Return with Honor: An Investigation of the Reentry Experiences and Discourses of Returning Missionaries in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Reentry is one of the most difficult and important periods of a traveler’s journey – a time to reflect on and integrate new experiences, identities, and perspectives into life at home. This period is often bittersweet and marked by a host of challenges and symptomology. Religious language and practice may function to alleviate or exacerbate these routine reentry challenges, or introduce a host of new concerns. Situated in the nexus of religion and tourism, the purpose of this critical-constructive qualitative inquiry is to (a) investigate the experiences and discourses of returning missionaries in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and (b) explore how these experiences and discourses influence the well-being and religious commitments of emerging adults. Primary data were collected via interviews with fulltime missionaries (n = 16) who had returned to a southeastern stake of the Church between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2016. Additional data were collected from social media posts; archival membership data; news stories; Church sermons, periodicals, handbooks, curriculum, and multimedia; and scholarly literature crossing a range of disciplines. These additional data points were used to inform discourse analyses and contextualize responses. Review of the literature, coupled with results from multiple layers of analysis (i.e., Willson\u27s approach to narrative analysis, Braun and Clarke\u27s approach to thematic analysis, Gees\u27 building tasks of critical discourse analysis), provide evidence that religious and secular discourses influence reentry via multiple points across the missionary cycle (i.e., recruitment, training, departure, mission, and return) and subsequently alter or anchor their religious identity and commitments. Specifically, feelings of alienation, loss, interpersonal discontent, and anxiety may be a product of or worsened by discourses related to the Significance placed on the mission, the Practice of dating and marriage, Identification as a returned missionary, the Sign Systems that privilege returned missionary knowledge and contributions, the Politics that make priesthood advancement and temple marriage more likely realities for returned missionaries, and the Relationships and Connections sacrificed via the adoption of alternative social discourses that elevate individual autonomy and engage with anti-Mormon ideals. As Church leaders prepare missionaries for and help them respond to the challenges of reentry and the transition to adulthood, they may wish to more intentionally steer the discourse of reentry via Church sermons, trainings, and more proactive social and multimedia campaigns. Church leaders also need to balance organizational goals (i.e., retention) with individual needs (i.e., the well-being of emerging adults). More broadly, reentry scholars and practitioners may wish to look beyond outdated anthropological theories of cross-cultural adjustment (i.e., theory of reverse culture shock, cultural identity theory) to enrich understandings of reentry. For example, evidence from this study indicated that the theory of place attachment, social comparison theory, and human development scholarship may all help explain the challenges and opportunities associated with reentry

Teaching Errorless Learning with Fidelity

Scholarly sources were reviewed to determine different strategies to teach students with minimizing negative interactions. Errorless learning is a research-based strategy that minimizes errors with few or no responses to the negative stimulus. Time-Delay and prompting are two types of errorless learning techniques examined in this presentation. Time delay is exhibited during activities where a response is required. The duration between the cue and the response can be constant or progressive. Constant time delay has a constant amount of time between cue and response, where progressive time-delay increases duration of time before scaffolding is provided. If no response or an incorrect response is provided, the instructor responds with the correct answer in a positive way and increases scaffolding. The teacher can use different prompting techniques to encourage correct student responses. Prompting is a form of scaffolding that increases desired responses. The hierarchy consists of many different types of prompting techniques; natural environmental cues are the least restrictive and full physical are the most intrusive. As students improve on desired skills, scaffolding and prompting should decrease. Research indicates that when errorless learning is implemented with fidelity, a student’s self-esteem increases and undesired responses decrease. Errorless learning can be implemented in a multitude of settings, meaning general and special education students can learn through this type of instruction

D-Shape: Demonstration-Shaped Reinforcement Learning via Goal Conditioning

While combining imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising way to address poor sample efficiency in autonomous behavior acquisition, methods that do so typically assume that the requisite behavior demonstrations are provided by an expert that behaves optimally with respect to a task reward. If, however, suboptimal demonstrations are provided, a fundamental challenge appears in that the demonstration-matching objective of IL conflicts with the return-maximization objective of RL. This paper introduces D-Shape, a new method for combining IL and RL that uses ideas from reward shaping and goal-conditioned RL to resolve the above conflict. D-Shape allows learning from suboptimal demonstrations while retaining the ability to find the optimal policy with respect to the task reward. We experimentally validate D-Shape in sparse-reward gridworld domains, showing that it both improves over RL in terms of sample efficiency and converges consistently to the optimal policy in the presence of suboptimal demonstrations

Goal Blending for Responsive Shared Autonomy in a Navigating Vehicle

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Grid-Sphere Electrodes for Contact with Ionospheric Plasma

Grid-sphere electrodes have been proposed for use on the positively biased end of electrodynamic space tethers. A grid-sphere electrode is fabricated by embedding a wire mesh in a thin film from which a spherical balloon is formed. The grid-sphere electrode would be deployed from compact stowage by inflating the balloon in space. The thin-film material used to inflate the balloon is formulated to vaporize when exposed to the space environment. This would leave the bare metallic spherical grid electrode attached to the tether, which would present a small cross-sectional area (essentially, the geometric wire shadow area only) to incident neutral atoms and molecules. Most of the neutral particles, which produce dynamic drag when they impact a surface, would pass unimpeded through the open grid spaces. However, partly as a result of buildup of a space charge inside the grid-sphere, and partially, the result of magnetic field effects, the electrode would act almost like a solid surface with respect to the flux of electrons. The net result would be that grid-sphere electrodes would introduce minimal aerodynamic drag, yet have effective electrical-contact surface areas large enough to collect multiampere currents from the ionospheric plasma that are needed for operation of electrodynamic tethers. The vaporizable-balloon concept could also be applied to the deployment of large radio antennas in outer space