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Teacher Faith Formation as Response to an “Existential Crisis” in Catholic Schools: Western Canadian Superintendents’ Perspectives
Get PDFThe shortage of teachers who can strongly identify with the religious mission of Catholic schools is at the point of an “existential crisis,” according to a system leader in Catholic schools in Western Canada. Drawing upon exploratory interviews completed with ten chief superintendents (who oversee large school districts), this paper reveals that while school districts offer various forms of faith formation regulating the personal lives of teachers amidst divergences between Church doctrines and social trends is complicated. Because the complexity of teacher faith formation is incredibly difficult to address, we discuss three key areas to renew the state of affairs: focusing on the individual teacher’s journey, creating content that is dialogical and seeks to integrate faith to life, and coalescing of Catholic educational partners to forge the political will to better support teacher faith formation
Paschal Space of Healing and Community: An Affinity Group for Catholic School Teachers of Color
Get PDFAs Catholic schools seek to recruit and retain more ethnoracially diverse faculties, we examine one site of potential support for Catholic school teachers of color – a racial affinity group. Using critical research methodology with qualitative data collection, we studied five teachers of color who engaged in weekly affinity group meetings, which were structured as Freirian culture circles and ran over a period of five months. Using a Catholic, critical framework on teacher education, we analyzed the data (culture circle recordings, written reflections, baseline and comparative interviews, along with classroom observations and debriefs) to examine how teachers’ participation impacted their sense of community as Catholic school educators. We found that engagement in these spaces cultivated a strong perceptions of community and solidarity for members through their experiences of authenticity, cultural understanding, professional development, and validation
Student Achievement Growth Before and During COVID-19: Comparing In-Person and Remote Learning in Catholic and Public Schools
Get PDFIn response to COVID-19, U.S. students learned remotely from mid-March to June 2020. At the start of academic year 2020-21, many schools remained remote but others—primarily Catholic and other private schools—reopened. We consider Catholic schooling as a proxy for in-person instruction and use national data from Renaissance Star and MAP Growth assessments to compare the achievement of similar students pre-pandemic, during the height of mitigation strategies, and after most schools reopened. In a departure from pre-pandemic growth patterns, students in Catholic schools showed more growth than those in public schools during the height of mitigation strategies, suggesting the importance of in-person instruction
Remotely Delivered Yoga Therapy for Chronic Pain: A Case Study
Get PDFMany people seek yoga as a complementary therapy for the management of chronic pain. Barriers to maintaining care for chronic pain conditions include pain with movement, fear of exacerbating symptoms, limited resources for long-term care plans, and a lack of individualized self-management instruction. In this case study, the yoga therapist implemented an integrative framework to address the needs of a client impacted by fibromyalgia primarily using video-conferencing software. This adaptive approach demonstrates the feasibility and potential benefits of remote yoga therapy for chronic pain, including improved adherence, long-term pain management, and self-efficacy for maintaining quality of life initiated by client-motivated lifestyle changes
Excited State Proton Transfer from Acidic Alcohols to a Quinoline Photobase Can Be Solvated by Non-Acidic Alcohol Solvents
No full textPhotobases are a type of molecule that become more basic upon photoexcitation and can therefore be used to control proton transfer reactions with light. The solvation requirements for excited state proton transfer (ESPT) in photobase systems is poorly understood, which limits their applicability. Here, we investigate the solvation of the ESPT reaction using 5-methoxyquinoline (MeOQ), a well-studied photobase with an excited state pKa (pKa*) of approximately 15.1, as a model system. Previous studies have shown that, in addition to the acidic donor that donates a proton to the photoexcited MeOQ, an additional “auxiliary donor” is necessary to solvate the resulting alkoxide. We investigate whether a nonacidic hydrogen bond donor (an alcohol solvent that MeOQ cannot deprotonate in bulk) can act as the auxiliary donor for the MeOQ ESPT reaction. First, we use steady state spectroscopy, TCSPC, and electronic structure calculations to show that MeOQ can deprotonate the acidic donor 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE, pKa = 12.5) using ethanol as the auxiliary donor. We show that the degree of ESPT is largely predicted by the degree of ground state hydrogen bonding between the photobase and the acidic donor. Next, we study the deprotonation of the acidic donors TFE and 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP, pKa = 9.3) with MeOQ in a variety of nonacidic alcohol solvents of varying chain length and branching. MeOQ ESPT occurs to varying extents in all solvents, suggesting that all studied nonacidic alcohols can function as auxiliary donors. We show that the concentration of the acidic donor is strongly correlated with the degree of ESPT. These results are necessary fundamental steps toward the understanding of the photobase ESPT reaction and its wide application in a variety of chemical systems
Cultivating Abolitionist Despair
No full textMichel Foucault once wrote, “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.” This affect of revolutionary force stems from the joyful militancy of bringing into existence the already possibly present worlds that are assumed to be impossible
Faith, Free Will Skepticism, and Fischer\u27s Tao
No full textSkepticism about moral freedom appears to be on the rise. This essay attempts to blunt the force of the recent growth of free will skepticism by appealing to a form of rational faith in free will. With a compelling account of the nature of faith (borrowed from Lara Buchak), we can see that even someone convinced by Pereboom-style skeptical arguments could nevertheless rationally accept and act on the claim that we enjoy moral freedom. Given an underappreciated aspect of P. F. Strawson’s famous paper “Freedom and Resentment,” this result should be less surprising than we might have thought. Further, this faith in free will should be especially appealing to those who have been moved by the resilience intuition that animates John Martin Fischer’s influential Semincompatibilism
Recording Arts Portfolio
No full textThis portfolio represents the culmination of the author\u27s undergraduate, recording arts education. The contents include original audio engineering work including two original songs, one podcast, one mastered song, another professional mix, and a professional portfolio website. The pieces represent the technical skills, creative decision-making, and interdisciplinary thinking cultivated through the course of the author\u27s degree
Synthergy
Get PDFSynthergy is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered social deduction game. Synthergy consists of an interactive website, game server, database, and AI server. Like other popular games in the same genre such as Werewolf, Town of Salem, and Among Us, Synthergy is played in a sequence of phases. During these phases, players use special actions, converse with each other, and vote to eliminate players they believe belong to the opposing team. Unlike these other games, Synthergy allows players to compete without a full roster of human players by utilizing non-player character (NPC) agents powered by the large language model chat-GPT by OpenAI. These agents are able to mimic all human player actions including writing chat messages, accusing other players, utilizing special actions and abilities, and answering questions. Each of these actions is formatted as a custom prompt, prepended with important game and character information. These prompts are then used to query the Chat-GPT 3.5 application program interface (API). Through the use of the LangChain library, the format of the plain-text responses is made consistent and predictable. In preliminary tests, the AI NPC agents have proven initially promising at mimicking human like play
Flores Bedregal et al. v. Bolivia
Get PDFThis case is about Bolivia’s failure to adequately investigate and prosecute the murder and forced disappearance of an opposition politician during the coup of General Luis García Meza Tejada in 1980. Eventually, the Court found Bolivia in violation of several articles of the American Convention