Marshall Carby\u27s An Experiment with an Air Pump

Using Joseph Wright\u27s painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump as an inspirational starting point, Shelagh Stephenson\u27s An Experiment with an Air Pump explores the depth of human existence using universal conflicts such as: morals versus ethics, science versus God and right versus wrong. Since the play\u27s premiere in 1998, it has provided a forum for hot button topics such as stem cell research, abortion, and scientific experimentation. The University of New Orleans\u27 production not only presented the issues in the play, it strives to be an example of theatrical excellence, challenge and engage both the company and the audience

Marshall Carby\u27s An Experiment with an Air Pump

Using Joseph Wright\u27s painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump as an inspirational starting point, Shelagh Stephenson\u27s An Experiment with an Air Pump explores the depth of human existence using universal conflicts such as: morals versus ethics, science versus God and right versus wrong. Since the play\u27s premiere in 1998, it has provided a forum for hot button topics such as stem cell research, abortion, and scientific experimentation. The University of New Orleans\u27 production not only presented the issues in the play, it strives to be an example of theatrical excellence, challenge and engage both the company and the audience

Personalized Feedback in a Virtual Learning Environment

The immediate shift to virtual instruction during the spring of 2020 forced educators worldwide to quickly adopt distance learning philosophies, technologies, and pedagogies. This lean adoption of virtual learning tools saw an unprecedented number of educators embrace new modalities of providing feedback to students. This paper explores those modalities and recommends that supervisors help educators situate personalized student feedback within the context of self-determination theory to ensure students\u27 needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are not abandoned in a virtual learning environment characterized by isolation and loneliness

Structural Leaders: The Intersection of School Principals, Business Leaders, and Social Networks

Educational partnerships are a convenient but underutilized tool in school improvement and reform efforts. Grounded in social capital theory and social network theory, this dissertation study explores the perceptions of school principals, business leaders, and community members on how resources are embedded, accessed, and utilized in local educational partnerships. Social network analysis examined the social network structures underlying the relationships between principals, business leaders, and community members in educational partnerships. The sample selection of five secondary schools provides multiple locations for the study. A total of twelve participants within the same school district in the southeastern United States will participate in this study. Data was gathered through interviews, surveys, and a document review and was analyzed according to the three themes of Lin’s network theory of social capital: 1) resource embeddedness, 2) resource accessibility, and 3) resource utilization. Interviews and documents were analyzed using constant comparative analysis, and survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and centrality measures. This study is critical because it takes a network approach with educational partnerships and provides practical insight into how school administrators can refine their business outreach and engagement efforts

Not for Sale: How home grown Scandinavian eco-cities take climate change imaginaries beyond market mechanisms

Inter-governmental climate talks have, over a twenty-year period, had little success in implementing measures to mitigate human-induced climate change. Their fundamental perspective, one of economic rationality, has not provided a compelling or effective basis for achieving their desired goals. Over the same interval, at the local scale, various constituencies have come together to address climate change by developing communities that allow their residents to live a lifestyle that includes concrete measures that do deal with the problems of climate change. By taking a perspective that emphasises ecological rationality, these eco-communities and eco-villages are challenging the status quo. This thesis examines four Scandinavian eco-city case sites and uses narrative walking interviews (where in-person observations were made of the characteristics of the built environment), the results of Google Web searches (to examine how these sites are characterised in English digital media), critical literature review, and comparative analysis. It then applies the theoretical frameworks of Critical Institutional Theory and Strategic, Values-based Planning Theory to examine how it is that these efforts have succeeded, to determine who were the key decision makers and who benefited from these projects, and to see what lessons about equity can be drawn from these local actions

Partnerships

"The word “globalisation” has a wide-ranging meaning! It includes (a) the phenomenon of the opening of the national economies upon a liberal global market resulting from progress in Communications and transport; or (b) the liberalisation of exchanges resulting from the interdependence between countries; or (c) the fact of becoming global and therefore spreading throughout the world; or (d) affecting the whole world or all peoples; or again (e) to put something into effect worldwide."(...

Tales from the playing field: black and minority ethnic students' experiences of physical education teacher education

This article presents findings from recent research exploring black and minority ethnic (BME) students’ experiences of Physical Education teacher education (PETE) in England (Flintoff, 2008). Despite policy initiatives to increase the ethnic diversity of teacher education cohorts, BME students are under-represented in PETE, making up just 2.94% of the 2007/8 national cohort, the year in which this research was conducted. Drawing on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with 25 BME students in PETE, the study sought to contribute to our limited knowledge and understanding of racial and ethnic difference in PE, and to show how ‘race,’ ethnicity and gender are interwoven in individuals’ embodied, everyday experiences of learning how to teach. In the article, two narratives in the form of fictional stories are used to present the findings. I suggest that narratives can be useful for engaging with the experiences of those previously silenced or ignored within Physical Education (PE); they are also designed to provoke an emotional as well as an intellectual response in the reader. Given that teacher education is a place where we should be engaging students, emotionally and politically, to think deeply about teaching, education and social justice and their place within these, I suggest that such stories of difference might have a useful place within a critical PETE pedagogy