Mexican Dance Group: Breaking Barriers One Tap at a Time (Chapter in Emerging Issues and Trends in Education)

Excerpt: With a growing number of Hispanic students in schools (Díaz-Rico & Weed, 2014; Oregon Department of Education, 2012), many educators wonder how to make the school community more accessible to Hispanic parents (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Gorski & Pothini, 2014; Valdés, 1996; Wink, 2005). The dance group described in this chapter demonstrates a natural way in which one teacher has accomplished Hispanic parental accessibility and, in doing so, positively impacted her school community. Rosa Floyd, the director of Nellie Muir’s Dance Group, has been teaching in Spanish-English bilingual classrooms for more than nineteen years. She came from Mexico as an adult and learned English, becoming an instructional assistant and subsequently a teacher. She has chosen to work with Hispanic students and regards her work as a bridge between Mexican parents and schools. Bilingual and bicultural, Rosa understands the Mexican community as well as the Anglo-dominated school culture. For several years, she has efffectively facilitated cross-cultural relationships between parents and teachers through the use of traditional dance groups. The months of practice preparing for the Cinco de Mayo presentations provide a catalyst for change as the teachers and parents address the invisible barriers that have kept Hispanic parents separated from the school community. Rosa’s effforts have led to a more welcoming and respectful school environment that embraces Mexican parents and reinforces students’ sense of cultural identity and heritage pride

Book Review: Writing Instruction and Assessment for English Language Learners K-8, S. Lenski, F. Verbruggen

Excerpt: The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition reported that today 11% of K-12 students in the USA are English language learners (ELLs). In 20 years, 25% of students in public schools will be ELLs (in Goldenberg, 2008). The growing number of ELLs creates a need for teachers who can implement culturally responsive teaching (Lucas & Villegas, 2007) and develop strong language and literacy skills among their students (Goldenberg, 2008). While veteran teachers adjust to the changing demographic and its demands, new teachers must be equipped with the right mindset and strategies to promote both language and literacy development simultaneously. ELLs need additional support to be successful in mainstream classes due to their language proficiency (Goldenberg, 2008)

Integrating Faith and Learning: Preparing Teacher Candidates to Serve Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

This essay examines how liberation theology and critical pedagogy inform the integration of faith and learning of a teacher educator who felt called to serve culturally and linguistically diverse students in the United States. The essay provides a brief cultural background of the educator’s journey from instructional assistant in an English learner program to teacher educator at a Christian University. The essay explains how liberation theology and critical pedagogy provide a coherent framework for preparing teacher candidates to work with English learners in public schools

The Commonality of Earthquake and Wind Analysis

Earthquakes and wind loadings constitute dynamic effects that often must be considered in the design of buildings and structures. The primary purpose of this research study was to investigate the common features of general dynamic analysis procedures employed for evaluating the effects of wind and earthquake excitation. Another major goal was to investigate and develop a basis for generating response spectra for wind loading, which in turn would permit the use of modal analysis techniques for wind analysis in a manner similar to that employed for earthquake engineering. In order to generate wind response spectra, the wind loading is divided into two parts, a mean load treated as a static component and a fluctuating load treated as a dynamic component. The spectral representation of the wind loading constitutes a simple procedure for estimating the forces associated with the dynamic component of the gusting wind. Several illustrative examples are presented demonstrating the commonality.National Science Foundation Grants ENV 75-08456 and ENV 77-0719

Lifting Linear Extension Complexity Bounds to the Mixed-Integer Setting

Mixed-integer mathematical programs are among the most commonly used models for a wide set of problems in Operations Research and related fields. However, there is still very little known about what can be expressed by small mixed-integer programs. In particular, prior to this work, it was open whether some classical problems, like the minimum odd-cut problem, can be expressed by a compact mixed-integer program with few (even constantly many) integer variables. This is in stark contrast to linear formulations, where recent breakthroughs in the field of extended formulations have shown that many polytopes associated to classical combinatorial optimization problems do not even admit approximate extended formulations of sub-exponential size. We provide a general framework for lifting inapproximability results of extended formulations to the setting of mixed-integer extended formulations, and obtain almost tight lower bounds on the number of integer variables needed to describe a variety of classical combinatorial optimization problems. Among the implications we obtain, we show that any mixed-integer extended formulation of sub-exponential size for the matching polytope, cut polytope, traveling salesman polytope or dominant of the odd-cut polytope, needs $\Omega(n/\log n)$ many integer variables, where $n$ is the number of vertices of the underlying graph. Conversely, the above-mentioned polyhedra admit polynomial-size mixed-integer formulations with only $O(n)$ or $O(n \log n)$ (for the traveling salesman polytope) many integer variables. Our results build upon a new decomposition technique that, for any convex set $C$, allows for approximating any mixed-integer description of $C$ by the intersection of $C$ with the union of a small number of affine subspaces.Comment: A conference version of this paper will be presented at SODA 201

Max-sum diversity via convex programming

Diversity maximization is an important concept in information retrieval, computational geometry and operations research. Usually, it is a variant of the following problem: Given a ground set, constraints, and a function $f(\cdot)$ that measures diversity of a subset, the task is to select a feasible subset $S$ such that $f(S)$ is maximized. The \emph{sum-dispersion} function $f(S) = \sum_{x,y \in S} d(x,y)$, which is the sum of the pairwise distances in $S$, is in this context a prominent diversification measure. The corresponding diversity maximization is the \emph{max-sum} or \emph{sum-sum diversification}. Many recent results deal with the design of constant-factor approximation algorithms of diversification problems involving sum-dispersion function under a matroid constraint. In this paper, we present a PTAS for the max-sum diversification problem under a matroid constraint for distances $d(\cdot,\cdot)$ of \emph{negative type}. Distances of negative type are, for example, metric distances stemming from the $\ell_2$ and $\ell_1$ norm, as well as the cosine or spherical, or Jaccard distance which are popular similarity metrics in web and image search

Transformative Learning Through Cultural Immersion

This qualitative study explored avenues to increase students’ intercultural competence through transformative learning. School of Education graduate students and faculty from a small, private university traveled to Ecuador to participate in a cultural immersion practicum. In addition to these primary goals, the trip was designed to facilitate transformative learning about cultural conceptions, diversity, and the dynamics of student differences with the goal of understanding one’s own cultural framework and adapting to another culture to develop empathy towards culturally and linguistically diverse students in the United States

College Readiness through an Innovative Concurrent Enrollment Program for Underrepresented College Bound Students

This paper explores several key findings of the first three cohorts of the South Los Angeles Mathematics (SLAM) Project. The SLAM Project is a longitudinal study designed to learn the best practices to employ in order to increase college access and success for underrepresented students. In particular, this project tackles the mathematics remediation crisis directly in order to ensure that the students in the program begin their postsecondary careers in credit bearing courses and shorten their time to degree. The program is unique in its student selection and instructional model. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate significant effects of college level coursework on student perceptions, attitudes, and persistence rates