Brief 20: Graduate Education and Civic Engagement

Across the country, new attention is being paid to graduate education and civic engagement (Applegate, 2002; Bloomfield, 2006). For decades college campuses have worked diligently to connect undergraduate academic study with public service in order to enhance learning and meet community needs, a connection often referred to as service-learning or civic engagement. Given that over 1,000 institutions have joined Campus Compact, a national organization of college presidents and institutions committed to this work (www.campuscompact.org), the widespread success of the service-learning movement is undeniable. As a further testament, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching now has a classification focused solely on community engagement (www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index). While graduate schools that prepare students for service-oriented professions such as law, medicine, and social work have long traditions of engaging students in clinics and other forms of experiential learning, graduate education overall has not been a major focus of the civic engagement movement (Stanton & Wagner, 2006)

Rewarding Faculty Professional Service

Scholars of higher education have long recognized that existing reward systems and structures in academic communities do not weight faculty professional service as they do teaching and research. In the past five years, however, many colleges and universities have found innovative ways to define, document, and evaluate faculty professional service in traditional promotion and tenure systems. Other institutions have created or expanded alternate faculty reward systems, including faculty profiles in service, merit pay, and post-tenure reviews emphasizing service. Based on data from a nation-wide sample, this paper discusses innovations in rewarding faculty professional service and offers conclusions and recommendations

‘Call her moonchild’ : Christina Ricci’s enduring embodiment of impure youth and whiteness

With a focus on how Christina Ricci performs the 'bad girl' body, one that renegotiates idealised forms of whiteness and ventures into performances of 'white trash', this article demonstrates how the actress's evolution from child to adult star was smoothed by a youthful physicality in adulthood, and a consistent performance of bodily taboos in both periods. By examining Ricci's physical presentation and associations with transgressive girlhood across a range of media, I argue that her persona deconstructs notions of female white purity by portraying childlike innocence alongside adult knowingness and sexuality. In considering how Ricci's distinct physicality relates to that of Shirley Temple, Ricci's body is revealed to playfully subvert idealised representations of the female child and childlike women. Ricci is shown to have made a career out of playing extreme variations of the 'dirty little white girl', whose 'dirtiness' aligns her with various kinds of 'Other' but who is as likely to pose her own threat to others as to need saving. As such, and in an extension of a term used to describe one of her characters, Ricci is conceived of as a 'moonchild'; a figure whose external whiteness depends on physical and behavioural darkness for it effect.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Keck+Magellan Survey for Lyman Limit Absorption II: A Case Study on Metallicity Variations

We present an absorption line analysis of the Lyman limit system (LLS) at z=3.55 in our Magellan/MIKE spectrum of PKS2000-330. Our analysis of the Lyman limit and full HI Lyman series constrains the total HI column density of the LLS (N_HI = 10^[18.0 +/- 0.25] cm^{-2} for b_HI >= 20 km/s) and also the N_HI values of the velocity subsystems comprising the absorber. We measure ionic column densities for metal-line transitions associated with the subsystems and use these values to constrain the ionization state (>90% ionized) and relative abundances of the gas. We find an order of magnitude dispersion in the metallicities of the subsystems, marking the first detailed analysis of metallicity variations in an optically thick absorber. The results indicate that metals are not well mixed within the gas surrounding high $z$ galaxies. Assuming a single-phase photoionization model, we also derive an N_H-weighted metallicity, = -1.66 +/- 0.25, which matches the mean metallicity in the neutral ISM in high z damped Lya systems (DLAs). Because the line density of LLSs is ~10 times higher than the DLAs, we propose that the former dominate the metal mass-density at z~3 and that these metals reside in the galaxy/IGM interface. Considerations of a multi-phase model do not qualitatively change these conclusions. Finally, we comment on an anomalously large O^0/Si^+ ratio in the LLS that suggests an ionizing radiation field dominated by soft UV sources (e.g. a starburst galaxy). Additional abundance analysis is performed on the super-LLS systems at z=3.19.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures (most in color). Accepted to Ap

Scholarship Unbound: Assessing Service As Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure Decisions

Scholars of higher education have long recognized that existing reward systems and structures in academic communities do not weight faculty professional service as they do teaching and research. This paper examines how four colleges and universities with exemplary programs for assessing service as scholarship implemented these policies within colleges of education. Case studies suggest that policies to assess service as scholarship can increase consistency among an institution’s service mission, faculty workload, and reward system; expand faculty’s views of scholarship; boost faculty satisfaction; and strengthen the quality of an institution’s service culture

Communities of Practice and Legitimate Peripheral Participation: Teacher Learning in Social and Situated Contexts

Learning through social interactions in situated contexts represents a significant means by which teachers in schools learn their craft (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Orr, 1996, Scribner, 1999). While research into the phenomenon of situated teacher learning exists, research into teacher’s learning and evolving expertise with the context of high stakes accountability environments is lacking to date (Boylan, 2010; Davies, 2005; Hodkinson & Hokinson, 2003; Pyrko, Dörfler, & Eden, 2017). This case study explored how teachers with 5-10 years of experience have learned in social and situated contexts. Teachers studied taught within two different subject areas within a large suburban high school. A multiple-case study approach involving interviews, observations, and document collection was used to explore the phenomenon through the lenses of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and communities of practice (CoP) as a means of understanding how teachers become more expert, what they focus their learning on and why, and how and to what extent external influences impact the learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). This study also explores implications for school administrators. The findings of the study demonstrated how teachers learn through social interactions in situated contexts as seen through the theories and concepts of LPP and CoPs. The three findings demonstrated; 1) how teachers develop the concept of a master teacher and how that influences learning; 2) how the pressures relating to standardized testing impacts how teachers interact with each other and what they practice in the classroom; and 3) how external influences from state, district, or school levels influences the professional learning that occurs through social interactions in situated contexts. These findings contributed to studying professional learning in two ways; 1) Through demonstrating how teachers come to perceive the concept of a master teacher and how that influences their learning and; 2) By showing how external influences affect the work teachers do together. Additionally, this study also presents implications for practicing school leaders in designing professional development programs and in shaping the overall school climate

Endomorphism rings generated using small numbers of elements

Let R be a ring, M a nonzero left R-module, X an infinite set, and E the endomorphism ring of the direct sum of copies of M indexed by X. Given two subrings S and S' of E, we will say that S is equivalent to S' if there exists a finite subset U of E such that the subring generated by S and U is equal to the subring generated by S' and U. We show that if M is simple and X is countable, then the subrings of E that are closed in the function topology and contain the diagonal subring of E (consisting of elements that take each copy of M to itself) fall into exactly two equivalence classes, with respect to the equivalence relation above. We also show that every countable subset of E is contained in a 2-generator subsemigroup of E.Comment: 12 pages. In the new version the main result has been slightly generalized, references have been added (particularly in connection with Corollary 2, which had been known before), and several of the proofs have been rewritten to improve clarit

A Direct Measurement of the IGM Opacity to HI Ionizing Photons

We present a new method to directly measure the opacity from HI Lyman limit (LL) absorption k_LL along quasar sightlines by the intergalactic medium (IGM). The approach analyzes the average (``stacked'') spectrum of an ensemble of quasars at a common redshift to infer the mean free path (MFP) to ionizing radiation. We apply this technique to 1800 quasars at z=3.50-4.34 drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), giving the most precise measurements on k_LL at any redshift. From z=3.6 to 4.3, the opacity increases steadily as expected and is well parameterized by MFP = (48.4 +/- 2.1) - (38.0 +/- 5.3)*(z-3.6) h^-1 Mpc (proper distance). The relatively high MFP values indicate that the incidence of systems which dominate k_LL evolves less strongly at z>3 than that of the Lya forest. We infer a mean free path three times higher than some previous estimates, a result which has important implications for the photo-ionization rate derived from the emissivity of star forming galaxies and quasars. Finally, our analysis reveals a previously unreported, systematic bias in the SDSS quasar sample related to the survey's color targeting criteria. This bias potentially affects all z~3 IGM studies using the SDSS database.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; Accepted to ApJ