From Porciones to Colonias: Curriculum Development in K-12 Education--Methodology and Program Development

The 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities- sponsored “From Porciones to Colonias: Inserting the “Hispanic” in a Hispanic Serving Institution through Curriculum Innovation” brought together faculty at the largest Hispanic Serving Institution in Texas, the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA), and public school teachers to create place-based curriculum. Using the natural landscape and cultural history of one of the most dynamic borderlands in the world as the main classroom laboratory, faculty housed in the CHAPS program (Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools) challenged elementary, middle, and high school teachers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities to create in their students historically literate citizens who are aware of their local cultural and natural history. The following briefly encapsulates the conducted activities

Bound states of edge dislocations: The quantum dipole problem in two dimensions

We investigate bound state solutions of the 2D Schr\"odinger equation with a dipole potential originating from the elastic effects of a single edge dislocation. The knowledge of these states could be useful for understanding a wide variety of physical systems, including superfluid behavior along dislocations in solid $^4$He. We present a review of the results obtained by previous workers together with an improved variational estimate of the ground state energy. We then numerically solve the eigenvalue problem and calculate the energy spectrum. In our dimensionless units, we find a ground state energy of -0.139, which is lower than any previous estimate. We also make successful contact with the behavior of the energy spectrum as derived from semiclassical considerations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PR