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A Pilot Study Examining Self-Regulated Strategy Development for Narrative Writing in Non-Traditional High School Settings
No full textResearch in alternative education placements reveals a high proportion of students that require evidenced-based practices and special education to achieve success (Ganon & Barber, 2015). This includes within multiple domains, such as behaviorally, academically, and in transition to adulthood (Ganon & Barber, 2015). Although it is one of the most crucial indicators of academic success, many secondary students do not meet basic writing expectations (Graham et al., 2013; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2011). As such, they do not feel confident in their writing, prepared for various writing tasks, or motivated to write (Early et al., 2010; Ling et al., 2021; Wahleithner, 2020). Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is an evidence-based writing intervention designed to foster various skills of writing, from composing quality written pieces to setting goals and implementing self-regulation strategies to achieve these goals (Graham & Harris, 1989). Decades of empirical evidence follows SRSD, including with various research designs and diverse populations. In the current study, instruction in SRSD’s narrative writing genre was implemented in two separate non-traditional settings: one behavioral intervention (BI) classroom within a local high school and one alternative learning environment (ALE) under court jurisdiction. Dependent variables of the study included correctly spelled words, correct word sequences, and total written words. Pre- and post-test measures were gathered through Intervention Central’s curriculum-based measure of written expression (CBM-WE). Results from Hedge’s g analyses between pre- and post-test probe scores yielded small to moderate effect sizes across all three dependent variables. Social validity was gathered via exit interviews from student participants in which they identified strengths and needs of the intervention, both generally and for their own personal growth
Understanding Stellar Element Formation Through Nuclear Reactions
No full textStudying nuclear structure has many applications, such as developing a stronger understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, or how elements are formed inside of stars. Our research focuses on analysis of the proton evaporation nuclear reaction of Carbon-12 on Aluminum-27 in order to extract information about the structure of the nuclei involved. We are studying the cross section, or likelihood, of this reaction, using both experimental and modeled data. Since the cross section of a nuclear reaction depends on the physical characteristics of the nuclei involved, we can use the cross section to analyze our work
What Must I Do? Servant-Leadership and Choice
No full textDrawing on archival research at Yale Divinity Library, this article examines four original manuscripts by Robert K. Greenleaf that explore themes of identity, responsibility, and personal growth within servant-leadership. Greenleaf emphasizes the primacy of individual character over systems, the paradoxical nature of leadership, and the enduring significance of choice. His reflections on entheos—an inner sense of oneness and rightness—frame leadership as a moral and spiritual journey. By situating these insights within contemporary servant-leadership theory, the article highlights their relevance for business education and leadership practice, inviting readers to engage with Greenleaf’s central question: “What must I do?
The Data Professional as a Servant-Leader: How the Pillars of Servant-Leadership Can Advance the Development of Ethical Data Analysis and Metrics in Organizational Life
No full textOrganizations are becoming more and more data-focused. Organizations need to infuse ethics into data analysis and metric development to avoid ethic decoupling and to ensure the equitable treatment of all involved. Using the pillars of servant-leadership allows data leaders to infuse ethical practices into data analysis and metric development that drive an organization’s success. While there is ongoing research to indicate potential limitations of servant-leadership, the data leader will be able to address concerns through emphasizing the necessity for ethical data practices and by emphasizing how servant-leadership challenges traditional notions of power
Understanding how Pharmacological and Complementary Alternative Medicines Improve Chronic Pain Management
No full textResearch Question: How do pharmacological and complementary alternative medicines compare for chronic pain management
Reviving Civil Discourse: A Leadership Imperative in the Age of Polarization
No full textThis paper examines the current erosion of civil discourse as a pressing leadership challenge in an era defined by polarization and distrust. Civil discourse, the respectful and constructive exchange of ideas, underpins democratic societies yet is increasingly undermined by hostile rhetoric and deepening societal divides. Drawing on servant-leadership and relational leadership theory, this study explores how leaders can counteract this decline by fostering trust, empathy, and open dialogue. The discussion is grounded in the philosophical contributions of bell hooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Viktor Frankl, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose ideas illuminate pathways for revitalizing civil discourse through compassion, truth-seeking, and moral courage. By integrating these insights, the paper argues that leaders must embrace ethical stewardship, active listening, and relational engagement to rebuild credibility and cohesion. It also addresses critiques of idealism by demonstrating that civil discourse does not suppress dissent but channels conflict into constructive outcomes. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for leaders across sectors to model and institutionalize practices that prioritize understanding over domination and collaboration over partisanship. This work contributes a theoretically grounded and actionable framework for leaders committed to restoring thoughtful debate, respectful dialogue, and responsible engagement, which are essential for navigating contemporary challenges and fostering inclusive, resilient communities
The Wisdom-ing of Academia: A Servant-Leadership Perspective
No full textThis article looks at the wisdom-ing of academia as more faculty members choose to delay retirement, continue working in varied ways, and are vibrant to the academy. Robert K. Greenleaf (1998), who is best noted as the Father of Servant Leadership, called aging the ultimate test of spirit. The authors represent Regent University’s Faculty Senate and look at this wisdom-ing, or graying, of faculty members through a Servant Leadership lens, a Biblical perspective, and then cognitive considerations, to provide insight into higher-education at large. We, the Regent University Faculty Senate, then share insights we learned from anecdotal casual conversations with our colleagues, such as the role of the Dean, the commitment to mission of our university, and financial considerations. The question is posed if faculty members meet with Greenleaf’s test of creating healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and to become servants themselves
Affinity Groups
No full textAffinity groups are a space for you to connect with others with shared identities and interests. The origins of affinity spaces was to bring together individuals together where they are in the minority, such as BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks for community, belonging and authenticity. At our SLC, affinity groups are an invitation. They are based on social identities and interests. If you would like to propose an affinity group, please submit a request during the opening plenary.BIPOCQueer + LGBTQ+ImmigrantsWhite Accountabilit
Can AI Foster Communicative Respect?
No full textChaired by Julia French, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame)
Almost everyone cares about respect. More specifically: almost everyone wants others to communicate with them in a respectful way. When they don’t feel respected, people shut down or retaliate. And when we feel that we’ve failed to show others respect, we can feel guilt and isolation. As LLMs increasingly become part of human-to-human communication, however, the question arises: does AI help or hinder communicative respect?
In this talk, I offer a framework for answering that question. The framework is inspired by the most influential philosopher of respect in the European tradition: Immanuel Kant.[1] Despite its historical inspiration, though, this framework is meant to provide guidance for those who design and implement AI within communicative technologies. Of course, frameworks aren’t always helpful – especially when they make a simple issue complicated. But respect, I argue, is not simple. It has, in fact, four dimensions. It is easy for all of us to overlook one or more dimension of respect. Within communication, the four dimensions are sincerity, receptivity, non-interference, and self-respect. To properly evaluate the impact of AI on person-to-person communication, we need to examine all four dimensions.
People sometimes talk of respect as though it were an absolute, all-or-nothing value. I suggest that is a mistake, and not just because it is multidimensional. At most, each dimension of respect corresponds to a default, defeasible moral demand: extreme circumstances and mutual agreements can make it permissible for people to bracket one or more dimensions of respect. As a simple example: when your life is in danger, you can lie and even harm the person threatening you. But these default demands are still strong. We don’t excuse lies and harm easily.
The first dimension of communicative respect is sincerity. A respectful communicator avoids lies, bullshit, and exaggeration. The words they use convey what they honestly think and feel. As anyone who has written wedding vows or an apology letter knows, sincerity is often difficult. Finding the right words can take hours. In principle, AI can assist with this, for example, by quickly providing a list of related phrases that we can consider using. AI can also undermine sincerity, however, if the technology does not prompt people to consider whether an AI-generated message really matches what they think. When looking for a phrase, it’s easy to just pick the simplest, nicest-sounding candidate from a given list, even when it doesn’t match one’s genuine but complex thoughts and feelings.
The second dimension of communicative respect is receptivity. A respectful communicator is willing to receive ideas, insights, and corrections from the person they’re communicating with. Genuine receptivity is difficult, especially when people start off with radically different perspectives, or when they have different approaches to communication. In principle, AI can facilitate receptivity, by translating or rewording messages to make them easier to understand. For example, a secular urban liberal could ask AI to ‘translate’ a message from a religious small town conservative into terms they’re more familiar with. It can also undermine this form of respect, however, by making it easier to respond to other’s messages without genuine receptivity to the others’ ideas. For example, the liberal might use AI to general a pleasant-enough response to the conservative’s message, without really engaging with its content.
The third dimension of communicative respect is non-interference. A respectful communicator avoids stepping on other people’s toes, that is, they avoid interfering with other people’s life projects. That is why we talk of being respectful of others’ time, since time is crucial for meeting the varied demands that are part of life. By making communication more efficient, AI can facilitate this form of respect. For example: if an administrator uses AI to the wordcount of an organization-wide message in half, it can leave employees more time for other tasks within work and outside of it. On the other hand, the very efficiency of AI-generated messages makes it easy for administrators to churn out vastly more words for employees to read, leaving them less time to meet their other professional demands, and to live their personal lives (“Sorry – I need to stay a little late to finish with my emails”).
The final dimension of communicative respect is self-respect. A respectful communicator recognizes and expresses their own value. The process of writing is often a powerful tool for self-respect, since composing a message can help someone crystalize their understanding of their own value. Assistive communicative technology can again help someone find the right words for this. Yet those same technologies can let someone skip on the task of reflection that facilitates that crystallization. As a result, someone who relies too much on AI in communication might never have a chance to understand their own priorities and their own knowledge. Without being able to do that cognitive work, someone might miss out on being able to say to themselves why they matter, and why they’re not simply replaceable.
In sum: there is no guarantee that AI-facilitated communication will either help or hinder communicative respect. Specific uses and design features can move things either way. The bad news is that this technology can easily make us less respectful in communication. The good news is that, developed, implemented, and used carefully, AI might open up novel and profound possibilities for communicative respect.
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[1] I defend this framework in more detail in “Political persuasion is prima facie disrespectful” (Journal of Moral Philosophy, forthcoming) and Ethical Persuasion: How to Change Minds without Lies, Bullshit, or Moral Compromise (under contract with University of Chicago Press)
AI, Grief and Mourning: Connecting with Digital Ghosts
No full textChaired by Tim Clancy, Ph.D. (Gonzaga University)
The advent of Large Language Models has made it possible for people to produce generative AI chatbots that imitate the conversational style of the dead, fine-tuning the system’s outputs to mimic speech patterns by drawing on their text messages, social media posts, emails, and other digital remains. What should we think about this practice? And how should we think about it?
Much of the literature on digital ghosts is either focused on their psychological impacts to individuals, or on what we might think of as straightforwardly ethical concerns, focusing on the specific obligations and concerns we may have in interacting with the dead, without much regard for social practices. But this elides an important distinction that emerges in historical literature on care of the dead: the difference between grieving and mourning. Grief is relatively immediate, unintentional, emotional, and experienced by individuals. Mourning takes longer, is more proactive, and is ritualized, with a public, social face.
Shifting our focus from grieving to mourning motivates a turn to Confucian philosophy, notable for its detailed defense of ritual in the service of supporting both social networks and individuals’ emotional capacities. It advocates embedding personal, individualized grief in formal mourning practices, contingent but emotionally potent social rituals.
To the Confucian, much of the current discussion suffers from an excessive focus on digital ghosts’ impact on individuals, overlooking the social coordination issues that may arise in mourning our beloved dead, ones that may both exacerbate and blunt some of these concerns. To the extent that Confucian philosophy focuses on non-medicalized, social, non-individualized public rituals that, while somewhat arbitrary, serve (like traffic laws) to help coordinate social responses to the loss of a group member, it can serve as an important corrective to the more individualized, private grief-centered accounts of digital ghost ethics dominant in the contemporary debate, especially those that treat grief as something to be gotten over, underscoring the value of mourning and thus opening up space for digital ghosts to be incorporated into structured commemorative and supportive rituals.
Digital ghost technologies are criticized for their potential to invite overreliance in times of grief (Fabry & Alfano, 2024; Lindemann, 2022), and compared to addictive substances whose use must be supervised and prescribed by a medical professional. Worries are raised about their inherent risk of inaccuracies, due to their underlying technologies, LLMs which themselves are inherently unreliable (Bao & Zeng, 2024). People worry that they lead us to think of our loved ones as replaceable, to instrumentalize or even zombify our dead (Fabry & Alfano, 2024), or to disregard the significance of death itself (Bao & Zeng, 2024).
Confucian philosophy, however, both cautions against some of the underlying assumptions behind these worries, and suggests strategies that can blunt their force. Their emphasis on relationality and emotional engagement suggest that worries about “too much” grief or dependence get something deeply wrong about our ethical and emotional landscape, and caution against the sanitized, individualist quasi-medical concerns associated with many modern worries about overreliance. Mourning technologies, even when in some sense “unnatural” or “inaccurate”, can matter when and because they help preserve important emotional capacities, including our care for the dead, as invitations to shape and nurture our responses rather than perfectly mimic the deceased, blunting concerns about accuracy. This makes room for digital ghosts as a kind of affective scaffolding for the bereaved, but scaffolding that does different work than that explored by, for example, Kreuger and Osler (2022).
Furthermore, their emphasis on social ritual helps protect against some of these concerns. For example, the Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s discussion of funeral and mourning rituals offers several striking points of connection to the modern phenomenon of digital ghosts. Rituals, he says, are nurturing. They help us to balance emotions and their expression by providing thoughtfully organized structures for experiences of various kinds. This is especially important, he argues, for experiences involving the beginning and end of life. “Ritual is that which takes care to order living and dying. Birth is the beginning of people, and death is the end of people. When the beginning and end are both good, the human way is complete” (Xunzi, 2014, p. 206) Responding appropriately to death is part of responding appropriately to people. If digital ghosts are to be appropriate, they need to help us express our emotions in a balanced way that nurtures the mourners and shows respect for the end of life.
Notably, this is not a solo affair, but a collective practice of evidencing respect for people. Part of this respectfulness, he thinks, involves making death a public affair. Responding to the death of a person should involve not just family and friends, but all those in the neighborhood and district. This should, he claims, extend not just to the funeral itself but to mourning afterward. To the extent that chatbots allow us to pretend “there has never been a funeral” (Xunzi, 2014, p. 208), they do something bad by failing to let us mourn. But to the extent that they allow for public and social engagement with the loss, they may have important work to do in two tasks: helping to keep the memory of the person alive, and keeping us from moving on too quickly. This both identifies important activities that chatbots, used as affective scaffolds, can perform, ones that are intrinsically social, while also introducing social resources and living connections that can help vulnerable people to make decisions with the support and reflective opportunities offered by a caring community, rather than going it alone.
This potential, in turn, is consistent with empirical evidence from users’ interactions with real digital ghosts, where distinctions between the simulations and the simulated are not just recognized, but often crucial to how they engage and what they find valuable about it, from expressing longing, to expressing frustrations about their difficult relationships with the deceased, to sharing memories with subsequent generations (Xygkou et al., 2023)