ILLUSTRATION OMITTED Research Articles

Postcards of the Familiar: A Meditation on Memories, the Magical, and Self-Realization

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sometimes the decision to choose a destination is practical and other times travels come about quite magically. During my 2010 sabbatical, I traveled to several destinations including Armenia, India, Greece, and Italy. Unlike other trips, this particular journey caused me to think a bit differently about new places and how I engage with them. In the process of exploring these places I purposefully bought postcards for they portray more than the daily lives of people; these sometimes iconic images often portray the more idealized images of places. Often, postcards reflect a country's milestones, history, and cultural legacies. I am intrigued by the portrayals reflected on postcards because they urge me to shift the pace with which I navigate the world. When I returned home it was to the familiar. But, my camera caused me to re-focus somewhat differently on the everyday, as though it was a postcard. Suddenly, I found myself exploring the meaning of the familiar, for I realized I had been engaged in a meditation for more than 34 years. It took leaving the familiar and encountering the new to realize this. My vision was now directed towards Mills Hall, the heart of the meditation. From earthquakes to student rebellions, this iconic structure has withstood hardships, loss, and the pains of separation by students, staff, and administrators. The elegant strength and endurance represented in this 160-year-old centerpiece of the Mills College campus reminds me of many of the buildings on those postcards I purchased while traveling. Mills College is a place where I lived my student life and now, where the trajectory of my professional life has expanded my intellect, teaching, and leadership skills. It is also the place where my vision of education has been informed and transformed. Mills Hall comes into my view with multiple layers of the familiar, but even though it is the framework around which my daily life is centered I still meditate on the question: How do I seek meaning in the familiar? Is a lack of reflection, a lack of meaning? As I follow the meditation, I see new reflections and details in what is almost taken for granted as the familiar. As a result, I enter new portals related to sites that are part of my daily life. It is as though a new door is placed on an old building, and there is a renewal within me. My son, Lucas, a photographer, insisted I become familiar with Martin Parr's work after viewing my photographs of the Mills College campus. Parr, a British documentary photographer, is an avid collector of postcards. Martin Parr's book Tutta Roma (2007) depicts postcard-like photographs of Rome. He documents Rome through the sites, as well as the millions of visitors who cast their gaze on this historical city. His work also reflects how visitors become part of the city and make it, to some degree, what it is. In this way, he forces the viewer to look at more than just the sites by turning the lens back on the visitors. After I studied Martin Parr's work, I looked at my photographs again and realized that although I may have intended to turn the photographic lens back on myself, I had not done so. As I continued roaming around the Mills campus, I had placed myself in the role of a tourist, venturing through a most familiar place. Perhaps this is something we all do, as observing is easier than participating. I look at the photograph I took of Mills Hall and I am struck by how it is centered, with equal parts of sky and lawn. There is a balance in this photograph that often is not achieved in life, for imbalance is more familiar and more of a driving force in the daily course of our lives. Even though this terrain is the axis on which my daily routine turns, there is always the possibility that I will lose myself in the landscape. I am reminded of the lyrics from Like a Stranger, a song written by Bob Weir and John Barlow, and made famous by The Grateful Dead on their 1990 Without a Net album: Inside you're burning I can see clear through Your eyes tell more than you mean them to Lit up and flashing Like reds and blues Out there on the neon avenue But I feel like a stranger Feel like a Stranger I wonder if I actually always see my surroundings. …

Artworld Analog: A Conversation with Anne Doran

Anne Doran is best known as a second-wave Pictures Generation artist. Her large, wall-mounted photo-sculptures appropriate found images from sources such as ads, porn magazines, and military literature, juxtaposing them in formally playful ways that at once recall the pop collages of James Rosenquist or Richard Hamilton and the angular designs of the Constructivists. However, Doran's artworld footprint is much more expansive than her visual art. For nearly three decades now, she has split her time working as an artist, a critic, an editor, and a curator. After showing at 303 Gallery in the 1980s, alongside such artists as Richard Prince, Liz Lamer, and Thomas Ruff, the economic recession led Doran to take a break from making art--a hiatus that, with a few exceptions, ended up lasting twenty-plus years. However, her visual work was rediscovered several years ago by gallerists Benjamin Tischer and Risa Needleman of the upstart New York City gallery Invisible Exports, and in 2014 they showed Doran's sculptures for the first time since they were on view in the 1990s. The exhibition garnered a great deal of reception and critical praise, helping introduce her prescient work to a new generation of artists interested in appropriation, image production, and the materiality of photographs. Now Doran is back to making work regularly. Her second show with the gallery, Analogs, was on view January 6-February 12 of this year, and coincided with the 11th White Columns Annual, which she curated--both exhibitions received more positive reviews. In February, Doran sat down with me in Brooklyn to talk about her work, the hiatus she took from making visual art, and the many artworld hats she's worn since. TAYLOR DAFOE: Let's start with your early work from the 1980s. At that time, how much did you know about the work of the Pictures artists, who were also appropriating found images? ANNE DORAN: I moved to New York City on the advice of Martha Wilson, who had seen my senior show at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. I was working at a place called d.c. space, which was a restaurant and jazz venue that also occasionally hosted performance art. Howard Halle, an old friend and one of my mentors, was a partner in the club and scheduled the art performances. He brought people like Martha, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Longo down from New York. I was living upstairs, and I'd put people up. I remember I once had the entire World Saxophone Quartet crashed out in my apartment. So I already knew some people. I moved to Brooklyn in 1979, in a snowstorm. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A friend and fellow artist, Gretchen Bender, had moved to New York City a bit earlier, and through her I got to know some of the Pictures Generation artists early on. Their work really excited me. I hadn't realized that you could use found images as your own. But, like Gretchen, I was part of a slightly younger generation that was working with multiple images rather than a single image. I was trying to put them together in ways that resonated personally or politically. By the late '80s, I was doing fairly well with my art. I was showing at 303 Gallery, which had moved to SoHo by then. But in 1987 the stock market crashed and the art market with it, and within a couple of years I, like many other artists, was out of a job. At that moment, I was offered a position as an associate art editor at Grand Street magazine, which the curator Walter Hopps had persuaded Jean Stein, the author of Edie: American Girl (1994), to purchase. She bought it in 1990 from Ben Sonnenberg, who had started it as a strictly literary journal in 1981. Walter's idea was that it should become a literary and art magazine modeled on publications like View. I'd known Walter since my Washington days, when he was working at the Smithsonian. We met when he did his 36 Hours show at the Museum of Temporary Art in DC, to which I lent a piece. …

3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale

KOCHI, INDIA DECEMBER 12,2016-MARCH 29, 2017 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With exhibitions spanning twelve venues and showing work by over one hundred regional and international artists, Kochi-Muziris Biennale is deservedly recognized as the largest platform for visual arts engagement in Southeast Asia. (1) Artist Sudarshan Shetty curated Biennale (his first curatorial project) and has sensitively and adroitly selected and positioned a compelling array of contemporary work across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, video art, sound art, and performance art. According to Shetty, Biennale--subtitled Forming in Pupil of an Eye--is an assembly and layering of realities that offers possibility for connections between spaces of and multiple other consciousnesses. (2) This approach seems appropriate for first and only biennial held in India, a country long associated with spiritual and meditative practices intended to facilitate such bridging of reality with higher consciousness. Aspinwall House, a sprawling sea-front compound that was originally headquarters of a nineteenth-century English trading company, is venue for majority of works in Biennale and location where most visitors will begin their experience of event. A number of artists represented at Aspinwall House have created works that respond to site's historical associations and its orientation toward fishing and shipping harbors of Kochi. The placement of Camille Norment's haptic sound installation Prime (2016) offers a particularly compelling example of this synergy. This deceptively simple piece consists of five wooden benches placed in a large, empty warehouse space with a view onto a pier jutting into harbor. As visitors enter room they are enveloped by a low, almost rumbling, chorus of voices--not singing, per se, but chanting and moaning, creating a sound that ebbs and flows like water outside. When one sits on a bench, experience of work is completed as voices' vibrations are transmitted through one's body, engaging viewer physically with hypnotic tones. The work becomes meditative, viewer at one with sound, water, and sensation. Another work that engages sea-front location of Aspinwall House and its historical association with trade routes through both placement and content is Pedro Gomez-Egana's Aphelion (2016). This mixed-media installation is also placed in a room facing harbor; yet rather than offering an immediate view of water, as viewers enter and take their seats an attendant draws curtains across windows and turns out lights, plunging room into complete blackness. Slowly, a circular image is projected that morphs into sun and moon and appears and disappears in lapping waves. The soundtrack for work speaks, in a low, rhythmic voice, of ships and water and sea. The voice intones, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes poetically (salt waters, silt waters, mud waters), and sometimes with references to warships and other vessels linked to both history and myth. Toward end of presentation, a roll of paper extending toward audience begins to ripple and move. At same time, narrative compares water to a snake, describing a connection between waves of sea and wavelike movement of a snake, which is visually echoed by rippling paper. As presentation ends, doors are flung open and light fills room. Other installations at Aspinwall House are less connected to particular location and history of venue, but nonetheless reference mythology and landscape in ways that reflect Biennale theme of connecting lived experience with other realities. Chittrovanu Mazumdar's large-scale sculpture and video installation, River of Ideas (2016), draws on river of Hades as well as Ganges to reflect on role of rivers as spaces of journey, of immersion, and of transition, to create an environment that encourages viewer to move beyond physical experience and to connect that experience to abstract thoughts and reflections. …

13th Dubai International Film Festival

MADINAT JUMEIRAH CONFERENCE CENTRE DUBAI DECEMBER 7-14, 2016 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) is an annual eight-day event that takes place at the Madinat Jumeirah Conference Centre in Dubai. Sponsored by a myriad of local and regional partners, the festival has consistently pledged to showcase cinema from the Arab world since its inception in 2004. This year DIFF presented 156 feature films, shorts, and documentaries from fifty-five countries, including seventy-three premieres from the Middle East and North Africa region, twelve premieres from the Middle East, and nine premieres from the Gulf Cooperation Council region. DIFF also featured fifty-seven world and international premieres, with special programs such as Nordic Spotlight, a segment dedicated to films from Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway; Oscar Glory, which featured a selection of films that are official submissions to the Academy Awards; and Last Chance, dedicated to the late Abbas Kiarostami and Andrzej Wajda and featuring their respective films Take Me Home (2016) and Afterimage (2016), which were screened alongside Seyfolah Samadian's documentary 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami (2016). Aside from the usually stellar lineup of films, DIFF is also known for its nightly red carpet gala screenings and the scenic views surrounding its venues--one of which is at Jumeirah Beach, an open-air beach cinema open to the public at no cost. The DIFF also generates highly productive spaces for its participants. For example, each screening is followed by a lengthy QA and Hady Zaccak's Ya Omri (104 Wrinkles) (2016), a biographical feature about his aging grandmother, whose self-reflexivity and collaboration on the twenty-year project with her grandson makes for a compelling work exploring love and loss through her lapses of memory. Soleen Yusef's stunning film Haus ohne Doch (House without Roof) (2016), follows three siblings on their journey from Germany to bury their mother in her ancestral village in Iraqi Kurdistan. (The mother is played by Wedad Sabri, the director's mother.) Although Haus Ohne Dach is Yusef's first feature film, she masterfully captures the antagonisms between the siblings--who live very different lives in Germany--as they embark on a trip that forces them to confront questions of gender, identity, and belonging amid a highly volatile politicized backdrop, causing them at one point to lose their mother's coffin. An unsurprising yet intriguing theme at DIFF this year was that a number of films dealt with bodies of water in their narratives. As the migration crisis has escalated over the past couple of years, the Mediterranean sea has come to symbolize more tragedy than hope as hundreds of thousands of refugees attempt to cross it--often in unsafe and overcrowded rubber boats--on their journey to Europe's shores. …

In Dream and Soil: A Conversation with Bea Nettles

Bea Nettles rose to prominence at the beginning of 1970 with her autobiographical mixed-media and photographic work. During that year she had a solo show at the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, or GEM) in Rochester, New York, and was also included in the seminal exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 2014, the show was re-mounted at Hauser & Wirth in New York City as the retitled The Photographic Object, 1970 and was accompanied by a publication of the same name from the University of Arizona and the University of California Press. Nettles has been exhibiting her work for nearly fifty years and is included in the collections of MoMA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; the Phillips Collection in Washington DC; the International Museum of Photography at the GEM; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her newest book, Dante Enters Hell (2016), has sold out and is in nine special collections libraries including those of Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities. In 2016, her early work began to pop up around the country in various exhibitions including at the Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. The recent reappearance of Nettles's early work--from the single pieces of the late 1960s to her Mountain Dream Tarot card deck (1975) and her visual autobiography Flamingo in the Dark (1979)--in museums and galleries is neither happenstance nor anomaly, but rather evidence of her importance in the history of American art. This work is visceral, poignant, humorous, and multivalent--and is as indicative of the experimental approach by many photographers of the 1960s and '70s as it is striking to twenty-first-century eyes. In particular, the return to materiality and the autobiographical in photography by many contemporary artists, as well as the mixed-media and photographic approach of painters today, prove Nettles was both ahead of her time and firmly situated within a legacy of artists (from Pictorialism to Victorian collage and book-making to Dada) in the history of photography. Although today artists must contend with the digital revolution, either embracing it or reacting against it, the impact of Nettles's layered approach, particularly in her early work, cannot be underestimated. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I met Nettles in 2005 as an incoming photography student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was teaching photography and book-arts classes and is now professor emerita. I gardened for her in exchange for books and time from 2007 to 2008, which I count as a pivotal year in my growth as an artist and being. In August of last year, I reconnected with Nettles at her home in Urbana for a conversation about the recent exhibitions of her early work and Dante Enters Hell. COLIN EDGINGTON: I had a student who saw your work recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I think it is incredible that these early works are being seen by younger generations. What does it mean for you to see it exhibited forty-five years later? BEA NETTLES: Sister in the Parrot Garden, which is the piece on view at the PMA, was made at Penland [School of Crafts] near Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1970. I would have been just out of graduate school. I still remember that piece because it was so difficult to make. When I coated Rockland Liquid Light photo emulsion on fabric it was extremely fragile; it would be processed just like a print, but if it folded in on itself the emulsion would smear and come off. It was delicate from start to finish. Often a mixed-media piece would start through experimentation and then I'd see the potential in it, or it'd crack open my thinking. I try not to be afraid or take myself too seriously with capital-A art, but I can be obsessed and I follow through on things. It is a delicate balance between my humor and being very serious, and I think my work reflects that. …

The Future of Energy

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The energy sources we use to generate electricity are changing due to concerns about pollution and climate change, the rise of affordable renewable energy, and the current availability of low-cost natural gas. Because the infrastructure to supply energy requires an enormous investment, our decisions today will have long-term effects. When considering our energy future, we must consider: * Should we subsidize renewable energy? * How will our transportation systems change? * How do we deal with the variability of electricity output from renewable energy sources like wind and solar when power demand is consistent? * Can we develop battery technology to store energy during low-demand periods? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] These questions have no easy answers. Making energy choices means considering multiple factors, exploring competing ideas, and reaching conclusions based on the best available evidence. This article describes a five-day online energy module (see On the web), developed by the Concord Consortium (an educational research and development organization) in which students compare the effects of various energy sources on air quality, water quality, and land use. The module's interactive models explore hydraulic fracturing, real-world data on energy production and consumption, and scaffolded argumentation tasks to help students examine evidence and discuss the issues associated with claims based on models and data. The free module, which aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013; see box p. 68), runs on computers or tablets. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Arguing with evidence Scientific argumentation has been defined as making and defending claims with supporting evidence (Berland and McNeill 2010; Osborne 2010). Science teachers increasingly focus on developing students' argumentation skills. A scientific argument typically includes: * the claim--a conjecture, conclusion, principle, or answer to a research question; * evidence--data or findings from students that have been collected and analyzed; and * reasoning--statements that explain the importance and relevance of the evidence and how the evidence supports the claim (McNeill and Krajcik 2007). In the energy module, students construct scientific arguments based on this claim, evidence, and reasoning (CER) framework (McNeill and Krajcik 2007). Additionally, students characterize and consider the limitations of evidence from the models and data when developing their arguments, which is known as uncertainty-infused scientific argumentation (Lee et al. 2010). Our energy choices have direct and indirect effects on our health, environment, and economy. The United States uses coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear fuel, hydroelectric dams, and renewable resources to generate electricity. Each source has advantages and disadvantages. Students must carefully examine the evidence when considering complex, nuanced questions such as: Will we have enough affordable energy in the near future? Comparing electricity sources The energy module first asks students, working in groups of two or three, to analyze an interactive map of electricity sources from 2001-2010 to determine the sources used in their own state. Pie charts (Figure 1) allow students to identify changes in each state's sources of electricity and to quickly compare electricity sources in different states. Next, students compare electricity use in the United States with that in the rest of the world. The module asks: With a growing global population and an increased demand for electricity, how can we continue to meet the demand while minimizing negative environmental impacts? Teaching hydraulic fracturing In the second and third activities, students learn about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a method of extracting natural gas from shale, to make evidence-based arguments about energy choices. …

Supporting Students With Autism

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Approximately one in 68 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to official estimates (CDC 2016). Although students with ASD have no typical learning profile, many have trouble organizing information, connecting past and present experiences/events, linking concepts, determining relevant from extraneous information, and planning (Tsatsanis and Powell 2014), which can negatively affect learning. The number of public school students receiving services for an ASD continues to rise with most of these students spending at least half of their day in general education classrooms (U.S. Department of Education 2014), including science classrooms. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013; see box, p. 41) call for all learners to receive access to quality science instruction, including students with disabilities such as ASD. Access to science content may be particularly relevant for learners with ASD. Although they are underrepresented in colleges and universities, those who enroll tend to major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields (Wei, Lenz, and Blackorby 2013). may be related to strengths associated with ASD, including attention to details and ability to recognize and repeat patterns (Baron-Cohen et al. 2009). Fortunately, the research base of supports and strategies shown to enhance the learning of students with ASD continues to grow with some recent literature reviews emphasizing practices used in secondary classroom settings (e.g., Fleury et al. 2014). Several online resources can help teachers who have students with ASD in the classroom (see On the web). As examples, this article addresses evidence-based practices that can be embedded in a Chemistry I lesson. Ready, Set ... Reactions! lesson, appropriate for all students, addresses the outcomes of chemical reactions based on the chemical properties of the elements and compounds (Figure 1, p. 38). Students are given diagrams (see On the web) and are asked to write a description explaining how the figures in the diagrams are combining and separating and to identify and categorize the chemical reaction as one of six types (redox, acid-base, synthesis, combustion, single replacement, or double replacement). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Supporting learners with ASD To enhance the lesson for students with ASD, we included four strategies that capitalize on their strengths: (1) priming, (2) peer supports, (3) schedules, and (4) visual supports. Priming. Priming involves preparing the student for a lesson prior to instruction in a relaxed context (Koegel et al. 2003). These learning activities are generally quick (approximately 10 minutes) and limit the need for additional prompting or modifications from an adult during class time. For this lesson, we decided to pre-teach how to determine whether a chemical reaction occurred using a model-lead-test instructional sequence. five- to 10-minute priming activity for the learner with ASD can be conducted by the science or special education teacher, a paraprofessional, or a peer before the Exploration portion of the 5E chemistry lesson. In this activity, the student with ASD is shown cards demonstrating a chemical reaction and cards that fail to demonstrate a chemical reaction (see On the web). The adult/peer guides the student by stating whether a picture card represents a chemical reaction and why (i.e., This is a chemical reaction because....). The sequence ends with showing a picture card and having the student with ASD independently explain whether a chemical reaction occurred (i.e., This is not a chemical reaction because....) with appropriate feedback from the adult/peer. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Peer supports. Throughout this lesson, students with ASD are paired with a typically developing peer. …

Better Formative Assessment

Formative assessment has been defined as the process recognize and respond to student to enhance that during the learning (Bell and Cowie 2001, p. 536). Formative assessment helps teachers identify strengths and weaknesses in their students' understanding, focuses students' attention on relevant information and ideas, and provides scaffolds that guide and support student progress (NRC 2011). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Formative assessment is an ongoing process (Figure 1) in which teachers typically engage in multiple cycles of * eliciting students' ideas, * noticing the substance of students' thinking, * interpreting to make sense of students' ideas, and * acting to guide and support student (Levin et al. 2012). How teachers approach formative assessment influences students' conceptual understanding, as well as their attitudes, motivation, and effort (Ruiz-Primo et al. 2010), particularly among underperforming learners (Stiggins and Chappuis 2005). Research indicates that meeting the new vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013; see box, p. 75) requires shifting teaching practices from more prescriptive approaches that emphasize discrete facts with a focus on breadth over (NRC 2011, p. 1) toward more responsive approaches that provide for students to engage in scientific investigations and argumentation and to achieve depth of understanding of the core ideas presented (NRC 2011, p. 11). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In each of the four dimensions listed above, a teacher's practices can be characterized along a continuum from more prescriptive to more responsive. This article, using results from our investigations of chemistry teachers' practices, suggests ways to implement more responsive approaches to formative assessment in the science classroom. A formative assessment example For a formative assessment of chemistry students studying chemical reactions, we showed a video (see On the web) of a student preparing a chemical demonstration for second graders. The student depicted in the video intends to create a display of a eruption. From among many available substances, she chooses to use sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and citric acid for the demonstration. She measures 5 g of each, places both in a test tube with a red triangle (a shape) behind it, and then adds 20 ml of water to the test tube. A fizzing occurs. After watching the video, the chemistry students are given a handout that describes the video activity and lists the materials that were available for the demonstration (see On the web). The chemistry teacher then asks the chemistry students to propose three ideas for how the student in the video could create a bigger eruption and to justify their answers. Figure 2 shows the answers of three representative high school students: Albert, Reinaldo, and Sonia (pseudonyms). Nearly all of the hundreds of students whom we tested with our probe assessment proposed increasing the amounts of baking soda and citric acid (Albert's ideas are a common variation). Reinaldo and Sonia also gave common suggestions. Other frequent responses included constricting the opening of the test tube, using a skinnier test tube, heating the water, using several more chemicals simultaneously, and shaking the test tube. We invite readers (as we have many other teachers) to analyze the student responses in Figure 2 and consider: What did you pay attention to? How do you make sense of it? Do you notice any patterns? Imagine these are students in your own classroom and you have a limited amount of class time to follow up on this formative assessment. What actions would you take to help these students develop a better understanding of the subject matter? How could the volcano be improved to better assess students' understanding? …

Long-Form Science

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Using an extended text in an upper-level science course is not a revolutionary idea. For example, many advanced biology teachers have been teaching Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), a book examining ethical issues in medical research. Indeed, a diverse selection of science nonfiction texts is suitable for a high school course, ranging from Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (2007) to Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook (2010). Introducing a novel or nonfiction book into the curriculum can reward both teacher and student, offering deep immersion into science content, but may seem daunting to many teachers, especially with little training in literacy instruction. Nevertheless, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) and Common Core State Standards (NGAC and CCSSO 2010) emphasize teaching of informational texts in content-based courses (see box, p. 31). This article offers strategies for teaching extended texts in the science classroom. Part 1: Before reading Choosing a text An extended text must lend itself to course goals and inspire relevant discussion (Calmer and Straits 2014). Consider, as an example, the book Zoo Story by Thomas French (2010). The author draws on six years of work experience at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa to address zoos' responsibilities to animals, employees, and patrons. Describing the lives of specific animals, French blends his scientific understanding of animal behavior, ecosystem and population dynamics, and biodiversity with an empathic portrayal of lives and relationships, echoing unifying themes appropriate for a course on general biology or zoology. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] French unravels the depth and complexity of a modern zoo as a journalist, not a scientist. He approaches scientific subject matter with a style of writing that is accessible to a general reader, useful for students preparing to become scientifically literate citizens. Fisher and Frey (2012) define worthy texts as those that allow readers to reflect on themselves and their actions; invite them in the worlds of others; understand the biological, social, or physical world; or solve problems that are timely and important. Zoo Story fits these criteria by allowing readers to reflect on the various dimensions of zoos, including their history as institutions, their intentions to conserve biological diversity, and the ethical and social problems they pose. Each student should have access to a copy of an extended text (Calmer and Straits 2014), which can be expensive. My school district opted to buy a classroom set of Zoo Story books for my zoology course instead of a traditional textbook. Some students bought their own copies. Used copies can be relatively inexpensive, and reading assignments can be staggered so the class can get by on fewer copies, rather than the entire class reading simultaneously. Introducing the text I introduce the text at the start of the course, months before it is assigned, in part to address misconceptions about zoology. Many students expect a zoo-ology course to focus on zoo animals. I explain that the course name is derived from the Greek zoia (animals) and encompasses the entire animal kingdom. We won't address charismatic megafauna until later in the course, looking first at the major invertebrate phyla, as is traditional for zoology curricula. Introducing Zoo Story early on offers the promise of in-depth discussion of elephants, tigers, and chimpanzees later on. When it's time to assign the text, I reintroduce it by showing ecologist Carl Safina's 2015 TED Talk (see On the web). His provocative and controversial central question, What are animals thinking and feeling? leads to the driving question central to Zoo Story: What are humans' responsibilities to protect animal species? After viewing the TED video, students discuss their own interactions with domestic animals, native wild fauna, and captive animals. …

Short-Form Science

Close reading is the practice of investigating a short (ranging from one or two paragraphs to three pages) piece of high-quality text. The text should be complex enough to be worthy of multiple readings and sufficiently supportive of learning goals (Brown and Kappes 2012, p. 2). In this article, we share a lesson plan and strategies that we used to implement close reading in a physical science class. Students spanned a wide range of reading ability, including multilingual learners. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Close reading is an effective core practice for engaging deeply with text. Characteristics of close reading include (Brown and Kappes 2012, p. 3): [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] * Multiple readings: This often occurs over multiple class periods. Teachers can model active reading and students can read independently, in pairs, or in small groups (Frey and Fisher 2013, pp. 33.38). * Annotation: Students use text-marking strategies to note unknown words or phrases, important ideas, connections to prior knowledge, and questions. * Text-dependent questions: Teachers can use these to guide students in making meaning of what they read (for online guides for writing questions, see gOn the webh). * Writing and discussion: Discussion is critical to student understanding. Students should reference the text to support their claims and arguments (Fisher et al. 2015, pp. 26.27; Frey and Fisher 2013, Chapter 3). Close reading requires science students to engage text in new ways and teachers to model best practices and gradually transfer responsibility. Teachers can remove scaffolds at their discretion, based on individual student needs, as students may understand close reading practices at different rates--even if they are investigating the same text. Examples of teaching strategies to enable differentiation include * The teacher works with a group of struggling readers to guide and model close-reading practices while other groups work independently. * Assigned reading pairs annotate together while taking turns reading aloud. * Based on each student groupfs level of understanding, groups receive different text-dependent questions of varying complexity. After each group answers its questions, students rearrange into mixed groups to share their responses and discuss other questions with classmates. Selecting text is a complex process. Many factors contribute to a text's difficulty level (Frey and Fisher 2013, p. 9; see On the web). Factors that make scientific text complex include vocabulary and technical language, prior knowledge demands, and the norms of scientific communication. Texts for science also include data tables, graphs, and scientific illustrations. Atomic structure unit Students often turn to Wikipedia for information; however, even though this information is easily accessible, students have a difficult time understanding it. For this reason, we chose to revamp our existing atomic structure unit to incorporate modified Wikipedia readings (see On the web for a list of articles) about key developments in the understanding of atomic structure. The revised five-day unit centers on close reading about the work of John Dalton, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrodinger. To reinforce the learning that students gain through reading, we also incorporate demonstrations, interactive games, and mini lectures. John Dalton: Day 1 Teachers first use John Dalton's drawings of atoms and molecules (Figure 1, p. 36) to lead the class through the Critical Response Protocol. Critical response is an arts-based technique for engaging students in equitable and critical discourse (Ellingson et al. 2016). The complex visuals can elicit important insights and support the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for literacy in science (NGAC and CCSSO 2010). Important characteristics of the Critical Response Protocol are that teachers ensure that all students contribute, document all student responses, and encourage students to engage with the visual without the teacher front-loading information. …

Staying Within the Law

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Evolution, due to its importance in science, holds a prominent place in national science standards and many state standards. Scientists nearly universally agree that the theory of evolution best explains the unity and diversity of life. Accordingly, numerous science, science education, and religious organizations support the teaching of evolution (Sager 2008). Nonetheless, evolution remains controversial (Hermann 2008) with a third of American adults stating that the theory is false (Miller, Scott, and Okamoto 2006). Given this controversy, teachers should know about the legal implications of teaching evolution in public schools. In v. Kurtzman (403 U.S. 602 [1971]), the U.S. Supreme Court developed a to determine whether a state action, such as the Tennessee law against teaching evolution that was the basis of the famous Scopes monkey trial of 1925, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This clause prohibits the government from passing legislation that establishes an official religion or prefers one religion over another. The so-called Lemon test states: (1) the act must have a bonafide secular purpose, (2) the act's principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and (3) the act must not result in an excessive entanglement of government with religion (Lofaso 2009). Below are four approaches to teaching evolution along with legal implications of using them in public school classrooms. Teachers are encouraged to engage all students in learning evolution--even those most reluctant to do so--while using best teaching practices consistent with current science and legally protecting oneself and school system. Approaches to teaching evolution Reiss (1992) reported on three possible instructional approaches, modified from Bridges (1986), for addressing controversial issues in science classrooms: advocacy, affirmative neutrality, and procedural neutrality. Hermann (2008) extended this framework to include avoidance. Avoidance Teachers avoid teaching evolution for many reasons, including: * they do not believe evolutionary theory and do not want to teach it, * they may want to avoid controversial issues to minimize discipline problems (Nicholls and Nelson 1992) and parental pressure, or * they lack training in teaching controversial issues (Levinson 2002). Teachers may omit instruction altogether or avoid using the term evolution in favor of the phrase change over time to introduce some general tenets such as adaptation and natural selection. Students may not even notice that evolution was omitted from the class. Teachers may not violate any laws if they avoid teaching evolution without the perception that they did so for religious reasons. However, teachers who omit evolution are not adhering to national standards and, in most cases, state standards. These teachers may be challenged for not adequately addressing the standards and can be required to do so by their school district (Peloza v. Capistrano Unified School District, 37 F 3d 517 [9th Cir. 1994]). Advocacy Advocating for evolution Public school science teachers advocate for evolution by teaching the science of evolution and not addressing related religious or political issues. Teachers advocating for evolution may explicitly or implicitly state that alternative explanations to evolution are unscientific or otherwise inferior. Some teachers advocate for evolution simply by teaching evolution without acknowledging that some students may hold beliefs they perceive to conflict with evolution. Advocates for evolution can defend science to the point that they alienate students by making them feel their own reasoning is inferior. However, students perceiving a conflict with their beliefs are often not vocal and internalize the conflict, which can result in disdain or complete withdrawal (Scharmann 1994). …

What Do You Notice in People and Why?: Thoughts on the Work of Rosalind Fox Solomon

A black-and-white photograph, about thirty inches square, pinned to the wall near the entrance of Rosalind Fox Solomon's exhibition Got to Go at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City (February 25-April 16). 2016), depicts a young boy holding an older woman's bare breasts. The woman in the image looks down at him with a smile, arms calmly at her side, shoulders back. Six other figures of all ages are also pictured some faces just barely visible), crowded around the woman and the boy. Their observance of this gentle, lighthearted interaction mirrors that of the unseen photographer, and, ultimately, of the viewer. All of the figures in the image, Karoo, South Africa, 1990, are black, wear only a piece of fabric around each of their waists, and stand outside a grass structure. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Pinned in close proximity to this photograph was another photograph of the same size, also depicting a woman with a child, Neshoba, Mississippi, 2001. However, the figures pictured in this image are white, blonde, and clothed, and stand on a sidewalk at night. The older woman, casually dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, stands in contrast to the young girl, who is dressed like a Disney princess complete with an updo and makeup. Solomon's flash illuminates the pair at a nervous moment. A small point-and-shoot camera dangles from the woman's arm as she prepares to stick a corsage to the girl's costume. The little girl is fidgeting as she looks away from the adult standing before her. Solomon placed these images among a gallery filled with dozens of others, so that viewers could not consider one without comparing it to the other. This pairing--unclothed South Africans next to clothed Americans--lead this viewer to a second comparison of equal disparateness: Solomon's project with Edward Steichen's 1995 exhibition and publication The Family of Man. Familiar to most people today in book form, the Family of Man project was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and included images made around the world by both known and unknown photographers, primarily of American or European nationality. In the publication, over five hundred pictures are organized by greeting card-like themes such as love, birth, and death, and printed in a range of sizes. Sentimental quotes, taken from a variety of sources, are inserted among the images to enhance the exhibition's glossy message of sameness across humanity. However, while Steichen's arrangement of images sings classical, Solomon's screams hardcore. Through her highly personal approach, Solomon's photography provides an alternative to Steichen's notion of what the world looks like, or at least, what photographs of the world look like. When Steichen and his staff first presented their project, Solomon was not yet making art, but she had begun traveling internationally. In 1951, following her college graduation, she started working with the pioneering, volunteer-abroad group, the Experiment in International Living, whose motto is People learn to live together, by living together. Solomon dates the beginning of her photographic practice to a 1968 trip with the Experiment to Japan, where the differences in culture that she was experiencing inspired her to take pictures. At this point, Solomon was married with two children, but looking for an outlet. In 1977. Solomon defined photography as, An excuse for retreating further into myself and my own world because I couldn't live in the world I wanted. (1) That year, Solomon's husband had taken a job in Washington, DC, as part of President Jimmy Carter's administration. Years of what she has called discontent were fueled, in part, by the feminist movement of the era. In response, she began teaching herself how to shoot and print photographs. Considering the criticism that Steichen's project immediately and continuously received, Solomon's wielding of the camera to depict people we are most curious about was brave in a post-Family of Man world. …

Dangerous Dakini: Monet Clark’s Bunny Girl and other Precarious Performance Videos

No images are visible during the opening sequence of Bunny Girl (2016), by California performance/video artist Monet Clark. Instead, Clark provides the most basic of sounds; a steady, syncopated clip-clop and the swish of fabric, sandy and hollow, like a lone Appaloosa trotting up a gulch in a Howard Hawks western. Riding over the black screen are credits, simple and white, and Clark leaves us with these for a beat. Then it's a hard cut to a bright, sunny exterior, the shoulder of a highway in the High Sienas, and we can finally see who's been making all the racket: it's Bunny Girl, teetering down a road, tackled-up in white lingerie, fishnet stockings, pink stiletto heels, the classic bunny drill. But something about Bunny Girl's context is off. Distinct alterations affect her traditional bunny attire: her black fishnets have a rip; her stiletto heels, one size too large, wobble precariously on the gravel of the emergency lane; her trademark bunny ears aren't perky and up-right--they're flopped down, clinging close to her face, reminiscent of those lop-eared bunnies at the Benton County Fair. Like Donny Kerabatsos in The Big Lebowski (1998, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen), this manifestation of Bunny Girl is distinctly out of her element; we're more accustomed to watching her serve cocktails and nuts at the Playboy Mansion, flirting with Jack Nicholson and Bill Cosby, vampy but innocent, a brightly colored bauble on Hugh Hefner's arm, the erotically fabulous but nevertheless submissive girl next door. In this subtle stylistic turn, Clark hijacks the traditional, chauvinist Playboy narrative and alters its setting, hobbling unsteadily down Highway 50 ten miles south of Tahoe, the muscles of her back tightly bunched, cheerfully but anxiously looking over her shoulder as the wheels of semi-trucks and sports cars roar by. Bunny Girl's trademark ears and tail may comprise a hackneyed symbolic system with which we have long grown familiarly contemptuous, but all the familiar contempt in the world doesn't debarb her peril, and from the video's outset we can already sense the moral-ethical imperative of Clark's narrative set-up: what happens to little bunnies who stray too far from Farmer McHeffner's Garden and find themselves caught on this high-speed asphalt patch? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In that sense, Bunny Girl has good reason to be anxious, though she never seems truly scared; it's simply in a bunny's nature to be fidgety. But her journey's just begun, and this isn't the only scene wherein Clark places Bunny Girl played by the artist herself) in a Californian landscape that seems alternately hostile and sublime. As the video progresses, Bunny Girl chambers over fallen pine tree trunks in the Sierras, crosses a salt slick in Death Valley, whirls in a superbloom of primrose and notchleaf phacelia in the Mojave Desert, vamps beside the decommissioned Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, romps with doomed lambs at a Nevada City slaughter farm, trips out beneath a Richard Diebenkorn pastiche of Emeryville cloverlcafs, and ultimately finds herself on a series of broken roads that empty into the coves of the Marin Headlands, where she dances to the crashing surf and end credits. As she briefly and delicately occupies each of these dystopian/utopian tableaus, the colorful, opaque quality of Clark's video is overlaid with found footage, sequences of environmental catastrophes and cultural strife: whales dying, crop-dusters spraying pesticides, protesters waving signs. But somehow; in the foothills of the headlands, she's a different bunny girl. Some of the character development takes place in the decomposition of her couture; zig-zagging dizzily toward the coast, her ensemble becomes increasingly frayed, her ears droop more than ever, and the tattered fishnets billow beneath her ankles. Yet dancing beside the suri' in her ravaged outfit, there is something heroic about Bunny Girl, and while I can't quite label this video an empowerment piece, there's no doubt that Bunny Girl has reached an affective apex of some sort. …

Review: Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts, edited by Adam Bell and Charles H. Traub

Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts Edited by Adam Bell and Charles H. Traub University of California Press, 2015 292 pp./$34.95 (sb) Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts was published before the November 8, 2016, United States electoral victory of Donald Trump, itself a media event, but after a profusion of other phenomena--including post-internet art (1); the exponential growth of Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+ (advent of both ever-cheaper digital photo technologies and augmented reality); the increased availability of 3-D printing; the revelation of unprecedented spying and surveillance technologies by the National Security Agency; the widespread use of drones for warfare, information, and entertainment; and major advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence that also impact media and media platforms. This host of august changes has often paradoxically stimulated a return to the art object, (2) witnessed in Vision Anew by some authors' probing of traditional values of photography (for instance, Gerry Badger's 2012 essay Keep it Simple Stupid, Just Make a Good Picture: The Basics of Photography). It has led others, such as Lev Manovich, to redefine the terms of the game, as when he writes: is no such thing as 'digital media.' There is only software--as applied to media data (or 'content') (206). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The most obvious prompt for the essays in the book--which range from the historical (such as the opening mini-manifesto from 1961, Photography Is, by Arthur Siegel) to teasing out or proffering new generalizations, if not usually theoretizations, on this rapidly changing visual culture--is the omnipresence of digitally based images, and the nearly equal ubiquity of their use by all sorts of artistic practitioners, professional and nonprofessional alike. The overwhelming acceleration and accompanying logic of barrage (3) highlighted through digital culture, at least in countries like the US, intimate issues far beyond this--that the environment has shifted onto a different register technologically, formally, politically, logistically, ontologically, and demographically, in which once sufficient responses, especially in any realm of aesthetics, will no longer do. Art historian David Joselit had already pointed out years before the Trump debacle in his Feedback Manifesto (2010), As art marches in circles, politicians manipulate images more effectively than the legions of MFA graduates from prestigous schools like Art Center, Cal Arts, Columbia, and Yale (262). Commending the value of Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Against Interpretation (4) to avoid interpretation but rather settle on action or the contagion of gesture, Joselit recommended, among other things, Don't produce art or art history by making a 'new' move in the game of aesthetics you learned in school. Assess the image ecology you live in and respond to it. Learn the system and counter it--make noise. Practice eco-formalism (262). Yet Vision Anew is decidedly unprogrammatic, aided in this by the broad range and roles of its forty-plus contributors, whether primarily artists, educators, critics, journalists, or historians--and their points of view, which include the presentation of configurations from the past (Rebeca Solnit on Eadweard Muybridge, excerpts from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1947 Vision in Motion, a 1968 Hollis Frampton lecture), and ones more current (Aaron Schuman's 2012 interview with Trevor Paglen on Machine-Seeing in his work). The reconsideration of medium provides some of the richest content in Vision Anew, whether this is treatment of the resurgence (23) of abstraction in photography (by co-editor Adam Bell), or reevaluation of the position of the photo book (Bell with Ofer Wohlberger and Jason Fulford) or of the changes wrought by HD (the co-editors Bell and Charles H. Traub with Bob Giraldi, Ethan David Kent, and Christopher Walters). …

Nude Animal: Vanessa Renwick and the Wild

In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) Jacques Derrida remarks on texts by Rene Descartes concerning the animal. His attention is drawn to the look the animal returns. Standing naked before his cat, the philosopher sees it looking back at him. If now we introduce this mutual look into an account of screen work by Portland-based film and video artist Vanessa Renwick, the opportunity arises to think in terms of animality and women. I could not do her work justice if I were to attempt a survey of Renwick's practice, which I have been aware of for over ten years. Her name was familiar to me long before 1 saw anything she had made. Nor would it seem to me an improvement if I were to exclude from my remarks commentary on the work of other artists. What follows, then, is an attempt to substantiate a thinking about animality by means of a single work by Renwick. I try to do this in a way that also recognizes the achievements of two others working with the moving image: Benjamin Pearson and Shehrezad Maher. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A comparison of Renwick's 9 is a Secret (2002) with Pearson's Former Models (2013) will raise the question of our relation to death. In 9 is a Secret, Renwick describes the experience of being an assistant in a friend's suicide. Before removing the plastic from the head of his dead body, she hears herself saying, and we hear her repeat aloud, You better be dead, motherfucker. It is as if we share Renwick's responsibility for his death, even bear the risks she took to assist hint. To be a survivor here is not to survive death oneself. Such a suicide commands a certain respect from the living, we who have not died, for we feel somehow humiliated by the departed, insofar as we agree to carry on in a world so decisively rejected by the friend. Renwick created a voiceover using a children's nursery rhyme, each line associated with a number less than nine. The lines of the rhyme number and characterize crows. Each line has the kind of significance for adults that such rhymes often do. Renwick shows us the young man who wants to die in beautiful black-and-white, high-contrast still images. They could be photographs, but there is often quiet movement. Like photocopies after several generations, the fragments consist of fixed poses cut from a strip of movement, a solitary black crow against a white ground. Carefully framed shots of a handsome young man, also in black-and-white, present a nude in parts, sculpted in the gray stone of what photographers would call, by comparison, images of greater latitude. Now immobile only because held in place, the fragments of the deceased before his death show signs of calculated movement. A viewer might be reminded of Chris Marker's La jetee (1962), in which subterranean victims of time-travel experiments are shown shell-shocked and fixed forever in black-and-white stills. The relationship between predator and victim in the animal world could be said to be a preoccupation in Renwick's screen work. Or perhaps it would be better to speak of the instinctive and irrational of living and dying. In this particular film, the stills punctuate a visual course of events in which we do not come to know the friend or learn anything of interest about him other than the reasons for his physical suffering and desire to die. We learn of the latter directly from Renwick in voiceover, almost in passing. The impression should not be left that the film offers an experience of sympathy, love, or generosity. In Former Models, by contrast, Pearson carries on an imaginary conversation with the deceased. This man with whom he speaks in voiceover is to be thought of as that of Rob Pilatus of the music duo Milli Yanilli, responding to questions after his death. Pilatus died in 1998. The voice that answers Pearson--that of Pilatus, processed beyond recognition if considered in its theatrical exhibition but coherent when listened to via a link emailed by the artist and using headphones recounts a disembodiment that considers the question of death in very different terms. …

A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality

Research Article| November 01 2016 A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality Robert Grand Robert Grand ROBERT GRAND is a writer and curator living in Queens, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2016) 44 (3): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.12 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Grand; A Harsh Game: Ericka Beckman's (Virtual) Reality. Afterimage 1 November 2016; 44 (3): 12–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.12 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book review: Sally Swartz. 2015. Homeless wanderers: Movement and mental illness in the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century

<p>No abstract available. </p>

In Memoriam: Joan Hawthorne Deming Howe Ensor and Rosamond Hawthorne Mikkelsen

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Hawthornes may or may not have been a remarkably 'hardheaded' race, as Julian Hawthorne wrote in his biography of his parents, but the Hawthornes born in the twentieth century can certainly be said to have been long-lived. Two great-granddaughters of Sophia and Nathaniel, Rosamond Hawthorne Mikkelsen and Joan Hawthorne Deming Howe Ensor, cousins and lifelong residents of Redding, Connecticut, died this year, six months apart, on January 4 and June 9, 2016, at ages 104 and 103. The two were the last surviving members of their generation in their branch of the Hawthorne family. I first met Joan Ensor in the mid-1980s when she responded to a notice I'd placed in the New York Times Book Review asking for research leads as I began work on my biography of the Peabody sisters. Joan invited me to her house in Redding to show me Sophia's two oil paintings of Lake Como, done for Nathaniel as engagement presents. These hung in Joan's living room by the fireplace, though they are now, thanks to her generous gift, on permanent display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Like her Peabody great-grandmother and aunts, Joan was a small woman, blue-eyed, warm-hearted (I was just one of many researchers welcomed into her home for a viewing of the Comos), and very smart. We spoke easily and began a friendship that spanned nearly three decades, conducted mostly through the mail. First Joan and her older daughter, Imogen Howe, sent further research leads. Would I be interested in Sophia's inscription to Nathaniel on the flyleaf of their book of Wordsworth's poetry (Sophia's first engagement gift to Nathaniel)? Indeed. Ebe Hawthorne's Spanish dictionary? Certainly! (The volume can be viewed now at the Concord Free Public Library, William Munroe Special Collections, along with the Hawthornes' 1837 Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Henry Reed, ed., both cleaned and handsomely restored.) But Joan's greatest gift to me was understanding. She knew my infrequent visits had to be coordinated with my own older daughter's traveling soccer team's tournament schedule, which occasionally brought us to Farmington or Avon, near enough to reach Redding for a morning or afternoon. Joan always asked about my daughter in letters, and sympathized with the difficulties of being a writing soccer-mom. She was in her seventies at our first meeting, and as my work on the book stretched into a second decade, I began to worry that, healthy as she always appeared to be, Joan might not live to see the result of the labors she had encouraged for so long. I took a chance and sent her a draft of a chapter I'd written on Sophia Peabody's girlhood. Joan's astute and reassuring letter in response boosted my confidence at a time when my publisher seemed to have lost interest, and after that she was my first reader on every chapter. It would not be wrong to say that I wrote, or finished, The Peabody Sisters for Joan Ensor. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I knew Joan's cousin Rosamond, called Rosy by her family, less well, though I also met her because of a painting. Joan and Imogen drove me to Rosamond's house just a mile away, the same house in which she'd grown up, to see Chester Harding's 1830 portrait of Sophia Peabody, hanging then on a brick wall in a sunny back room. (The portrait was willed to the Peabody Essex Museum, where it will soon join the Charles Osgood portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne on permanent exhibition.) A portrait of Rosamond in her late twenties by the artist Rosamond Tudor, mother of the children's book author and illustrator Tasha Tudor, shows her to have been a slender beauty, with the black hair of her great-grandfather and his sister Ebe. She was also immensely capable, a painter herself and jack-of-all house trades. She had designed and supervised the construction of the extension to her house in which we sat to view Sophia's portrait; she'd landscaped the surrounding gardens, installing terraces and digging a pond on the property. …

The other space race: Eisenhower and the quest for aerospace security

The Other Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security Nicholas Michael Sambaluk, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 2015, 316 pages [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Other is fascinating look at the early years (1954-1961) of the celebrated Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is full of fascinating sidebars fleshing out the context of the times in vivid detail and peaking with the lunar landing in 1969. Regrettably, until now, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's role has received rather superficial treatment in this race saga. Many mistakenly derided his administration as being caught off guard by the Sputnik launches and supposedly playing mere catch-up. However, The Other highlights an important reality: Eisenhower was far more programmatic in his approach to space and more intimately involved in the strategic policy-level decision making than is generally acknowledged. Much of this oversight is understood through the lens of his leadership style. Historian Stephen Ambrose, an Eisenhower biographer, noted that Ike had gotten through many a crisis simply by denying that a crisis existed In the aftermath of Sputnik, his usual resort to calmness failed to quell the uproar, but his ability to shape the direction of U.S. space exploration would influence policymaking thereafter. The book is much more than an account of Eisenhower's personal involvement. The inherent tension is clearly exposed between Ike's desire to use space as a window into Soviet capabilities to prevent misperception and worst-case thinking--quite possibly leading to nuclear Armageddon--and the Air Force's contrarian approach foreseeing space weaponization as inevitable. A newly independent, brash Air Force viewed itself as the vanguard of American defense in a future dominated by spiraling technological feats where second place--so its leaders argued--would consign the Nation to certain doom against a relentless Communist foe intent on domination. Sambaluk unambiguously illuminates how disconnected Air Force senior-leader thinking was from the strategic initiatives Eisenhower was trying to crystallize at the dawn of a new frontier. A clear example of these competing philosophies regarding how best to achieve space security was the project. A focal point throughout the book, it was a piloted, reusable, boost-glide spacecraft that launched like a rocket and recovered by landing like an unpowered glider. To supporters, Dyna-Soar would enable the United States to control the ultimate high ground. To detractors, the project was an overly ambitious fantasy given the state of many necessary supporting technologies, was fiscally irresponsible during a recession, and jeopardized the peaceful methods Eisenhower was keen on pursuing to keep a lid on competition and expenditures. In a telling comment, Sambaluk has a bit of fun noting Dyna-Soar would eventually go the way of the dinosaur, but acknowledges that in 1957, in the hysteria following Sputnik, it seemed quite possible that it would go from concept to creation, with all that entailed. Sambaluk lucidly explains Ike felt that the superior American space technologies could pierce the seemingly opaque Soviet military system. He was supremely confident satellites, once operational, would expose the so-called bomber gap and missile gap as gross distortions of reality, derailing agendas demanding ever greater spending on yet more weapons of war--or so he thought. Eisenhower's Open Skies initiative sought tangible verification of capabilities through routine, unencumbered space overflights; however, Khrushchev, suspicious of sinister designs, thwarted the proposal. Of course, once Sputnik was aloft and transmitting, overflight became a nonissue and actually facilitated Eisenhower's goal, since Sputnik's successive orbits set a precedent by default when the United States did nothing to hinder its path. …

Narrative Artists' Books and the Human Condition: The Work of Philip Zimmermann

Most artists attempt to balance the personal and societal, but the artist's books of Philip Zimmermann, who spoke at Visual Studies Workshop's 2016 Photo-Bookworks Symposium, achieve this balance with uncommon ease. For Zimmermann, considering the personal and social is not just a communication strategy--it is an end in itself. Zimmermann makes work about the relationship between self and society. Through personal experiences, historical incidents, and contemporary issues, he examines how knowledge and belief shape the way humans share the world with one another. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Zimmermann uses the narrative artist's book especially effectively to expound the long history of the self and society. Five recent works--Celsius 233 (2015), Cruising Altitude (2011), Incident in Deseret (2014), Paradise luist: An Allegory (2013), and Reaper (2015)--all integrate photographic images with a running text. Celsius 233 and Paradise Lost: An Allegory also include drawn imagery, each to different effect. Zimmermann often combines original (personal) content with appropriated (more universal) text and image, augmenting or reconfiguring the borrowed media to construct new meaning. He manipulates the imagery to create a cohesive visual vocabulary from disparate sources. Drawing on expertise in photomechanical color separations, his signature exaggerated halftone dots, color screens, and other devices clue the reader in to a media-critical mindset. One must consider how the aesthetics of commerce and warfare, propaganda and exoticism, and objectivity and sentimentality ultimately contribute to the repeated shortcomings of humanity that Zimmermann addresses. As investigations into human nature, totalitarianism, and faith, Zimmermann's books parallel political theory. For example, Hannah Arendt's observations about self and society map onto these artists' books in an interesting, generative way. First, Arendt argues, the public sphere is constructed. Thus, citizenship and communal belonging manifest through political participation, not through supposedly inherited qualities like race. Second, she posits an inherent spatial aspect to politics. For Arendt, political opinions are necessarily formed and tested through engagement in the public sphere. Zimmermann's narratives play out in these spaces of social engagement, or investigate how an individual's thoughts are shaped in this sphere. This social force exerted on the individual is addressed by Arendt's third point: the distinction between private and public life. She claims the public interest is only achieved by overcoming private self-interest and thinking about the long-term consequences of one's actions. (1) The constructedness of the public sphere is investigated in Cruising Altitude, where Zimmermann explores how identity, through language, race, and ethnicity, impacts one's status and participation in a community or culture. The book's dos-a-dos (double-sided) structure emphasizes the juxtaposition between positive and negative aspects of travel. One side, Above, follows a personal narrative of wanderlust via text set atop what appear to be vintage postcards. Flipping the book over presents Below, in which each page features a single word--synonyms of foreigner in various languages--over photos taken from inside an airplane. Against words like undocumented and outsider, the liminality suggested by the airplane cabin morphs from the traveler's invigorating sense of displacement in Above to unsavory implications of a life spent not belonging. Contrasted with the postcards' nostalgic visual treatment, the techno-scientific objectivity associated with unmanipulated aerial photography furthers the sense that reality is more accurately reflected in the bleak otherness expressed in Below. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Zimmermann continues this investigation into the human capacity to overcome nature, and human nature, in Paradise Lost: An Allegory, an update of John Milton's 1667 poem about Adam and Eve's fall from grace. …