Responses of three Muslim majority primary schools in England to the Islamic faith of their pupils

This paper considers the responses of three English primary schools to the education of their Muslim pupils. It begins by setting out the context of discussion about Muslims and education in Europe as well as by describing some of the structural and pedagogical characteristics and trends in English education influencing the schools’ options and choices. The main body of the article is a comparative analysis of the three schools, focusing on the approaches of teachers and school leaders to the faith backgrounds of their pupils, their constructions of Islam for these educational contexts, and their preparation of Muslim children for a religiously plural Britain. As the schools devise strategies and select between options, they provide in microcosm differing models of the inclusion of minority Islam in a western society

Digital Transitions: Nonprofit Investigative Journalism: Evaluation Report on the Center for Public Integrity

Summarizes outcomes of a one-year grant to CPI to transform itself into a leader in digital nonprofit journalism. Examines CPI's track record, use of new tools and methods, capacity as an effective and credible online presence, and areas for improvement

Plainly Spoken: A Traveling Exhibt Sponsored by the Midwest Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers

"Plainly Spoken" showcases competition submissions by Midwest Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers members based on Julia Miller's "Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings." Pieces include models that replicate books from an historical period, cutaways that visually reveal hidden structures, and interpretive pieces, as well as authentic historical examples from the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120269/1/plainly_spoken_14.pd

Dodging the Damocletian sword of academic oral presentations

Milperra, NS

We Are (Not) Who We Were: Irish Cultural Nationalism and the Battle Over Tara

This paper traces the controversy over the construction of a major motorway through the heart of one of Ireland’s most iconic and treasured heritage sites: The Hill of Tara. Through qualitative content analysis of opponents’ discursive strategies, the author reveals how key nationalistic themes that have been repeatedly utilized by Irish political actors during historical episodes of contention and state-building are reactivated within this contemporary political struggle. This is a theoretically compelling exercise because it reveals the durability of nationalist symbols over time and in diverse political contexts. In the case of Ireland, it demonstrates how citizens make sense of themselves in terms of their past and how culturally significant spaces play a central role in the process of national identity construction in this relatively young republic. It also provides insight into the strategic aspect of identity formation as it is linked to frame alignment processes in a manifestly inter-connected and globalizing world. In the case of Tara, this process is complicated by conflicting pressures of modernity and the allure of economic prosperity that also vie for pre-eminence as national interests

Pulsing corals: A story of scale and mixing

Effective methods of fluid transport vary across scale. A commonly used dimensionless number for quantifying the effective scale of fluid transport is the Reynolds number, Re, which gives the ratio of inertial to viscous forces. What may work well for one Re regime may not produce significant flows for another. These differences in scale have implications for many organisms, ranging from the mechanics of how organisms move through their fluid environment to how hearts pump at various stages in development. Some organisms, such as soft pulsing corals, actively contract their tentacles to generate mixing currents that enhance photosynthesis. Their unique morphology and intermediate scale where both viscous and inertial forces are significant make them a unique model organism for understanding fluid mixing. In this paper, 3D fluid-structure interaction simulations of a pulsing soft coral are used to quantify fluid transport and fluid mixing across a wide range of Re. The results show that net transport is negligible for $Re<10$, and continuous upward flow is produced for $Re\geq 10$.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Let\u27s Not Do Anything Drastic: Processes of Reproducing Rural Marginalization in Education Policy Decision-Making

At a school board meeting in micropolitan Athens County, parents of children attending the district’s smallest elementary school, Chauncey Elementary, packed in to defend the school against consolidation. They made calls for a levy to cover the impending budget shortfall and offered to reduce their classrooms by half if other schools would also bear some of the costs. They spent their holiday season defending their school, a source of vibrancy in the small town, from being closed. In the meeting, someone advocating for alternatives to closure suggested cutting administrator positions. The board response, according to one parent-leader? “Let’s not do anything drastic!”. As the U.S. urbanizes, rural autonomy over local institutions has dwindled and rural residents are marginalized by policies which govern those institutions. Recent work, some with a large public reach, has described contemporary rural politics as driven by resentment (Cramer 2016), rage (Wuthnow 2019), or something otherwise “the matter” with rural people (Frank 2005). Urbanormativity theory, with its focus on the cyclical relationship between representations of rurality and structural forces of urbanization, has the potential to shed light on how such ideologies develop and are reinforced through processes of marginalization from political and community life in rural places (Fulkerson and Thomas 2019). In this project, I use a mixed-methods retrospective case study of school consolidation in Appalachia as a way to understand the process by which local politics come to marginalize people and places along lines of rurality and social class. I also examine how this marginalization and loss of autonomy contribute to the development of rural politics and identity. Drawing from multiple methods, I examine the structural and social processes by which school consolidation was achieved, with alternatives to closure labeled as “drastic measures”. I pay particular attention to the shifting role of the state in curtailing decisions about rural schools and the ways neoliberal ideology lent itself to justifying rural marginalization. Further, I examine the impacts of these school consolidations on the rural community and its local politics. The concentration of negative outcomes in Chauncey constructed the community as a political “sacrifice zone” (Scott 2010). The processes and outcomes of this consolidation, I argue, serves as a useful case study to better understand political divisions along rural-urban lines