Search results

In March 2020, we opened our classrooms to students, parents, and the world. Zoom and Google Meet became the new spaces to gather as regular check-ins with students and families became the norm. Educators served students through a two-way window where we previously only saw them in the school setting and now with the use of technology, could literally see into their homes. It is evident to many that inequities exist among the students and families that we serve, and our efforts to care them focused on social-emotional learning and supporting their well-being. While many see the challenges that the pandemic brought, there were also many opportunities that came about, including the use of core values which helped guide us through uncertainty. The need for human connection became a clear factor when we were not able to be together physically. Connecting with students and families on an authentic, deeper level, shifted how we think about school leadership and improving schools. The mindset transitioning to our ability to teach in schools and communities, not just in a physical classroom, became one of our guiding principles. Across the United States, school districts’ instructional directives varied greatly. In our district, leaders came together to create virtual lessons to be available for all students. Our focus was to support educational equity and to give students opportunities to engage with grade level curriculum at any time of day (or night).

When the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, Samuel G. Ward, a writer for the Dial, commented, “I am with all the world intensely interested in Emily Dickinson. She may become world famous or she may never get out of New England” (Sewall 1974, 26). A century after Emily Dickinson's death, all the world is intensely interested in the full nature of her poetic genius and her commanding presence in American literature. Indeed, if fame belonged to her she could not escape it (JL 265). She was concerned about becoming “great.” Fame intrigued her, but it did not consume her. She preferred “To earn it by disdaining it—”(JP 1427). Critics say that she sensed her genius but could never have envisioned the extent to which others would recognize it. She wrote, “Fame is a bee./It has a song—/It has a sting—/Ah, too, it has a wing” (JP 1763). On 7 May 1984 the names of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were inscribed on stone tablets and set into the floor of the newly founded United States Poets' Corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “the first poets elected to this pantheon of American writers” (New York Times 1985). Celebrations in her honor draw a distinguished assemblage of international scholars, renowned authors and poets, biographers, critics, literary historians, and admirers‐at‐large. In May 1986 devoted followers came from places as distant as Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Japan to Washington, DC, to participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's conference, “Emily Dickinson, Letter to the World.”

This paper aims to provide a guide to significant primary and secondary resources relevant to the study of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.

Online catalogs, bibliographies, and the worldwide web were searched to identify relevant items. In some cases, citation analysis and other bibliometric measures were used to determine the highest‐impact sources. Items were annotated after personal examination by the author. The paper is divided into two main sections: primary sources (anthologies, databases and web resources) and secondary sources (bibliographies, databases, biographical resources, reference resources, monographs, journals and web resources).

The paper introduces each resource, indicating its scope and contribution to the study of Dickinson. It acknowledges in particular the developments in recent Dickinson scholarship.

Dickinson remains popular among both scholars and laypeople, but the most recent bibliographies of Dickinson scholarship date to the late 1980s. This guide provides a late twentieth‐ to early twenty‐first‐century update to those earlier works.

Several risk factors have been identified in ongoing efforts by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to mitigate high rates of homelessness among veterans. To date, no studies have examined the relationship of rurality and distance to nearest VA facility to risk of homelessness. Due to challenges in accessing available services, the hypothesis was that rural-residing veterans are at greater risk for homelessness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The cohort consisted of veterans who had separated from the military between 2001 and 2011. The authors used a forwarding address provided by the service member at the time of separation from the military to determine rurality of residence and distance to care. The authors examined differences in the rate of homelessness within a year of a veteran’s first encounter with the VA following last military separation based on rurality and distance to the nearest VA facility using multivariable log-binomial regressions.

In the cohort of 708,318 veterans, 84.3 percent were determined to have a forwarding address in urban areas, 60.4 and 88.7 percent lived within 40 miles of the nearest VA medical center (VAMC), respectively. Veterans living in a rural area (RR=0.763; 95 percent CI=0.718-0.810) and those living between 20 and 40 miles (RR=0.893; 95 percent CI=0.846-0.943) and 40+ miles away from the nearest VAMC (RR=0.928; 95 percent CI=0.879-0.979) were at a lower risk for homelessness.

The unique data set allowed the authors to explore the relationship between geography and homelessness. These results are important to VA and national policy makers in understanding the risk factors for homelessness among veterans and planning interventions.

THERE are no motions of ultimate importance to be submitted to the Library Association Annual General Meeting this year. That which, if passed, is to provide that the President shall be installed in office at the opening of the Annual Conference in itself is merely a domestic or internal Association matter. As we have argued in THE LIBRARY WORLD such an arrangement would give a more dramatic and dignified opening to the President's year; he would be installed by the outgoing President in the presence of the largest assembly that the members can make in body; indeed on the only occasion in a normal year in which he sees and is seen by a full meeting; instead as now rising to take charge of us and to make his most important address as unobtrusively as an ordinary member at a time when his term is almost over. It is a better entry for him and for us, as a spectacle and demonstration, than a small January induction on a cold and usually wet evening at Chaucer House attended at best by not more than a hundred members.

The purpose of this paper is to first articulate and then illustrate a descriptive theoretical model of documentation (i.e. document creation) suitable for analysis of the experiential, first-person perspective.

Three models of documentation in the literature are presented and synthesized into a new model. This model is then used to understand the findings from a phenomenology-of-practice study of the work of seven visual artists as they each created a self-portrait, understood here as a form of documentation.

A number of themes are found to express the first-person experience of art-making in these examples, including communicating, memories, reference materials, taking breaks and stepping back. The themes are discussed with an eye toward articulating what is shared and unique in these experiences. Finally, the themes are mapped successfully to the theoretical model.

The study involved artists creating self-portraits, and further research will be required to determine if the thematic findings are unique to self-portraiture or apply as well to art-making, to documentation generally, etc. Still, the theoretical model developed here seems useful for analyzing documentation experiences.

As many activities and tasks in contemporary life can be conceptualized as documentation, this model provides a valuable analytical tool for better understanding those experiences. This can ground education and management decisions for those involved.

This paper makes conceptual and empirical contributions to document theory and the study of the information behavior of artists, particularly furthering discussions of information and document experience.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of graduate students about the need for a multicultural education course at doctoral level in a mid-sized higher education public institution in Southwest Florida.

A qualitative case study method was applied with multiple sources of data collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations and students’ written papers, online discussions and assignments that aimed to prepare educators to teach culturally diverse students and challenge their own perceptions about culture, race and other multicultural education-related topics.

The findings indicate that, even though the multicultural education course promoted an eye-opening transformational experience for students through their interactions and learning from each other, the students still need further training in multicultural education because of their limited culturally responsive teaching skills.

Limitations of the study are that both the researchers were deeply involved with the material and the class, as the class professor and one of the students, which might have affected the authors’ perception about the students’ journey in learning about multicultural education. The researchers’ dual-role (as researchers and course professor and graduate assistant) might have influenced the participants’ responses, as they knew they were part of a research project. Thus, the participants’ spontaneity in sharing their opinions and beliefs about multicultural education may have been hampered, perhaps responding what the researchers expected rather than with their authentic perspectives on the topics.

The implications of this study to teachers, educators and practitioners are that it invites the readers to reflect on their academic preparedness to work with culturally diverse students. For policymakers, the study indicates the need for creating standards that aim to examine in-service graduate student teachers about their self-efficacy, readiness and dispositions to work with culturally diverse students.

Because of the limited publications on doctoral students learning multicultural education, the authors’ study offers an important insight into the transformational experience of doctoral students learning multicultural education and the implications for improving graduate courses in multicultural education.

The aim of this study was to examine the potential role of music lessons as part of a treatment programme for children diagnosed as having severe chronic anxiety disorders. The findings are presented as a series of individual case studies based on the recorded observations of the children, parents, music‐teachers and family therapists. Over the period of a school year five children were recruited to receive lessons on an instrument of their choice from an experienced professional music‐teacher. Music lessons were credited with improvements in feelings of efficacy and self‐confidence, increased social ease and independence, new opportunities to express creativity and emotional feelings, and control over intrusive thoughts and feelings. Normalisation of the therapeutic environment, combined with freedom from parental pressure to succeed, appears to emerge as a key feature of the success of the project. The findings indicate that music lessons on prescription may offer a useful complement or alternative to therapy for difficult and complex childhood anxiety disorders.