers

This article discusses how to develop adaptability in teacher candidates. The author required teacher candidates to adapt a face to face lesson plan for a virtual setting and concludes that candidates need more opportunities in their coursework to identify reasons to change instruction and reflect on adaptability

Situating Academic Readers: Emotion and Narrative in the Classroom

This dissertation seeks to address gaps in the teaching of academic reading at the middle, secondary, and university level by examining the pedagogical potential of emotion as a direct category of analysis. Despite a recent interdisciplinary resurgence in emotion, emotion itself remains untheorized in dominant pedagogical approaches, often associated with accounts of private reading, completed outside of the requirements of school. This dissertation argues that emotion is a productive category to explore in the classroom, and that direct attention to emotion can open up avenues of analysis new to readers. In order to address how approaches to emotion could deepen academic reading, I designed a qualitative study of a sophomore English class in an urban high school. My analysis of recorded class discussions, student writing, transcribed conversations, student surveys, teacher interviews, lesson plans, and a daily research journal worked backwards, isolating moments of academic reading moves in order to analyze the pedagogical methods that invited these particular responses. In this action research with students, I define emotion through a rhetorical lens, based on the cultural critic Sara Ahmed, as our readings of how we meet objects of our attention. I adopt social constructivist approaches to language – as invention, always situated within contexts, and continually shaping emotion. I conclude that emphasis on emotion leads students to increased awareness of self, text, and others. Specifically, students situate speakers and characters in relation to their important objects. While defining those relationships, students investigate ambiguities in language use. At the same time, students position themselves in relation to the textual relationships they have mapped. Drawing on the transactional theory of Louise Rosenblatt, this dissertation considers acts of classroom reading as powerful events which include student readers and texts as participants. Ultimately, emotion as a direct category of analysis leads students to practices of academic reading based on relationships, which I offer as a redefinition of “close reading.

Ground-breaking Exoplanet Science with the ANDES spectrograph at the ELT

In the past decade the study of exoplanet atmospheres at high-spectral resolution, via transmission/emission spectroscopy and cross-correlation techniques for atomic/molecular mapping, has become a powerful and consolidated methodology. The current limitation is the signal-to-noise ratio during a planetary transit. This limitation will be overcome by ANDES, an optical and near-infrared high-resolution spectrograph for the ELT. ANDES will be a powerful transformational instrument for exoplanet science. It will enable the study of giant planet atmospheres, allowing not only an exquisite determination of atmospheric composition, but also the study of isotopic compositions, dynamics and weather patterns, mapping the planetary atmospheres and probing atmospheric formation and evolution models. The unprecedented angular resolution of ANDES, will also allow us to explore the initial conditions in which planets form in proto-planetary disks. The main science case of ANDES, however, is the study of small, rocky exoplanet atmospheres, including the potential for biomarker detections, and the ability to reach this science case is driving its instrumental design. Here we discuss our simulations and the observing strategies to achieve this specific science goal. Since ANDES will be operational at the same time as NASA's JWST and ESA's ARIEL missions, it will provide enormous synergies in the characterization of planetary atmospheres at high and low spectral resolution. Moreover, ANDES will be able to probe for the first time the atmospheres of several giant and small planets in reflected light. In particular, we show how ANDES will be able to unlock the reflected light atmospheric signal of a golden sample of nearby non-transiting habitable zone earth-sized planets within a few tenths of nights, a scientific objective that no other currently approved astronomical facility will be able to reach.Comment: 66 pages (103 with references) 20 figures. Submitted to Experimental Astronom

microbeMASST: A Taxonomically-informed Mass Spectrometry Search Tool for Microbial Metabolomics Data

microbeMASST, a taxonomically informed mass spectrometry (MS) search tool, tackles limited microbial metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments. Leveraging a curated database of >60,000 microbial monocultures, users can search known and unknown MS/MS spectra and link them to their respective microbial producers via MS/MS fragmentation patterns. Identification of microbe-derived metabolites and relative producers without a priori knowledge will vastly enhance the understanding of microorganisms’ role in ecology and human health

A Taxonomically-informed Mass Spectrometry Search Tool for Microbial Metabolomics Data

MicrobeMASST, a taxonomically-informed mass spectrometry (MS) search tool, tackles limited microbial metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments. Leveraging a curated database of >60,000 microbial monocultures, users can search known and unknown MS/MS spectra and link them to their respective microbial producers via MS/MS fragmentation patterns. Identification of microbial-derived metabolites and relative producers, without a priori knowledge, will vastly enhance the understanding of microorganisms’ role in ecology and human health

Making a Case for Emotion in the Common Core Understanding of Close Reading

This article argues that close reading is a more authentic, relevant, and powerful practice for students when we treat emotion in readers and in texts as a rhetorical category of analysis. Both building off of the Common Core State Standards’ focus on close reading and critiquing its limiting definition, this article both models and analyzes a type of close reading that puts rhetorical analysis of emotion at its center. The text under consideration is a reading response composed by a student in a sophomore English class in an urban public school in the South. Ultimately, the article argues that by privileging emotion as a rhetorical category of analysis, emotions gain significance beyond the individual, pointing to stances on the world and to relationships with others. By considering the rhetorical force of emotion along with scholarship on emotion in literacy and cultural studies, I offer this article as one way of troubling the CCSS from within

Legislating First-Year Writing Placement: Implications for Pennsylvania and Across the Country

As many states begin to phase in new assessments of Common Core State Standards, this study explores the complicated politics of alignment, entry-level pathways, and developmental education at the college level. Through a comparative analysis of state level policies in Florida, Wisconsin, and Idaho, the authors discuss implications for possible similar legislation in Pennsylvania. They argue writing program faculty may be able to leverage the implementations of such assessments by adopting the impending exams as an exigence for paying attention to legislative efforts to define "college ready", building relationships with policymakers, creating system-wide first-year writing coherence, using effective rhetoric, and exploring multiple measures for placement processes. Keywords: placement, common core, state policy, rhetoric Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Katrina L. Miller, Department of English, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705. Contact: [email protected]

Catalyst : Celebrating 25 Years of Fanshawe College Fine Arts

On the occasion of an exhibition of works by 46 Fanshawe graduates, members of the college community recount the establishment and development of the fine arts programme. Includes brief artists' statements. 1 bibl. ref