The role of leaders in fostering civic engagement and student voice activities : tales from a democratic school

This symposium examines the question: how can school leaders can foster civic engagement practice throughout the school? The papers examine aspects of this theme within one elementary school: the (perhaps inherent) dilemmas of being a democratic leader, the contexts and conditions that impact the promotion of civic-efficacy in children, the relationship between civic engagement and inquiry-based practices, and the way in which teachers “sense-make” of their leader’s civic-based initiatives. In a time when schools face constant pressure to narrow the focus on test scores, the papers provide important lessons on how leaders can maintain a vision of civic education despite these strong external pressures.Godkänd; 2011; 20111205 (ulrber

Detection of an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the nearby ultracool dwarf star SPECULOOS-3

Located at the bottom of the main sequence, ultracool dwarf stars are widespread in the solar neighbourhood. Nevertheless, their extremely low luminosity has left their planetary population largely unexplored, and only one of them, TRAPPIST-1, has so far been found to host a transiting planetary system. In this context, we present the SPECULOOS project’s detection of an Earth-sized planet in a 17 h orbit around an ultracool dwarf of M6.5 spectral type located 16.8 pc away. The planet’s high irradiation (16 times that of Earth) combined with the infrared luminosity and Jupiter-like size of its host star make it one of the most promising rocky exoplanet targets for detailed emission spectroscopy characterization with JWST. Indeed, our sensitivity study shows that just ten secondary eclipse observations with the Mid-InfraRed Instrument/Low-Resolution Spectrometer on board JWST should provide strong constraints on its atmospheric composition and/or surface mineralogy