Four-year Grant Research Articles

Addressing the shortage of African American male teachers in minority-serving school districts with innovative partnerships

PurposeThe paper discusses a partnership between Huston–Tillotson University (HT), a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) and the Austin Independent School District (AISD), a minority-serving school district, both in Austin, Texas, with a grant provided by Apple Inc. (Apple). The purpose of the partnerships is that valuable relationships can increase the number of African American male teachers in primary and secondary education in minority-serving public schools. The African American Male Teacher Initiative (AAMTI) at HT was created as an innovative approach to recruit and select 20 African American males each year of a four-year grant provided by Apple.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviewed the literature on the lack and need for African American male public school teachers. Once the data is established during a three-to-four-year period, a mixed-method approach will be utilized to examine data retrieved from interviews, surveys, demographics of student participants, numerical data and retention and graduation rates. This will establish whether strategic partnerships can successfully increase the number of qualified African American males in public education.FindingsThis paper proposes and provides research evidence that African American male teachers can positively impact all students in the classroom setting.Research limitations/implicationsThere is limited data to test a hypothesis on the effectiveness of a partnership between the university and public school to increase the number of African American male teachers through recruitment – selection and retention efforts. Therefore, follow-up research is needed for the first graduating class of 2024.Practical implicationsThe broader impact of this paper is to show that partnerships between universities and public schools with corporate sponsorship can positively increase the number of African American male teachers prepared to teach in public schools through strategic recruitment and selection efforts.Social implicationsThis paper can serve as a model for universities and school districts to implement. High placement of prepared Black male teachers in public schools can reduce the school-to-prison pipeline and juvenile homicides and defeat generational poverty.Originality/valueMuch research highlights the problems associated with a lack of African American male teachers. This paper includes the challenges but offers a sound basis for practical solutions.

FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education A new collaborative framework

Most colleges and universities offer services at their institution for students with disabilities who cannot properly utilize the standard available resources. Often the student needing the remediated resource does not obtain it until the semester is up and running, putting them significantly behind the other students in the course. This paper discusses a multi-institutional project at the University of Virginia that was established to address this problem. With a four-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing Disability Services Offices to safely share remediated texts for qualified recipeints, in order to reduce their nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education.

Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record

Aimed at historians, Comics and the World Wars focuses on comics not as a mode of humor but as a means of recovering the facts and feelings of historical events. As the forward and preface emphasize, this text makes the case for the significant utility of wartime comics to historians attempting to understand the past. To this end, the introduction lays out the authors' primary methodological influences and offers an outline of the following chapters. The second chapter proposes a theory and method of incorporating comics as a primary source. It also uses a short study of Wonder Woman to illustrate how this can be done. Further chapters provide a history of wartime comics, focusing especially on some important actors in their development, and illustrate the contributions of particular artists and agencies.The succeeding chapters deal with the work and influence of William Kerridge Haselden, a staff cartoonist for the British Daily Mirror (chapter 3); comics produced by British and colonial non-coms and their role in molding a new notion of heroism during WWI (chapter 4); the conscious depiction in labor movement papers of men who ignore their own self-interest as gullible dupes (chapter 5); the US government's effective use of comics to support its total war effort during WWII (chapter 6); contrasting images of women as either sex objects/domestic goddesses or as civilian war workers/combatants (chapter 7); and the clear alignment of the Communist British Daily Worker with the stance of the Russian government, illustrated by striking contrasts between cartoons published before and those published after Russia switched sides to join the Allies during WWII (chapter 8). The conclusion iterates the book's central argument and theory. Except for several references to Henri Bergson, Comics and the World Wars contains nothing about humor theory and little about humor itself in wartime comics. Instead, the text spells out the purposes to which humor is put, for example, to mold attitudes. Although the material in chapters 3 through 8 is often fascinating in itself, Comics and the World Wars will probably be of limited interest to readers more intent on humor than history.The research resulting in Comics and the World Wars was funded by a four-year grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The acknowledgments page names Jane Chapman as principal investigator and also mentions that Adam Sherif and Andrew Kerr received funding as researchers from this grant. Many of the challenges and limitations in this text can probably be traced to its origins.Because the authors labor to claim validity above all for comics as historical sources, the first two chapters are heavily laden with linguistic and historical theory; the style of those chapters is replete with the language of social sciences, poststructuralism, and semantics. The language resembles that of a grant proposal. A short excerpt in which the authors introduce the concept of a cultural trace illustrates their style: In analysis of these sources, though, it will also be important to ascertain more specific contextual detail in order best to assess potential historical content. Before moving to outline the methodology here, it remains to highlight that the notion of subject location, as coupled with an understanding of processes of narrativity and the inevitable role of subjectivity therein, must produce a result in the work itself. Because the rendering of narrative invariably entails subjective action, including the mediation of the present, the position of the subject in space and time must invariably bear some influence. Whether mediated consciously or subconsciously, subject location, to use the language of post-structuralism, leaves a trace. (20)The text lacks any indication of which author wrote each chapter. However, chapters 3 and following drop most of the jargon, passive voice, and interminable sentences. Collectively, much of what the authors argue is interesting if not particularly relevant to the humor found in the wartime comics examined. The authors insist on the importance of popular culture and specifically of comics to the cultural record; they remind their readers of the limited and refracted nature of every cultural artifact and the necessity of checking one source against others. They point out that historians use their sources to tell a narrative. Nonetheless, one wonders, does any contemporary historian really need to argue so exhaustively for the value and limitations of popular culture artifacts in examining the historical record? The information in the illustrative chapters should appeal to general readers. Who will find Comics and the World Wars of most interest? Historians, culture critics, anyone interested in the development of cartoon strips, and perhaps someone looking for examples of relatively obscure wartime comics.

Evaluation of Professional Development in the Use of Arts-Integrated Activities with Mathematics Content: Findings About Program Implementation

In 2010, the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, was awarded an Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) grant to develop, implement, and disseminate a research-based program of professional development (PD) that equips prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers to infuse mathematics instruction with arts instruction in their classrooms. The PD includes summer institutes and classroom-based residencies in which music, dance, and drama performing artists work with teachers in teams. This instructional approach is often called arts integration. American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted an evaluation of the four-year grant from 2010-2014, examining the implementation of the PD and assessing its impact on teacher practices and student mathematics knowledge. This article reports on the experiences of the elementary school teachers and Wolf Trap teaching artists in the first cohort of participating schools during 2011–12 and 2012–13, drawing on data from a variety of sources (PD observations, residency artifacts, artist interviews, and teacher surveys). We find that the Wolf Trap PD program demonstrates features of effective PD. It is classroom-based, intensive, and focused on what teachers and students need to know to teach and learn mathematics. It is aligned with district standards and offers many opportunities to teachers for active learning. The Wolf Trap PD program delivered preparation to teachers to infuse performing arts-based strategies into their mathematics instruction, starting in the PD institutes and then continuing in the residencies and did so with fidelity to the planned model. Wolf Trap used several approaches to optimize fidelity: a planning year and practice sessions with teaching artists, consistent use of local content experts, and materials structured to reflect the concepts and approaches used in both institutes and residencies. The article concludes with suggestions for practitioners and questions for further research.

Rewarding Research

Rewarding Research

New CLGF Four-Year Grant to Help Local Government Service Delivery and Boost CLGF’s Research Capacity

The UK Department for International Development (UK AID) has agreed £4.5 million funding for a four-year CLGF programme to improve governance and service delivery at local level in several areas of the Commonwealth including Africa and Asia from 2012-16. It will also help to support national policy frameworks for local government service delivery, and increase engagement of local government in regional policy planning and implementation. CLGF will continue to work with its members, UN partners and others to mobilise more resources towards the support of local government in the Commonwealth. The new programme will focus on local government pilot projects in LED, supporting ministries and local government associations in strengthening their national policy making for local government, and establish regional forums to enable local government to engage in and influence regional policy making to reflect the needs and priorities of local government. It will also boost CLGF’s research capacity with targeted research to strengthen CLGF’s policy making and advocacy, including more sustained engagement in international policy debates on key issues affecting local government, such as climate change.

Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University

Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University

Editor's Notes

It has been a year now since the APSA's Public Policy Section voted to provide the Policy Studies Journal to all members. Section members should by now have received a full volume of the PSJ, and have had the opportunity to see that the Journal provides a high quality and highly visible outlet for their best research. Submission to the Journal remains quick (with an average decision time of 43 days) and our reviewers continue to make a substantial investment in assessing (and improving) quality of our papers. We welcome your public policy submissions, and provide guidance on content and format along with the submission portal on our easily accessible webpage (http://psj.ipsonet.org). Articles in this issue provide a good illustration of the range and quality of the current research focusing on public policy. These articles address matters ranging from the strategies employed to drive change in public policy to specific policies that shape (or misshape) political representation. Robert Wood uses the cases of national forest and public range management to demonstrate how strategic attacks to shift policy making venues within entrenched subsystems can lead to policy change. Judith Layzer, focusing on the management of New England fisheries, identifies reliance on the adroit combination of plausible scientific claims and explicit protection requirements in fisheries’ governing statutes to bring about discontinuous policy change. Gregory Lewis, on the other hand, documents a much less successful effort to change arts policies via attempts to influence public opinion by reframing the policy debate. Several articles in this issue attack conventional wisdom about mechanisms that drive the policy process. Leigh Raymond uses the study of habitat conservation plans to argue that trust (or social capital) is an over-rated ingredient in encouraging cooperative social action. Rather, he argues, policy should focus on structuring incentives and building assurance mechanisms. Beth Leech shows that, despite the concerns of legislators, non-profit organizations that receive federal grants do not lobby more heavily than those without such grants. Cumulatively, these and the other articles in this issue add substantively to the stock of knowledge about public policy process and outcomes. One of the key ingredients to the continuing success of the Policy Studies Journal has been having sufficient resources to properly and expeditiously manage the flow of manuscripts, inquiries, solicitations, and other ingredients of an academic journal. We are deeply grateful to the George H. W. Bush Library Foundation for providing a generous four-year grant to underwrite journal operations. In addition, the Policy Studies Organization and the George Bush School of Government and Public Service both provide unstinting financial and material support to the Journal. We are deeply grateful for the continuing support of each of these organizations.

Reading and Riding: A Summer Language-Literacy Camp for At-Risk Adolescents

Reading and Riding: A Summer Language-Literacy Camp for At-Risk Adolescents

Clues to common weight disorders from rare lipodystrophies?

Research that might shed light on common weight disorders, such as obesity, has received a boost from the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. A four-year grant, which amounts to US$1.6 million, has been awarded to a research team led by Dr Abhimanyu Garg at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas, TX, USA).

Science career project aimed at minorities

Last Saturday, 110 school children in grades three to eight gathered at a community center in Atlanta for some hands-on experience in what it's like to be a scientist. They will be spending their Saturdays for the next 14 weeks getting to know earthworms, learning to use calculators, experimenting with computer graphics, and improving their verbal and written communication skills under the supervision of students and faculty from the Atlanta University Center. The project is but the first in a whole array of programs the Atlanta University Center is undertaking to promote science and engineering careers for people in minority and low-income groups. Collectively the project is called the Resource Center for Science & Engineering. It is supported by a four-year grant of $2.76 million from the National Science Foundation. NSF hopes to develop a number of these centers throughout the U.S. The center in Atlanta is the first to receive funding and to get ...