Getting Back to Our Roots

Completing this senior honors project afforded the opportunity to develop activities around the topics of basic gardening skills, cooking skills, and the importance of quality nutrition for the students from the Center for Child Development Day Camp. Seven lesson plans were developed in collaboration with Mrs. Kathy Schupp, the director of the Nutrition Center. At the beginning of summer, discussion took place regarding the types of nutrition information that could be learned from working in the Schrank Hall South teaching garden. The Great Garden Detective Adventure was used as a resource in planning lessons for the students. This book was made by the United States Department of Agriculture and is used as “a standards-based gardening nutrition curriculum for grades three and four.”1 The Great Garden Detective Adventure contains eleven lessons from which lessons for this project were based. Lessons were created as a hybrid education model, including learning in the classroom, kitchen, and garden. Data collected following each lesson showed improvement in nutrition knowledge

Practice Makes Progress: Using the Lifespan Course as an Example for Role-Play Implementation

This conceptual article addresses specific clinical and practical implications for the utilization of role-play in the human growth and development course. Specific approaches to integrating role-play into the human growth and development course, including what we coin as Structured Role-Play, Semi-Structured Role-Play, and Unstructured Role-Play implementation strategies, are discussed at length. Sample vignettes and experiential activities for each developmental stage are provided. Finally, we address ethical considerations regarding role-play implementation

Fieldwork as Text and Context: Graduate Students\u27 Narration and Negotiation of Field Experiences Within an Inquiry Community

Fieldwork has historically played an important role within teacher education. Most often these experiences in schools are depicted as sites for developing teachers to gain insight into the practice of teaching. Research into fieldwork as a context for teacher learning, however, has traditionally focused on the learned outcomes, and less on how teachers have experienced and self-described these places of study (Zeichner, 2010, 2012; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Ball & Forzani, 2009). This year-long study explored how students in a literacy education program conceptualized the space of fieldwork as part of their teacher education program. Specifically, the study explored how students made sense of - individually and collectively within an inquiry community -field experiences in relation to coursework, to their own ongoing inquiries, and to their developing identities as teachers. I approached this work from a conceptual framework grounded within three strands: literacy as sociocultural practice; narrative inquiry; and critical feminisms. Data sources included fieldnotes, analytic memos, interview transcripts, and artifact analysis. The research provides insights into how fieldwork is conceptualized as a space of learning within teacher education. During their participation in an inquiry group, and in individual interviews, participants routinely described their goals for fieldwork, their impressions for what was expected of them, and how classroom experiences influenced their perspectives on literacy education, urban education, and teaching more broadly. In particular I analyzed how fieldwork functioned as a space that was both integrated and separated from other spaces of learning in the teacher education program. I critically examined how these narratives were embedded within larger discourses around schooling, teacher education, and school-university partnerships; these stories offer new insights into how fieldwork experiences are integrated into teacher learning, and present a far more complicated image of fieldwork learning than is often reflected in the literature. Furthermore, the collaborative learning within the inquiry group demonstrates the importance of creating spaces for sustained, critical dialogue in connection to field experiences. The study offers new ways of conceptualizing fieldwork that takes into account the inherently relational work of these spaces, highlighting the importance of how fieldwork is integrated and framed within teacher education

Psychological Effects of Thought Acceleration

Six experiments found that manipulations that increase thought speed also yield positive affect. These experiments varied in both the methods used for accelerating thought (i.e., instructions to brainstorm freely, exposure to multiple ideas, encouragement to plagiarize others’ ideas, performance of easy cognitive tasks, narration of a silent video in fast-forward, and experimentally controlled reading speed) and the contents of the thoughts that were induced (from thoughts about money-making schemes to thoughts of five-letter words). The results suggested that effects of thought speed on mood are partially rooted in the subjective experience of thought speed. The results also suggested that these effects can be attributed to the joy-enhancing effects of fast thinking (rather than only to the joy-killing effects of slow thinking). This work is inspired by observations of a link between “racing thoughts” and euphoria in cases of clinical mania, and potential implications of that observed link are discussed.Psycholog

Agency Innovation in Vermont Yankee\u27s White Space

The literature on “agency discretion” has, with a few notable exceptions, largely focused on substantive policy discretion, not procedural discretion. In this essay, we seek to refocus debate on the latter, which we argue is no less worthy of attention. We do so by defining the parameters of what we call Vermont Yankee’s “white space” — the scope of agency discretion to experiment with procedures within the boundaries established by law (and thus beyond the reach of the courts). Our goal is to begin a conversation about the dimensions of this procedural negative space, in which agencies are free to experiment with new approaches without judicial oversight. We also explore some of the ways in which energy and environmental agencies are innovating within these boundaries

Agency Innovation in Vermont Yankee\u27s White Space

The literature on “agency discretion” has, with a few notable exceptions, largely focused on substantive policy discretion, not procedural discretion. In this essay, we seek to refocus debate on the latter, which we argue is no less worthy of attention. We do so by defining the parameters of what we call Vermont Yankee’s “white space” — the scope of agency discretion to experiment with procedures within the boundaries established by law (and thus beyond the reach of the courts). Our goal is to begin a conversation about the dimensions of this procedural negative space, in which agencies are free to experiment with new approaches without judicial oversight. We also explore some of the ways in which energy and environmental agencies are innovating within these boundaries

Excerpts From the Eva Crane Field Diary: Stories

Male or female, young or old, the characters of this collection inhabit a liminal space of trauma and social dislocation in which elements of the real and fabulous coexist in equal measure. The ghosts that populate the stories are as much the ghosts of the living, as they are the ghosts of the dead. They represent individual conscience and an inescapable connection to the past

Goal-directed Leg Movements and Kicks in Infants with Spina Bifida

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Infants with SB present with a known central nervous system lesion that often results in neurologic, orthopedic, and/or cognitive impairments. They usually learn to walk significantly later than typically developing (TD) infants. The delays they experience in learning to walk appear to be related to the fact that they move their legs and kick less often than infants who are TD. Only a small number of studies have reported strategies that therapists and parents may use to increase how often infants with SB move their legs and kick. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact conjugate reinforcement has on the frequency of leg movements (LMs) and kicks generated by infants with SB. METHODS: The LMs of 7 infants with lumbar or sacral SB were videotaped while they were supine in 3 conditions: Baseline; Acquisition (tethered to a mobile); and Extinction. The infants’ LMs were video-taped for two minutes in each condition which enabled us to capture their spontaneous and goal-directed LMs and kicks. The video-tape of each infant’s LMs were then behavior coded via a frame by frame analysis to identify how often each baby moved his or her legs and kicked in each condition as well as how often they generated 9 types of kicks. RESULTS: A significant correlation was observed between LMs and kicks (r= .976, p=0.00). These infants moved their tethered leg significantly more than their untethered leg (p=0.036). These infants generated more goal-directed LMs and kicks in the acquisition and extinction conditions; however, these differences only approached significance (p \u3c .05). Single kicks and parallel kicks were the most common types of kicks generated in each condition. CONCLUSION: The present results are consistent with the literature and suggest that increased kicks lead to stronger neural connections and increased strength, which ultimately leads to earlier onset of ambulation. Due to the significant correlation between LMs and kicks, increasing the frequency of LMs in infants may increase the amount of kicks. However, further research is needed. This study was limited by the small sample size and large standard deviations within group means

Neural Basis of Stereotype-Induced Shifts in Women\u27s Mental Rotation Performance

Recent negative focus on women\u27s academic abilities has fueled disputes over gender disparities in the sciences. The controversy derives, in part, from women\u27s relatively poorer performance in aptitude tests, many of which require skills of spatial reasoning. We used functional magnetic imaging to examine the neural structure underlying shifts in women\u27s performance of a spatial reasoning task induced by positive and negative stereotypes. Three groups of participants performed a task involving imagined rotations of the self. Prior to scanning, the positive stereotype group was exposed to a false but plausible stereotype of women\u27s superior perspective-taking abilities; the negative stereotype group was exposed to the pervasive stereotype that men outperform women on spatial tasks; and the control group received neutral information. The significantly poorer performance we found in the negative stereotype group corresponded to increased activation in brain regions associated with increased emotional load. In contrast, the significantly improved performance we found in the positive stereotype group was associated with increased activation in visual processing areas and, to a lesser degree, complex working memory processes. These findings suggest that stereotype messages affect the brain selectively, with positive messages producing relatively more efficient neural strategies than negative messages. © 2007 Oxford University Press

Zika virus infection in the returning traveller: what every neurologist should know

Zika virus has been associated with a wide range of neurological complications. Neurologists in areas without current active transmission of the virus may be confronted with Zika-associated neurological disease, as a large number of returning travellers with Zika virus infection have been reported and the virus continues to spread to previously unaffected regions. This review provides an overview of Zika virus-associated neurological disease and aims to support neurologists who may encounter patients returning from endemic areas