Street Smarts Research Articles

White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural

Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Susannah Bartlow White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. No one will teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that knowledge will set you free. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. —Assata Shakur, quoted on a mural at Marquette University What does it mean to whitewash? To terminate? I have been tasting and retasting these words on my tongue after a mural of Assata Shakur at Marquette University was whitewashed, and I was fired—terminated —for having supported the mural, ending a fourteen-year career in feminist academia. As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015. The mural was on display for six weeks at the GSRC before a storm of Students fill in detail of the Assata Shakur mural at Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Photograph by Amanda T. Smith. News and Views 691 media coverage in mid-May prompted the university to cover the mural in white paint and fire me for my support of the project. My experience of this process was as rapid as it sounds: I received a few phone calls alerting me that the whitewashing of the mural was imminent and that there was a formal review of my leadership decisions, and I was fired twenty-four hours later. The idiomatic usage of “whitewash” tells us that something is shameful and that it has been, or ought to be, covered up. Whose cover-up was it—and whose shame? Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable. Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself. Other recent cases of faculty repression, from Steven Salaita to Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson, demonstrate how concerns about liability, finances, and public perception guide administrators ’ decisions about representation on campuses. Far from being liberal utopias, or even spaces that respect speech, universities remain testing grounds when students’ or educators’ actions present direct antiracist critique. What more clear or direct example of antiracist critique than the quotes we chose for the mural: Assata Shakur’s own words asserting the importance of street smarts and intellectual prowess, naming the power invested in knowledge systems and the importance of claiming that power for ourselves? Universities are, in our time, particularly responsive to pressure from the right. Private, nonprofit, advocacy organizations troll university websites looking for evidence of liberal bias; conservative media outlets publish student bloggers who feed the fantasy that the facts of United States history, presented without whitewashing, do not belong in classrooms . In particular, those who study the lives and knowledges of historically marginalized populations are in the crosshairs of right-wing attacks. In the case of the mural—and in each of the other cases cited above— it was either a right-wing news source or a powerful donor or decision 692 News and Views maker who raised concerns about leftist bias, civility, or...

White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural

Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Susannah Bartlow White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. No one will teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that knowledge will set you free. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. —Assata Shakur, quoted on a mural at Marquette University What does it mean to whitewash? To terminate? I have been tasting and retasting these words on my tongue after a mural of Assata Shakur at Marquette University was whitewashed, and I was fired—terminated —for having supported the mural, ending a fourteen-year career in feminist academia. As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015. The mural was on display for six weeks at the GSRC before a storm of Students fill in detail of the Assata Shakur mural at Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Photograph by Amanda T. Smith. News and Views 691 media coverage in mid-May prompted the university to cover the mural in white paint and fire me for my support of the project. My experience of this process was as rapid as it sounds: I received a few phone calls alerting me that the whitewashing of the mural was imminent and that there was a formal review of my leadership decisions, and I was fired twenty-four hours later. The idiomatic usage of “whitewash” tells us that something is shameful and that it has been, or ought to be, covered up. Whose cover-up was it—and whose shame? Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable. Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself. Other recent cases of faculty repression, from Steven Salaita to Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson, demonstrate how concerns about liability, finances, and public perception guide administrators ’ decisions about representation on campuses. Far from being liberal utopias, or even spaces that respect speech, universities remain testing grounds when students’ or educators’ actions present direct antiracist critique. What more clear or direct example of antiracist critique than the quotes we chose for the mural: Assata Shakur’s own words asserting the importance of street smarts and intellectual prowess, naming the power invested in knowledge systems and the importance of claiming that power for ourselves? Universities are, in our time, particularly responsive to pressure from the right. Private, nonprofit, advocacy organizations troll university websites looking for evidence of liberal bias; conservative media outlets publish student bloggers who feed the fantasy that the facts of United States history, presented without whitewashing, do not belong in classrooms . In particular, those who study the lives and knowledges of historically marginalized populations are in the crosshairs of right-wing attacks. In the case of the mural—and in each of the other cases cited above— it was either a right-wing news source or a powerful donor or decision 692 News and Views maker who raised concerns about leftist bias, civility, or...

Street smarts of science for students.

A workshop organized by the Society for Leukocyte Biology offers advice to graduate students on how to navigate educational and professional waters to find success in academia.

Randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a video game as a child pedestrian educational tool.

Injury is the number one cause of death and disability in children in the United States and an increasingly important public health problem globally. While prevention of injuries is an important goal, prevention efforts are currently fragmented, poorly funded, and rarely studied. Among school-aged children, pedestrian crashes are a major mechanism of injury. We hypothesized that we could develop a game-based educational tool that would be effective in teaching elementary school children the principles of pedestrian safety. Between November 2011 and June 2013, second- and third-grade children in Los Angeles Unified School District were randomly assigned to play a unique interactive video game (Ace's Adventure) about pedestrian safety or to a traditional didactic session about pedestrian safety. A pretest and posttest were administered to the study participants. Afterward, study participants were observed for appropriate pedestrian behavior on a simulated street set called Street Smarts. All statistical analyses were performed using SAS version 9.2. A total of 348 study participants took the pretest and posttest. There were 180 who were randomized to the didactic and 168 who were randomized to the video game. The didactic group demonstrated a higher mean score increase (1.01, p < 0.0001) as compared with the video game group (0.44, p < 0.0001). However, observation of study participants revealed that participants who played the video game, as compared with the didactic group, more frequently exhibited appropriate behavior during the following: exiting a parked car (p = 0.01), signaling to a car that was backing up (p = 0.01), signaling to a stopped car (p = 0.0002), and crossing the street (p = 0.01). Students who played the educational video game about pedestrian safety performed similarly to those who attended a more traditional and labor-intensive didactic learning. Innovative educational methods, such as game playing, could significantly change our approach to injury prevention and have the potential to decrease the burden of injury among children worldwide.

The road not taken or how I learned to love the liver: A personal perspective on hepatitis history

The road not taken or how I learned to love the liver: A personal perspective on hepatitis history

EP-1322: Street Smarts: an interactive program to enhance effectiveness in the workplace.

EP-1322: Street Smarts: an interactive program to enhance effectiveness in the workplace.

This Wound is Consistent with Harm

It could have happened anywhere. I knew crime having lived in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Haven. But I thought I was going to be ready for this moment in Kampala. As part of my characteristic risk-calculating analysis, I worked out what I thought would be a logical plan to diffuse an unexpected situation exactly like this months before I moved to Uganda to conduct research. I would calmly give the perpetrator a strategic amount of money, and then offer to connect him with a local organization to address whatever need he would identify. He would be disarmed by my reaction. I would feel some control while having “turned the other cheek.” I was aware that this would sound naive and idealistic at best, so I practiced street smarts religiously, often in a paranoid fashion, to avoid undesirable encounters. On this day, though, I didn’t turn around when I heard running footsteps behind me. When my assailant runs away, I do not think fast enough to register that he is running down a street that ends at an intersection with a police station. I fail to chase him, standing in place, stunned and defeated. An opportunity to rectify the emasculation I feel after giving into his demands passes. Somewhere nearby, a woman shouts from her window “Ooo, sorry, sorry!” The tears flow, but I tell myself to hold it together. Don’t miss this conference. I feebly compose myself and pass through a small squatter settlement on Mulago hill. I wave, force a smile and give the Ugandan greeting oli otya to the folks I know here, crying all the while. No one says anything more than the expected bulungi in response. Only then do I realize that my back continues to sting and now itch. I touch my back. Blood covers my hand, and I realize for the first time that I have been stabbed. Thoughts race: I wonder if I need a tetanus injection. Did he recently use the handsaw on someone else? Could I get infected with an awful illness? Minutes later, I arrive at the clinic where I work and greet two staff members. Noting my disheveled appearance, they ask if I am okay.

Successful ACT Programs Share Key Elements

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessSuccessful ACT Programs Share Key ElementsAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Jun 2012https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.47.11.psychnews_47_11_9-aAbstractPractical steps to measure and ensure the quality of assertive community treatment (ACT) programs are supported by scarce evidence, but a multi-pronged approach may help maintain ACT team quality and program fidelity until firmer ground is reached.“[N]o single strategy is sufficient for ensuring adequate ACT implementation and services of consistently good quality,” said Maria Monroe-DeVita, Ph.D., director of the Washington Institute for Mental Health Research and Training and an acting assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and colleagues in Psychiatric Services in Advance, published online April 15.ACT programs have reported largely positive outcomes since their development 35 years ago, Monroe-DeVita and colleagues noted. These include fewer psychiatric hospitalizations, better retention in treatment, better housing stability, and more. However, programs show a mixed record in meeting basic standards over time, and that might be worrisome, said the authors. “[I]nadequate model implementation suggests less-effective services.”In practice, numerous problems cause difficulties in maintaining fidelity to program ideals, said Robert Kiesling, M.D., medical director of Pathways to Housing in Washington, D.C., which operates four ACT teams. He was not involved with Monroe-DeVita’s research.“It takes time to get up and running,” said Kiesling in an interview with Psychiatric News. “We have challenging patients with long histories of mental illness and chronic general medical ailments, and staff burnout is a fact of life.”Monroe-DeVita and colleagues reviewed 57 articles published from 2000 to 2011, dividing them into four strategies that the programs use to maintain quality:Policy and administration: “ACT programs need clearly defined practice standards,” they said, noting that several states have already mandated such standards. Licensing or certifying ACT programs is another way to hold programs to their original ideals. Adequate funding is critical, especially in a program’s early years, when start-up and recruitment costs are greater than reimbursements. “Funding strategies that support outreach efforts to consumers who may be difficult to locate or engage in services … are particularly crucial for ACT teams,” they said.Training and consultation: Practice-based training and supervision are also important, said Monroe-DeVita and colleagues. “Even mature ACT teams … will often require ongoing, periodic consultation and training, especially given the high rate of turnover among staff at community mental health programs.”ACT programs do need an outside look, said Kiesling. “Funders have a vested interest in how the organization is functioning.”Team operations: Finding the right mixture of clinical skills, street smarts, pragmatism, and persistence is necessary but never easy, said the authors. “Experience in traditional office-based mental health programs is not necessarily a good predictor of success as an ACT team member, because ACT involves extensive outreach.”When Pathways to Housing hires new staff, for example, it conducts an extensive interview process, but the candidate also spends time with the team as members work in the community, said Kiesling. Once on board, new hires spend two to three weeks taking didactic courses (like the D.C. Department of Mental Health’s day-long training) and shadowing staff on their rounds.Program evaluation: “ACT teams rarely collect outcome data,” they noted. But they emphasized that staff should gather and evaluate regular measurements of frequency, duration, and type of services provided, along with consumer outcomes like employment, housing, symptom reduction, and psychiatric hospitalization.Doing research at his program would require a full-time staff person, something Pathways to Housing can’t afford now, said Kiesling. Keeping up with the documentation required by insurers or Medicaid is time-consuming enough, he noted.These approaches should be seen as “working hypotheses” for the moment, said the authors. “Additional rigorous research on implementing and sustaining the quality of ACT and other evidence-based practices is needed.” “Program Fidelity and Beyond: Multiple Strategies and Criteria for Ensuring Quality of Assertive Community Treatment” is posted at http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=1103903. ISSUES NewArchived

Abstract LB-50: Street smarts: cancer education and outreach in the homeless community

Abstract In response to a year-long investigation of cancer among the homeless in Birmingham, AL, this presenter created an education program called “Street Smarts.” Findings from a focus group consisting of homeless women diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer revealed competing values (poor self-esteem and body image, limited health care resources, etc.) preventing individuals in this population from seeking diagnosis or treatment for cancer, even when free-of-charge options are available. Street Smarts brings together members of this underserved community for a day of pampering while educating them about breast cancer screening and health care alternatives. The program is funded in partnership with the North Central Alabama Susan G. Komen Foundation. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2012 Mar 31-Apr 4; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2012;72(8 Suppl):Abstract nr LB-50. doi:1538-7445.AM2012-LB-50

Testing for discrimination: Evidence from the game show Street Smarts

This paper conducts two alternative tests of discrimination in the game show Street Smarts, which both exploit the unique setup of the game to determine why discrimination occurs. The results indicate non-black contestants have a lower prior perception of the skill level of blacks relative to non-blacks in answering the average question in the game. When results are stratified by question category, one finds that non-black contestants perceive blacks and non-blacks to have equal ability in answering general knowledge questions. However, they perceive blacks to have a lower ability in answering miscellaneous, entertainment, and slang/common saying questions.

Zen and the art of making a living: a practical guide to creative career design

Prologue: the art of life's work: the Tao of work or, creative self expression zen at work or, poetry in motion myth at work or, crafting the story of your life the world calls for the post-modern (blissful) hero. Part 1 The quest for life's work: the quest for your best - vision questing, clarifying values, pointing to purpose, targeting talents, marking mission objectives, what if you still don't know?. Part 2 The game of life's work: playing the game - winners, losers, and choosers - your new career - getting a picture, reality testing, evaluation - no or go?. Part 3 The battle for life's work: winning in the marketplace - taking it to the street - choosing your marketing strategy, sailing the entrepreneurship, wielding the free-lance, crafting the nonprofit foundation, landing the right job, street smarts. Part 4 The school of life's work: learning to change - the old boy and the student-sage - getting there - transition strategies, training thrills - knowledge and skills, creating the self-image you need to succeed, help! - enlisting support, loving what you do ('til you are doing what you love). Appendix A: Economics - scar-city or mutual support system?. Appendix B: volunteering. Appendix C: long-term planning for zealots, fanatics, and eager beavers.

‘The street smarts of a cartoon princess’. New roles for women in games

The role of women in games is changing, although the media and sometimes games designers have been slow to catch up with this. This paper argues that games are adopting a more gender-neutral approach and that in cases where this does not happen, players are taking matters into their own hands. Fan texts reappropriate the female in games to present a more playful aspect and the growing sociality of games, especially online games, means that designers are taking note where players find difficulty with gendered representations. At the same time the female gamer is becoming less of a trope as players accept more freely that men and women play a diverse selection of games that cannot be categorised by sex.

Ability, Adverse Learning and Agency Costs: Evidence from Retail Banking

The literature on incentive contracting suggests that the optimal performance pay contract depends on a tradeoff between productivity and agency costs. The effect of employee ability on this tradeoff is theoretically ambiguous, as the employee’s private gains (through more sophisticated gaming responses) may exceed the employer’s productive benefits. Similarly, employees’ “adverse learning” about how to game their incentives may outweigh their productive learning. Existing research has not examined these possible perverse effects. We observe branch managers of a large retail bank following the introduction of a new incentive plan. We use a novel empirical strategy to estimate the profits the bank loses through managers’ manipulation of loan sizes and interest rates, and find that these agency costs are between three and twelve percent of profits on average. Managers’ formal education (“book smarts”) has no impact on agency costs, but their ability to infer undisclosed information about the incentive plan (“street smarts”) does. More-able managers in the latter sense cost the bank an extra two percent of profits. Finally, agency costs are increasing over time, suggesting that adverse learning dominates productive learning. We find suggestive, but inconclusive, evidence that higher levels of “street smarts”are associated with a higher rate of adverse learning.

Street smarts for boss

The Urban Challenge was an autonomous vehicle competition sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in November 2007. Contestant robots were required to autonomously execute a series of navigation missions through a simplified urban environment consisting of roads, intersections, and parking lots while obeying road rules and interacting safely and correctly with other traffic. In contrast to previous DARPA challenges, which focused on rough-terrain navigation, this competition required a system capable of complex autonomous behaviors, such as waiting for precedence at an intersection or passing a slow-moving vehicle on a multilane road. These behaviors were managed by a software subsystem called the behavioral executive in Boss, Tartan Racing's winning entry in the Urban Challenge. The fulfillment of this role required the carefully structured integration and management of many disparate capabilities in a highly flexible manner over the course of the development, accommodating whatever changes were necessary to win the competition amidst a continuously evolving software system. These requirements, among many others, are reflected in the behavioral executive's architecture, the flexibility and adaptability of which played an important role in the team's success.

Innovation and Disability

Innovation and Disability

Model World: The Hidden Ingredient and Nature vs. Nurture

AboutSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Go to Section HomeInterfacesVol. 37, No. 6 Model World: The Hidden Ingredient and Nature vs. NurtureSaul I. GassSaul I. GassPublished Online:1 Dec 2007https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.1070.0293 Previous Back to Top Next FiguresReferencesRelatedInformationCited ByApplying a critical biography perspective to the work of Frank GilbrethJournal of Management History, Vol. 22, No. 4Saul I. Gass24 February 2011 Volume 37, Issue 6November-December 2007Pages 501-603 Article Information Metrics Downloaded 1 times in the past 12 months Information Published Online:December 01, 2007 Copyright © 2007, INFORMSCite asSaul I. Gass, (2007) Model World: The Hidden Ingredient and Nature vs. Nurture. Interfaces 37(6):577-581. https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.1070.0293 KeywordsOR/MS philosophyhuman OR characteristicstime and motion studiesOR historyPDF download

This Way to School... Lessons From the Classroom

This Way to School... Lessons From the Classroom

Artistic Undertones of Humanistic Leadership Education

Leaders are increasingly called on to function in ways that demand creative smarts as much as book smarts and street smarts. Consequently, more attention is being given to artistic potentialities of leadership. To help create relevant educational opportunities, the author responds in three ways. First is to identify a framework of characteristics that provide an artistic context for leadership in action. Second is to establish an integrative foundation for such characteristics and to translate the resultant pattern into an integral array of leadership competencies. Third is to develop a diverse array of artistic catalysts and activities to promote these competencies.

Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts: The Figured World of Smartness in the Lives of Marginalized, Urban Youth

How smartness is defined within schools contributes to low academic achievement by poor and racial/ethnic minority students. Using Holland et al.’s (1998) [Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (Eds.) (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] concept of “figured worlds,” this paper explores the “figuring” of smartness through the perspectives of marginalized youth. The youth made key distinctions between being book smart vs. street smart. This distinction is a direct challenge by the youth to the dominant discourse of smartness or “book smarts” as it operates in schools. To the youth, “street smarts” are more important because they are connected to being able to maneuver through structures in their lives such as poverty, the police, street culture, and abusive “others.” This distinction is key because street smarts stress agency in countering social structures whereas, for many of the youth, book smarts represented those structures, such as receiving a high school diploma. Implications for schools and pedagogy are discussed.

Capacity for Survival: Exploring Strengths of Homeless Street Youth

The majority of research on homeless youth has focused on the multitude of problems faced by this vulnerable population. The current study, while acknowledging the hazards of life on the streets, seeks to explore the personal strengths and informal resources street youth rely on to navigate their environments. Qualitative data from seven focus groups conducted with street youth ages 18-24 were analyzed using content analysis. These data, rich with interactions among youth participants, highlight three important themes: developing "street smarts," existence of personal strengths, and informal resources relied upon by youth to survive. Results provide valuable insights into the strengths of homeless youth that can be useful to providers in assessing street youths' service needs and increasing the likelihood of long-term positive outcomes.