The educational situation in Utopia: Why what is, is

In this response to Molly Ware’s review of our 2013 book, John Dewey and Education Outdoors, we extend her suggestion that complexity be regarded as an important, generative force in education reform. Drawing on Dewey’s 1933 Utopian Schools speech, we discuss the “level deeper” that Dewey sought as he criticized the method/subject mater dichotomy, which he saw as an artifact of social class carried forward in the form of a curricular debate rather than a natural source of tension that would be productive to democratic education. Dewey radically argued that learning itself contained similar anti-democratic potential. Eschewing the false child versus curriculum dichotomy, Dewey believed complexity as a catalyst for educational action would be achieved by engaging children in historically formed occupations, harnessing the forces that drive technological and cultural evolution in order to spur interest, effort, and the formation of social attitudes among students. Following Ware, we suggest that reformers should seek to understand at a lever deeper the many sources of complexity they encounter as they both challenge and honor what is

From critical to CALM: The development and implementation of a brief unified mindfulness workshop for college students

Dramatic rises in levels of anxiety, stress, and depression in college students have been observed over the past decade and is so pervasive that it has been deemed the College Student Mental Health Crisis (CSMHC). A number of experts have argued that much of this crisis can be attributed to students’ overall lack of basic knowledge of emotions and adaptive emotional processing. To address this problem, this study sought out to develop a brief mindfulness workshop as an intervention for college students to help increase student well-being, decrease anxious and depressive symptomology, and allow for material to be easily internalized. In this study, 67 total participants, all of whom were college students at James Madison University, completed a mindfulness workshop entitled, From Critical to CALM: A Guided Mindfulness Workshop. Stages of this study included the following: 1) Participant recruitment; 2) Conduct the pre-intervention assessment of participants using the Henriques-10 Well-Being Questionnaire (H10WB), the CORE Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7) scale; 3) Conduct the workshop; 4) directly after each workshop, administer a brief “Quiz” to assess the knowledge participants obtained as well as a satisfaction survey; and 5) Conduct the post-intervention assessment of all remaining participants using the same pre-intervention measures along with one qualitative question asking participants to indicate what concept(s)/idea(s) from the workshop they remember learning. Students’ satisfaction of the workshop overall was high and the vast majority of them reported that they would likely use the workshop’s strategies in the future. Two to three weeks after the workshop, students also retained at least some of the key knowledge elements from the workshop. Test-retest results for this study found statistically signficant change in students’ well-being, as indicated by the H10WB. A positive trend on the GAD was also found, but there was no change found on the CORE-OM. Due to the limitations of this study, the results are not able to be effectively interpreted to determine causation. However, given the nature and brief time of the intervention, these results were deemed as encouraging. Further development of the workshop and adjustments to the study will need to be performed to determine if, indeed, the workshop may have succeeded in initiating improvement in well-being, potentially through facilitating mindful awareness of intrapsychic process

Total economic value of the National Park Service: a contingent valuation method analysis, The

2014 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis estimates the total economic value (TEV) of avoiding up to 40% cuts to the National Park Service (NPS) park lands and NPS programs. TEV is made up of visitor use and nonuse values (existence can bequest values). We use a Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) survey to estimate benefits generated by the NPS, from a nationwide perspective. Thus, in order to estimate the TEV of the NPS, we use the Turnbull estimator and a logit regression to estimate household-level willingness to pay (WTP) from the data collected in the CVM survey. This study, by nature, is a benefit analysis. It uses stated consumer preferences to estimate aggregate WTP. The mail and internet survey had a response rate of 18 percent with a sample size of 317. Depending on model specification we find conservative lower bound annual household WTP estimates for avoiding up to 40% cuts to NPS park lands of $243.39 and$194.20 for avoiding up to 40% cuts to NPS programs (both values were estimated using the Turnbull estimator), and upper bound estimates of $1,015.10 for avoiding up to 40$430.00 to avoid up to 40% cuts to NPS programs (both values were estimated using a logit model). By summing the above statistics, we find estimated annual household WTP for avoiding up to 40% cuts to the NPS ranging from $437.59 to$1,445.10. Applying the lower bound WTP estimate to 18 percent of the households in the United States (as consistent with the survey response rate, in order to treat nonresponses as 'no' votes), we conservatively estimate the annual TEV of avoiding up to 40% cuts to the NPS to be $9 billion. Using the upper bound household WTP estimate and applying it to the all households equates to an annual TEV of avoiding up to 40$167 billion

The Ursinus Weekly, June 10, 1910

Baccalaureate sermon • Junior oratorical contest • Commencement • Memorial services • Class Day • Resolutions • Resolutions of sympathy • Notes • Funeral of Miss Thomas • Funeral of Mr. Fogelman • Tennis tournament • Alumni orationhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/2840/thumbnail.jp