Transubstance

The word morph sounds so soft but there is tugging and there is pulling. The unsticking of legs from the threads breaks any thoughts of grace.https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/onearth/1055/thumbnail.jp

Teacher Hiring and Placement at the Elementary School Level: The Challenges of Implementing Strategic Human Resource Management Practices

Decades of research emphasizes the importance of staffing schools with quality teachers, as this will have the largest impact on student achievement (Mason, Schroeder, 2010). With high teacher turnover rates in addition to shrinking qualified candidate pools, the hiring process holds great significance (Tooms, 2004). This case study explored how one school district hires and places elementary school teachers. This study follows a qualitative case study approach using documents and interviews as data collection methods. Recently, Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) has made the transition from business to educational literature. This study explored two concepts, including fit and flexibility from SHRM literature as a theoretical framework to determine strategic actions throughout human resource (HR) practices in the selected school district. The results indicated there is little evidence of strategic human resource practices in the studied school district. These findings add to a small, yet growing, body of literature on SHRM in education as well as on teacher retention and HR literature

Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays

In this collection of longer essays nested within brief, lyrical meditations, each piece focuses on some micro aspect of everyday life as a means of exploring complex macro systems—families, dinner parties, vineyards, deserts, nations. For example, Walker’s own experience as the mother of a micropreemie (a baby born weighing less than one pound, twelve ounces, or before twenty-six weeks gestation), “the smallest thing in the world,” spurs an exploration of, among other things, the economics of health care, the causes of premature births, and the ethics of extreme interventions. Where the Tiny Things Are is a book of ideas and an exploration of science. It is of the world and of the heart – both intensely personal and expansively empathetic