Leadership Class Research Articles

2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards

2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Beth McCabe, Director We are pleased to announce that three writers with connections to Callaloo will receive 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, which are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating its 22nd year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. The Awards are $30,000 each and will be presented to the six recipients on September 15th in New York City. Fiction writer JAMEY HATLEY has attended Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops in the past, and her work appeared in Callaloo in 2014. Her first novel, The Dream-Singers, is the story of twins, one born at the moment Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his final speech and the other at the moment King dies. After the devastation of the assassination, the people in an all-black neighborhood of Memphis fixate on the babies as a symbol of hope. Their hope is short-lived when the boy twin dies under mysterious circumstances just three months later. Her nominator writes, “Reading her work is like witnessing past, present, and future on one page. She creates a very convincing community and voice through her use of fable.” Ms. Hatley has recently returned to her hometown of Memphis to care for her elderly parents. She says, “So many of the themes that were already present in my novel have become starkly real since my return: dreams as debt, who gets to leave home and who must stay, the responsibility to home and collective amnesia. It attempts to interrogate the cliché to ‘just follow your dreams’ and reveal what a complex proposition that is for a community where one of the most famous dreamers of all time is killed.” In addition to Callaloo, her work has appeared in The Account and Oxford American, among others. She has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for the past five years and is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She received her BS from the University of Tennessee, her MA in journalism from the University of Memphis, and her MFA from Louisiana State University. Ms. Hatley plans to use her Writer’s Award to cover living expenses during the next year so she can write fulltime and complete her novel. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee. LADEE HUBBARD is also a fiction writer; she attended a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops in 2008. Her vibrant, smart, and funny first novel tells the story of the Ribkins family, each member of which is born with a unique talent: one can see in the dark, one can pick any lock, another can make intricate maps from memory of anything he sees. Ms. Hubbard says, “Riffing on W. E. B. Dubois’s famous essay about the need to cultivate a black leadership class, The Talented Tenth, is structured as a road novel that combines elements of the picaresque and the noble quest. The book is conceived as an allegory of African American life during the second half of the twentieth century and looks at the meaning of talent, its relation to notions of African American mobility, and its role in the mediation of responsibility to a wider community.” “It is an amazing book,” says her nominator. “Inventive and surreal but edged with truth and real pain.” Ms. Hubbard’s [End Page 764] work has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and others, and she has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Ms. Hubbard received a BA from Princeton, an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a PhD from UCLA, and most recently an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to take time off from teaching, pay for child care, and devote her full attention to completing her novel. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband and three...

The Pursuit of the Public Interest: Social and Ideological Factors Influencing Career Choice of First-Year Law Students

In US, the political leadership draws disproportionately from lawyers, thus it is important to understand the political perspectives of students attending law schools across the nation. This study examines these variations in and across race and ethnicity. We ask, “How are student aspirations for careers in public interest law and government and political positions related to race, ethnicity, and social and political ideology?” Data for the study were collected in 2004 from 6,100 law students attending 64 US law schools. Results reveal significant differences in social and political ideologies by race and ethnicity and further demonstrate the correlation between race and ethnicity, political ideology, and career choice. We argue for greater representation of racial/ethnic minorities and individuals with a broad range of social-political ideologies in the nation’s public interest sector and political leadership class, and further, more studies examining the career path of lawyers and law students.

The evolution of power and the divergence of cooperative norms

We consider a model of multilevel selection and the evolution of institutions that distribute power in the form of influence in a group's collective interactions with other groups. In the absence of direct group-level interactions, groups with the most cooperative members will outcompete less cooperative groups, while within any group the least cooperative members will be the most successful. Introducing group-level interactions, however, such as raiding or warfare, changes the selective landscape for groups. Our model suggests that as the global population becomes more integrated and the rate of intergroup conflict increases, selection increasingly favors unequally distributed power structures, where individual influence is weighted by acquired resources. The advantage to less democratic groups rests in their ability to facilitate selection for cooperative strategies – involving cooperation both among themselves and with outsiders – in order to produce the resources necessary to fuel their success in inter-group conflicts, while simultaneously selecting for leaders (and corresponding collective behavior) who are unburdened with those same prosocial norms. The coevolution of cooperative social norms and institutions of power facilitates the emergence of a leadership class of the selfish and has implications for theories of inequality, structures of governance, non-cooperative personality traits, and hierarchy. Our findings suggest an amendment to the well-known doctrine of multilevel selection that “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.” In an interconnected world, altruistic groups led by selfish individuals can beat them both.

In-situ feature-based objects tracking for data-intensive scientific and enterprise analytics workflows

Emerging scientific simulations on leadership class systems are generating huge amounts of data and processing this data in an efficient and timely manner is critical for generating insights from the simulations. However, the increasing gap between computation and disk I/O speeds makes traditional data analytics pipelines based on post-processing cost prohibitive and often infeasible. In this paper, we investigate an alternate approach that aims to bring the analytics closer to the data using in-situ execution of data analysis operations. Specifically, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a framework that can support in-situ feature-based objects tracking on distributed scientific datasets. Central to this framework is a scalable decentralized and online clustering, a cluster tracking algorithm, which executes in-situ (on different cores) in parallel with the simulation processes, and retrieves data from the simulations directly via on-chip shared memory. The results from our experimental evaluation demonstrate that the in-situ approach significantly reduces the cost of data movement, that the presented framework can support scalable feature-based objects tracking, and that it can be effectively used for in-situ analytics in large scale simulations.

Leader Development Through Reading and Reflection

The current investigation serves to assess the usefulness, lessons learned, and leader development of eight male students in a senior level university leadership class based on reading and reflection. Thematic analysis of participants’ responses revealed three major themes to explain students’ lessons learned in leader development through journaling: (a) Relationship Development, (b) Technical Skill Development, and (c) Awareness Development. Support exists for the effectiveness of reading and reflection as a pedagogical tool for leader lesson development with a college‐age sample.

The Evolution of Power and the Divergence of Cooperative Norms

We consider a model of multilevel selection and the evolution of institutions that distribute power in the form of influence in a group’s collective interactions with other groups. In the absence of direct group-level interactions, groups with the most cooperative members will outcompete less cooperative groups, while within any group the least cooperative members will be the most successful. Introducing group-level interactions, however, such as raiding or warfare, changes the selective landscape for groups. Our model suggests that as the global population becomes more integrated and the rate of intergroup conflict increases, selection increasingly favors unequally distributed power structures, where individual influence is weighted by acquired resources. The advantage to less democratic groups rests in their ability to facilitate selection for cooperative strategies – involving cooperation both among themselves and with outsiders – in order to produce the resources necessary to fuel their success in inter-group conflicts, while simultaneously selecting for leaders (and corresponding collective behavior) who are unburdened with those same prosocial norms. The coevolution of cooperative social norms and institutions of power facilitates the emergence of a leadership class of the selfish and has implications for theories of inequality, structures of governance, non-cooperative personality traits, and hierarchy. Our findings suggest an amendment to the well-known doctrine of multilevel selection that “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.” In an interconnected world, altruistic groups led by selfish individuals can beat them both.

Rural and Community Development in Nigeria : An Assessment

The paper examines rural or community development in Nigeria with emphasis on the institutions, agencies, policies and strategies employed to bring about the much needed rural development in the country. It goes further to assess the impacts of the various efforts made by both the domestic and foreign governments and international organizations, institutions, agencies and non-governmental organizations to bring about real development at the grassroots level. In the attempt to do this, clarification of concepts like development, rural areas, and rural development was carried out, which formed the theoretical basis of the analysis. It was found out that efforts made by the Nigerian government though several strategies like the nation’s development plans from colonial era to date which were ex-rayed did not bring about meaningful development. Similarly international organizations and regional strategies have not lead to any significant improvement in the living conditions of the rural dwellers and rural development in general. It was also found out that a number of issues such as corruption and mismanagement, faulty planning from above rather than bottom-up approach; pursuance of the colonial and neo-colonial economic and social policies which were anti people among other factors led to failure of the rural development efforts. The paper therefore concludes among other things that for rapid and sustained rural development to take place, the lopsided and urban based development process must be reversed to rural-based and bottom-up approach, government to continue to create conducive environment for rural development to thrive, change of attitudes and orientation by all and sundry, particularly the leadership class in Nigeria in order to minimize corruption and mismanagement of resources. Therefore, for rural development to be realistic and enduring, these measures should be given priority attention, especially at the implementation stages.

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64

The Failure of Categories: Haitians in the United Nations Organization in the Congo, 1960–64 Regine O. Jackson The 1960s was a tumultuous decade in world history, especially across the continent of Africa where almost thirty European colonies were dismantled. Although experiences and obstacles varied by country, colonial withdrawal opened up new opportunities for African nationalists as well as black expatriates.1 Activists and radicals from the United States and the Caribbean flocked to postcolonial Africa, along with businessmen and investors seeking to capitalize on promises of development. Kevin Gaines, whose work has become indispensable to the history of black internationalism, documents the experiences of African Americans in Ghana: Professionals, and technicians seeking refuge from constrained opportunities . . . were welcomed by Nkrumah, who, perhaps more than any other African head of state of his time, encouraged blacks from the Western world to emigrate and lend their skills to building the new nation.2 While Ghana stands out, according to Gaines, because Kwame Nkrumah made it a “destination of radical hope” for black expatriates,3 the Congo was also a significant site for different reasons. In what became known as the “Congo Crisis,” former colonial governments and international organizations played decisive roles in the transition to independence as well as in the experiences of the individuals whose diasporic subjectivities led them to Africa. The United Nations and its specialized agencies began recruitment efforts to replace European administrators of African bureaucracies as early as 1958. After the Democratic Republic of Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960, the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld launched the most extensive and prominent among these efforts: the United Nations Organization in the Congo or ONUC (Organisation des National Unies au Congo).4 For four years, the Civilian Operations Program recruited [End Page 34] French-speaking professionals and technicians from all over the world to help establish the country’s infrastructure and to supplement the small Congolese leadership class. Hundreds of Haitians—teachers, professors, engineers, and doctors—went to Africa as part of the ONUC program. By 1962, Haitian émigrés constituted the second largest contingent of UN staff experts working in the Congo.5 Maurice Dartigue was Chief of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Africa Division. Dr. Athemas Bellerive directed the World Health Organization (WHO) medical team that included several Haitian doctors (see Figure 1). And in 1963, ONUC’s military force was commanded by Max H. Dorsinville.6 A relatively large number of Haitians participated in the UN programs in Benin and Cameroon, as well as in the Congo. Some Haitians spent career lifetimes with their families there. Yet what is known about the experiences of the estimated 7,500 Haitians in African countries amounts to undocumented fragments that have accumulated over time and are repeated in literature and various commentaries. The historiography of post–World War II pan-Africanism focuses primarily on Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa as sites of resistance and black internationalist activism. As Martin and West note, referring to Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Hayes Edwards, “That literature, even in its more recent diasporic and Black Atlantic variations, displays a consistent Afro-Saxon bias.”7 When Haiti is mentioned at all, it is frozen in time in 1804; in popular and scholarly perception, Haiti’s impact on the world is effectively limited to the Haitian Revolution. The connections between Haiti and Africa—and the relationships between Haitian and African peoples—are imagined as largely symbolic, with no attention to the ways Haitian émigrés took tangible, self-determined action on behalf of African sovereignty.8 Equally troubling, Africa only enters the scholarship on Haitian migration in the work of epidemiologists. Here, the “Haitian hypothesis” proliferates, alleging that Haitian people brought AIDS to the United States in the 1970s after returning from Africa.9 The overall effect of these accounts is that Africa is written out of the Haitian diaspora and vice versa. More familiar narratives of migration to North America, Western Europe, and the nearby Caribbean dominate the scholarship, which naturalizes certain sites as destinations for Haitian migrants and for transnational political activity.10 The gaps in the...

Nigeria and the Attainment of Sustainable Development in the 21st Century

This research examines the capacity of Nigeria to attain sustainable development in the 21st century, using the extant parameters of the nation’s governance system and political economy. We stated that the link between governance system and political economy is that the former is shaped and determined by the texture and structure of the latter. Our study reveals that the architecture of governance, sustained by elitist preferences, cannot engender sustainable development, due mainly, to a prebendalist leadership class and a reinter economy, sustained by a defective federal system. This explains why, Nigeria’s human and infrastructural development trajectory is on the downward trend, despite the upswing in oil revenue over the last three decades. Evidently, the activities of political and economic managers, who depend largely on oil rent, subjected the Nigerian State to oil resource curse. We concluded that rejigging the governance system and “escaping” oil resource curse are precedent conditions for achieving sustainable development in the 21st century and beyond. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n4p645

Gender Matters

This two-phase study investigates the process of developing resilience through participation in outdoor adventure programming. In this study, resilience is conceptualized as experiencing growth through a disruptive event. In the first phase, a pre–post survey measure was used to assess resilience in university students who were enrolled in a semester-long adventure education program, a three-credit leisure class, or a one-credit leadership class. The second phase involved semi-structured interviews to better understand the results from Phase 1, which indicated an interaction effect between gender and time. Of particular interest was the finding that males decreased in reported levels of resilience, while females experienced increased levels. The salience of gender roles to adventure education programming is considered as an explanation for these results.

Rural and Community Development in Nigeria: An Assessment

The paper examines rural or community development in Nigeria with emphasis on the institutions, agencies, policies and strategies employed to bring about the much needed rural development in the country. It goes further to assess the impacts of the various efforts made by both the domestic and foreign governments and international organizations, institutions, agencies and non-governmental organizations to bring about real development at the grassroots level. In the attempt to do this, clarification of concepts like development, rural areas, and rural development was carried out, which formed the theoretical basis of the analysis. It was found out that efforts made by the Nigerian government though several strategies like the nation’s development plans from colonial era to date which were ex-rayed did not bring about meaningful development. Similarly international organizations and regional strategies have not lead to any significant improvement in the living conditions of the rural dwellers and rural development in general. It was also found out that a number of issues such as corruption and mismanagement, faulty planning from above rather than bottom-up approach; pursuance of the colonial and neo-colonial economic and social policies which were anti people among other factors led to failure of the rural development efforts. The paper therefore concludes among other things that for rapid and sustained rural development to take place, the lopsided and urban based development process must be reversed to rural-based and bottom-up approach, government to continue to create conducive environment for rural development to thrive, change of attitudes and orientation by all and sundry, particularly the leadership class in Nigeria in order to minimize corruption and mismanagement of resources. Therefore, for rural development to be realistic and enduring, these measures should be given priority attention, especially at the implementation stages.

Servant Leadership Through Distance Learning: A Case Study

This qualitative study explored the influence a distance learning servant leadership course had on the emergency service students’ understanding of leadership. The research study utilized a case study design in order to tell the story of the lived experiences of the participants. The setting for the study was a state university in Utah, with the six participants being declared, undergraduate emergency services majors that underwent a 15-week distance learning servant leadership class. The data used in the study consisted of the post-hoc online eJournal writings of the participants. The data analysis revealed to two themes that formed the individual case descriptions presented in results section. The literature review acknowledged the problem of bureaucracy within the emergency services and identified the practice of servant leadership as a possibility for overcoming the often-bureaucratic approach towards leadership. In addition, the literature review identified commonalities between established constructs of servant leadership and the emergency services. The findings of the study seem to demonstrate that undergoing a class on servant leadership left lasting impressions on becoming a servant leader and overall was a positive experience for the student. This study’s findings add to the existing body of knowledge associated with servant leadership within emergency service academia.

More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz (review)

Reviewed by: More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz John Ernest (bio) More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889. By Stephen Kantrowitz. (New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Pp. 514514. Cloth, $36.00; paper, $20.00.) The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment all seem to invite a relatively straightforward narrative for African American history, clear dividing points that mark the end of one story and the beginning of another, the conclusion of slavery’s disturbing chapter in U.S. history and the beginning of the story of freedom. Of course, the war, the proclamation, and the amendment were neither clean endings nor solid beginnings, but the messier story of African American history is harder to shape into a compelling narrative. In More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889, though, Stephen Kantrowitz proves himself up to the challenge, and he provides a magnificent example of how to avoid the seductions of easy beginnings and endings by simply recognizing that slavery was not the sole or even the defining issue for African American activists before the Civil War. This study of the “leading members of Greater Boston’s black community” is a story with many beginnings, and many intertwining narrative lines (8). To his great credit, Kantrowitz doesn’t simply assume the existence of a “black community” but instead looks at the mechanics of its formation and maintenance. He considers the organization of the black community—through schools and churches, lodges and libraries—to be central to the story he needs to tell. “In the face of widespread poverty and hardship,” he writes, “early-nineteenth-century black Bostonians formed Baptist and Methodist congregations, created mutual aid societies, established schools to serve their children and literary societies to cultivate their minds, and gave new life to the oldest institution of them all, the city’s black Masonic lodge. These organizations became the training grounds for a generation of black leaders. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, activists became ready to undertake broader and more ambitious feats of organization” (20). Collectively, these associations lead one into a history that cannot be reduced to a single political cause or social movement. The African American leaders central to this history were devoted to something “more than freedom,” something as complex and significant as recognition and citizenship. [End Page 573] Kantrowitz tells the story of self-described “colored citizens,” African Americans excluded from the usual forums of citizenship but determined to establish their claims through their own organizational efforts. Kantrowitz takes his central term from David Walker’s influential 1829 manifesto, Walker’s Appeal, which was directed to “the coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America.” Although he does not address the global citizenship suggested by Walker’s title, Kantrowitz explains the formation of a class of “colored citizens” in the United States, which includes some of the leading black men and women of the nineteenth century (though women play a relatively minor role in Kantrowitz’s account). Included are William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, George T. Downing, Leonard Grimes, Lewis Hayden, Robert Morris, William C. Nell, George L. Ruffin, and David Walker, among others. Although his focus is on Greater Boston, Kantrowitz presents the city largely as one among many centers of African American life, “one island in an archipelago scattered across North America,” and thus addresses the “development of the networks and alliances”—with other communities and organizations, and with white allies—that involved Boston leaders in the necessarily national struggle for recognition and rights (8). In his focus on citizenship, Kantrowitz addresses a defining strand of African American intellectual and cultural history—the politics of respectability, the asserted hope behind Du Bois’s later emphasis on a “talented tenth.” For the African American leadership class he studies, Kantrowitz explains, “‘citizenship’ meant being legally and politically vested, but it also meant something more: bonds of trust and even love across the color line. It meant knowing and being known; it meant a warm welcome to...

They Told Us We Would Change

They told us an educational program would change us. It was an advanced on-site program, but they said it would give us more than education. They said we would see changes in our jobs, professional titles, and relationships. They also said our nursing practice would change, along with our thoughts and opinions about our profession. Soon, they promised, we would see "the bigger picture"whatever that meant. We heard what they were saying-at least we thought we did. But would we really change?"They" were the administrators, deans, and professors of Simmons College in Boston. They talked about the wide-ranging benefits of advanced education. Their audience was a large group of eager and curious nurses from Winchester Hospital on the outskirts of Boston. Winchester Hospital was collaborating with Simmons College on a unique on-site educational program. There were two tracks to choose from: AD-to-BSN and RN-to-MSN.We attended the informational session for our own personal and professional reasons. We came from a variety of clinical backgrounds, nursing roles, and departments within the hospital. And we all wanted to expand our knowledge and earn advanced degrees. These are our stories.STEPHANIEI wanted to return to school for myself. I wanted a master 's degree in nursing. I wanted to accomplish it and see where it could take me. I knew I could do it once I got in the groove, but realizing it would become my life for the next two years was another thing entirely. There was so much to learn in such a short period of time. It was overwhelming to think about the fast-paced class schedule, the cost of books, and the commitment of time and energy, all while working full-time as a nurse in the operating room (OR).But the opportunity was amazing. I could work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., then walk down the hall to the conference room for my nursing leadership and management class. I didn't have to worry about driving into Boston, finding parking, and navigating snow storms at night. And, tuition reimbursement was available.I knew most of my classmates because we all worked at Winchester Hospital. They were so experienced-some had been nurses for 30 years; some worked as nurse directors and nurse managers. I was only 26 years old and had five years of experience as an RN. I was intimidated by their knowledge. How could they give presentations without showing anxiety, and how could they convey messages with such ease?There were so many articles to review and textbooks to read. There was so much information to absorb. So many projects and papers as well as group work. We learned about evidence-based practice, research, finance, staffing, nursing theory, and budgets. It was difficult to balance work, school, family, friends, and personal time. Thank goodness we had each other. We became more than just classmates. We studied together, wrote papers together, and met at coffee shops to organize and plan our ethics debates together. We knew what was going on in each other 's lives. We waved to one another and chatted in the hallways at work. Then, a couple of hours later, we would stand side by side in the Conference Center and present on "Burnout in Nursing."What a great personal accomplishment. I have to admit I was proud to walk onto the stage and receive my degree. But then I thought, "What next?" A spark had been ignited in me and I wanted more. I wanted to publish my research. I was ready for a job transition. I heard about a job posting for a clinical nurse specialist of surgical services. A master 's degree in nursing was required for this position. It would be a great opportunity to apply what I had just learned: to provide quality care to our patients and support the nurses more effectively. I applied, completed an extensive interview process, and was offered the position. I had come so far, changed so much, accomplished so much. Not only had I earned the credential that qualified me for a new job, but I also had become a life-long learner. …

Hello ADIOS: the challenges and lessons of developing leadership class I/O frameworks

SUMMARYApplications running on leadership platforms are more and more bottlenecked by storage input/output (I/O). In an effort to combat the increasing disparity between I/O throughput and compute capability, we created Adaptable IO System (ADIOS) in 2005. Focusing on putting users first with a service oriented architecture, we combined cutting edge research into new I/O techniques with a design effort to create near optimal I/O methods. As a result, ADIOS provides the highest level of synchronous I/O performance for a number of mission critical applications at various Department of Energy Leadership Computing Facilities. Meanwhile ADIOS is leading the push for next generation techniques including staging and data processing pipelines. In this paper, we describe the startling observations we have made in the last half decade of I/O research and development, and elaborate the lessons we have learned along this journey. We also detail some of the challenges that remain as we look toward the coming Exascale era. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Leadership Through the Special Olympics

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING INVOLVES ACTIVE PARTICIPATION IN THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE (Kolb, 1984). We sought to teach leadership to baccalaureate nursing students using a Special Olympics volunteer experience as an experiential learning exercise. Founded in 1968, the Special Olympics is a volunteer organization that provides yearround sports training and athletic competition to adults and children with intellectual disabilities. The purpose of this learning activity was to have students participate in a civic engagement opportunity and observe how leadership behavior emerges in a semi-structured environment. Our goal was twofold: to provide experience working with a vulnerable population that students will encounter in nursing practice, and to provide an opportunity to critically assess leadership behaviors as they emerged during the day's activities.Method In summer 2011, 62 accelerated BSN students enrolled in a nursing leadership, management, and contemporary issues class. One class objective was to incorporate concepts, theories, and principles of leadership and management into professional nursing practice. We designed a three-part assignment to reinforce this objective. First, the president of the local Special Olympics came to the classroom to speak about the organization and leadership structure, experiences with managing and leading the organization, and working with vulnerable populations from a leadership standpoint. Second, students used class time to work in small groups, as volunteers, at one of various sports at the Special Olympics summer games. Third, the students wrote group papers to reflect on their experiences, discuss how leaders and followers emerged, and apply leadership theory to the experience.We evaluated the student's ability to apply leadership theory to the volunteer experience and to create linkages to nursing practice. The student's overall experience was assessed through the group assignment and an anonymous voluntary survey. For the survey, we asked students to use a five-point Likert-type scale to indicate their agreement or disagreement with three statements: 1) I was able to apply concepts of leadership to the Special Olympics. 2) I am able to apply my Special Olympics experience to nursing experience. 3) I enjoyed the Special Olympics experience.Outcomes Twelve groups of five students collaborated on the papers. The group papers indicated that students were able to effectively apply concepts and theories of leadership to the Special Olympics experience. Students incorporated leadership concepts ranging from servant and authentic leadership theories, to leadership style and philosophy. All groups successfully identified how leaders and followers emerged during the Special Olympics event.We evaluated the student's ability to apply leadership theory to the volunteer experience and to create linkages to nursing practice. The student's overall experience was assessed through the group assignment and an anonymous voluntary survey. For the survey, we asked students to use a five-point Likert-type scale to indicate their agreement or disagreement with three statements: 1) I was able to apply concepts of leadership to the Special Olympics. …

Creating Success for Students With Autism Spectrum Disorders and Their Teachers

This case study is intended for use in an educational leadership class to facilitate conversation on providing effective instructional practices to students on the autism spectrum. In particular, this case study demonstrates how a school district incorporated a research-based model into their system to provide support to teachers of students with autism spectrum disorders. The case provides opportunity to discuss challenges faced by leadership in special education and to analyze the interactions between and within various organizations through various theoretical lenses (i.e., knowledge-based theory, open systems theory).

Security and the Rule of Law in Nigeria

This study has espoused security and rule of law in Nigeria as matters of national discourse. Nigeria in recent times has been trailing through periods of insecurity of lives and property as well as none respect for the rule of law, natural justice and human dignity. To this end, the effort to build a formidable federalism in a heterogeneous society like ours is still a subject of serious debate. However, the study is objectively undertaken to evaluate the level of security and application of rule of law in Nigeria. Survey Design is the adopted methodology in which available literature were corroborated with empirical data as instruments for the analysis of issues relating to security and rule of law in Nigeria. Also, the study hinged on the Circular Causation Theory which posits that economic developments result in a circular causation process whereby the riches are awarded more favour in terms of security and respect for their civil rights while the poor are insecured and always disrespected. However, the major findings of this study are that Nigeria from the period of colonialism has been passing through turbulence years of crisis and insecurity arising from the colonial transgression that forced different ethnic groups into one nation without their consents. As a result of this, politics of bitterness and acrimony, leadership vacuum and disrespect to human dignity were the major manifestations of such activities of the Niger Delta restiveness and the Boko Haram insurgence. It was therefore recommended among other things that the leadership and political class should not politicize issues pertaining to security and that security issues should be seen by all Nigerians as collective war that should be fought and won collectively.

Density Functional Theory Approach to Nuclear Fission

The Skyrme nuclear energy density functional theory (DFT) is used to model neutron-induced fission in actinides. This paper focuses on the numerical implementation of the theory. In particular, it reports recent advances in DFT code development on leadership class computers, and presents a detailed analysis of the numerical accuracy of DFT solvers for near-scission calculations.

From Rule of Law to Rule of Love: towards Plato‟s Ideal State - the City of God

The pervading highhandedness and insensitivity in governance, the consequent suffering of the masses and a global order that has virtually reverted to the Hobbesian state of nature, confirm the Biblical averment that “when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” Inspired by this timeless, instructive and worrisome admonition, the paper reviews the evolution of Western political thought and the resultant theories targetedat constantly updating, fine-tuning and upholding the essence of the Social Contract towards the realization of the essence of the Biblical averment, which states that “when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.” Fundamentally a presentation on leadership and spiritual intelligence, the paper discusses these two phenomena with special reference to good governance and recommends that organizational and political leaders should be conscious of the transience of power, the ephemerality of materialism and the eternity of the soul vis-à-vis the immutable Biblical injunction that “you reap what you sow.” The paper argues that “the righteous” of the literature of Judeo-Christian theology is the same as the “philosopher kings” of Plato‟s Utopian Kalipolis and the modern day leader who governs guided by the essence of spiritual intelligence. The paper opines that it is only when the consciousness of spiritual intelligence permeates the system, especially within the leadership class, that amoral familsim will abate along with the decay of social infrastructure, pervasive poverty, ever-elongating unemployment line, youth restiveness, social fragility and volatility and countless other social malaise that constitute the insidious albatross of human society. In conclusion, the paper holds that the string that ties the theories enunciated and their applicability in governance is the human element and here lies the issue of leadership. Here, the paper avers, lies the realization of the Biblical “rule of the righteous” and “kingdom of God on earth” and Plato‟s “ideal state--the city of God.&#8221