Kenya Quaker Secondary School Peace Curriculum Pilot Project: Examining the Role of the Principal in the Successes and Challenges of the Implementation

This qualitative study examined the implementation of a peace curriculum for Kenyan Quaker secondary schools. Fourteen schools were selected for this study 1 year after school leaders attended specific training sessions. On site visits were made to 12 of the 14 schools selected for this study, and interviews conducted with the remaining principals. Schools were ranked on their level of implementation at low, medium, or high. Results indicated that 12 of the 14 schools implemented the curriculum at a medium or high level. Additional findings note the leadership of the principal was key in the overall peace curriculum implementation and addresses successes and challenges of implementing a new initiative in these schools. The development of the Curriculum for Peace and Conflict Management for the Quaker secondary schools in Kenya was a response to the effects of the 2007–2008 post-election violence. In the aftermath of the violence, more than 1,000 were killed and thousands of others displaced from their homes. Many people experienced neighbors turning violent on neighbors, even though living side by side for many years. The Quakers, also known as Friends, have been historically known for promoting peace and conflict resolution around the world. However, once the violence settled and order was restored within the country, these Kenyan Quakers realized they were ill-equipped to address the impact of the violence and create a culture of peace within their schools and communities. The first edition of the Curriculum for Peace and Conflict Management was a collaborative effort between George Fox University, a Quaker institution in the United States, and the Kenyan Quaker secondary schools leadership group. Completed in 2011, this curriculum for ninth and tenth graders contains 43 lessons comprised of eight major themes addressing specific Kenyan cultural needs involving peace in society. Those themes are: 1) Who am I? 2) Peace; 3) Virtues that promote peace; 4) Conflict and conflict management; 5) Life skills; 6) Human rights and responsibilities; 7) Peace and health; and 8) Peace and the environment. The primary concepts of the curriculum begin with the theme of Who Am I?, then develop into the themes of valuing one another; diversity as a strength; and the uniqueness and contributions of each individual to school and society. All together, the first edition consists of a Teachers’ Guide, Resource Guide, and Syllabus. An article describing the development of this project was first published in the 2012 Journal of Research on Christian Education, Volume 21, Issue 1

When Women Faculty Write: The Power of Community in Scholarship

With the variety of teaching and leading roles placed on faculty members within higher education institutions, finding time to engage in scholarship can be very challenging and often problematic. One way to support scholarship requirements, is finding likeminded colleagues who can provide encouragement and assistance in such efforts. This article describes the formation of a women’s faculty writing group at one Christian higher education institution, and how the support from within that group, helped to facilitate and increase each member’s scholarship agenda and productivity

Learning Cultural Humility Through Stories and Global Service-Learning

Service-learning experiences are often utilized by nursing programs in efforts to increase the cultural competence of nursing students. Through the use of sharing story, the concepts of cultural competence and cultural humility can be explained for students preparing for upcoming intercultural experiences. This case study describes the experience of nursing students and university faculty on their first service-learning trip to rural Kenya and how the intercultural issues were navigated there as students developed characteristics of cultural humility. This story is now being shared in preparations for subsequent international trips with nursing students and can be a model for programs wanting to prepare for service-learning experiences

Angle-resolved RABBIT: theory and numerics

Angle-resolved (AR) RABBIT measurements offer a high information content measurement scheme, due to the presence of multiple, interfering, ionization channels combined with a phase-sensitive observable in the form of angle and time-resolved photoelectron interferograms. In order to explore the characteristics and potentials of AR-RABBIT, a perturbative 2-photon model is developed; based on this model, example AR-RABBIT results are computed for model and real systems, for a range of RABBIT schemes. These results indicate some of the phenomena to be expected in AR-RABBIT measurements, and suggest various applications of the technique in photoionization metrology

Coherent Control of Photoelectron Wavepacket Angular Interferograms

Coherent control over photoelectron wavepackets, via the use of polarization-shaped laser pulses, can be understood as a time and polarization-multiplexed process. In this work, we investigate this multiplexing via computation of the observable photoelectron angular interferograms resulting from multi-photon atomic ionization with polarization-shaped laser pulses. We consider the polarization sensitivity of both the instantaneous and cumulative continuum wavefunction; the nature of the coherent control over the resultant photoelectron interferogram is thus explored in detail. Based on this understanding, the use of coherent control with polarization-shaped pulses as a methodology for a highly multiplexed coherent quantum metrology is also investigated, and defined in terms of the information content of the observable.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Musembe School: How One School and Surrounding Community was Transformed

The story of Eloise and John\u27s work in the Muliro Village area of rural Kenya perhaps best represents all of the tenets of cultural humility in play at the same time. Eloise and John had the unique opportunity to enter into a project that had not been on their radar, nor one they had envisioned or planned for. However, God had specific plansfor one small primary school known as Musembe, and the surrounding community of Muliro Village

Maximum information photoelectron metrology

Photoelectron interferograms, manifested in photoelectron angular distributions (PADs), are a high-information, coherent observable. In order to obtain the maximum information from angle-resolved photoionization experiments it is desirable to record the full, 3D, photoelectron momentum distribution. Here we apply tomographic reconstruction techniques to obtain such 3D distributions from multiphoton ionization of potassium atoms, and fully analyse the energy and angular content of the 3D data. The PADs obtained as a function of energy indicate good agreement with previous 2D data and detailed analysis [Hockett et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 223001 (2014)] over the main spectral features, but also indicate unexpected symmetry-breaking in certain regions of momentum space, thus revealing additional continuum interferences which cannot otherwise be observed. These observations reflect the presence of additional ionization pathways and, most generally, illustrate the power of maximum information measurements of this coherent observable