In April, the premier issue of Ecopsychology was launched online. Doherty, editor-in-chief, believes this online journal will offer psychological solutions through the use of ecological psychotherapy.  “Ecopsychology will raise provocative questions about consciousness, identity, health, and ethical living,” he said. “The role of the journal is to foreground these questions and create a space for dialog.”

Ecopsychology places psychology and mental health disciplines in an ecological context and recognizes the links between human health, culture, and the health of the planet. With its groundbreaking and diverse collaboration of psychotherapists, social science researchers and contributors from other environmental-related fields, Ecopsychology is the only peer-reviewed journal of its kind.

Doherty developed the ecopsychology studies program at Lewis & Clark and runs his own private practice.

Read an interview in The Oregonian featuring Doherty discussing ecopsychology.

Exposito published an article in the April 2009 issue of Educational Leadership: Supporting English Learners titled “Top Notch Supports for Language Learners.” The article describes Exposito’s experience with a group of girls from Bell Gardens Intermediate in Los Angeles for the past two years. The school’s high concentration of immigrant students primarily from Mexico and Central America led Exposito to feel that Latina girls needed a place to discuss their lived, urban realities that sometimes lead to a numbing of the spirit. After working with the principal at the school and two counselors, the group set up a writing club called Girls at Promise. In this club, girls meet for two days a month to write and share their stories as well as read literature that is connected to their urban reality. Exposito’s team led the girls on field trips to the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to local colleges. Girls at Promise is currently finishing its second year.

Shagoury published an article titled “Language to Language: Nurturing Writing Development in Multilingual Classrooms” in the March 2009 issue of Young Children. In the article, Shagoury recounts her time spent in a multilingual kindergarten classroom in which six or more languages were spoken by the children. She provides examples of the process young dual-language learners engage when learning written languages in both first and second languages. “When the two written language systems that children are learning are very different, children still draw on their knowledge of their home language as well as their growing understanding of English, testing out hypotheses just as they do in their oral language,” Shagoury said.

Young Children is the journal for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The theme for the March issue was “Supporting All Kinds of Learners.”  In the introduction to the issue, the editor states:  “All the articles in this cluster are about getting to know individual children and then planning a curriculum and teaching strategies that will support every child’s development and learning.”

In February, Kopp published Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage. This book surveys Oregon’s utopian history in relation to communal experiments. Since 1856, with the establishment of the Aurora Colony, there have been over 300 communities within Oregon, ranging from religious groups to Socialists to the ecologically friendly. Kopp explores the social, political, and cultural effects these utopian communities have had on Oregon’s history.

Kopp will do a reading from his book at Powell’s Books on May 27 and be interviewed by KPOJ on the same day.

Erickson and Merchant were quoted in an article by the Oregon Council for the Humanities about the hidden treasures found in library archives. Unfortunately, digital technology is quickly contributing to the extinction of paper archives, said Erickson. “We communicate in very short and spontaneous ways now, rather than being methodical and contemplative about what we are writing,” he said. Merchant added, “Word-processing programs that overwrite previous drafts will result in fewer early versions being preserved. There may be poets and novelists who end up keeping only their final version. This will be very impoverishing for literary scholars.”

One of the major concerns archivists face involves the longevity of digital technology. Erickson pointed out that archivists know how to preserve written documents, but the same is not true for archival CDs. Merchant also believes that works deemed to be “inferior” may not be saved in the digital world, which could lead to the elimination of great authors’ novels. “We can’t anticipate the judgments of posterity, and masterpieces sometimes lie hidden,” Erickson said. “Emily Dickinson is the perfect example. She was not very well known when she died, and it is a miracle that we have her work. It is in little bound volumes that she left behind. It’s wonderful, just wonderful. But someone might easily have thrown those away.”

Read the article.

Bernstein published “Shinto Beliefs and Traditions” in The Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009).  This two-volume encyclopedia is a compilation of over 300  concepts that explain death-related terms that have become part of everyday social discourse. Bernstein’s contribution is a study of religion and life cycle in Japan, namely the division between Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. On the encyclopedia, Bernstein said, “My entry is one of several hundred in an encyclopedia meant to be a one-stop resource for those interested in, as the title indicates, ‘death and the human experience.’”

Regulation & Governance, a journal devoted to the study of regulation and governance by political scientists, lawyers, historians, anthropologists, and economists, named Wheat from Chaff the best article published in the 2007-2008 volumes of the journal.

In their article, Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum test the widely held expectation that regulators can more effectively target serious violations when they have a broader array of sanctioning options in their enforcement arsenal.  To test this theoretical expectation, Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum analyze enforcement actions at the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) during the period when the FEC received an expansion in its sanctioning options.  What they find runs counter to expectations: the FEC was not better able to focus on the most serious violations after receiving a broader array of sanctions.  Lochner, Apollonio, and Tatum suggest that simply expanding sanctioning options, without also expanding monitoring resources, is not sufficient to enable regulators to prioritize their enforcement efforts toward the most serious problems.

Todd Lochner teaches undergraduate courses in constitutional law, civil liberties, and political science. He also teaches a joint undergraduate-law school course on election law at Lewis & Clark Law School, where he is a research fellow.  Rhett Tatum is currently a student at the Georgetown University Law Center where he is studying election law.

Read their winning paper.

Charles (Kip) Ault

Ault co-wrote an article in American  Paleontologist with his son, Toby Ault, in March. Toby received a Watson Fellowship in 2002-03 to retrace Darwin’s adventure, with emphasis on South American localities. The article, titled “On the Trail of Darwin’s Megabeasts,”  recounts efforts the Aults took to find their way to locations where Darwin  collected fossils as well as to mimic his process:  ask locals where to look. On the 2003 trek, Ault said, “We found ourselves guided by a motorcyclist, museum scientists, as well as Darwin’s journal, as we crossed Patagonia, with particular emphasis on the Rio Negro’s Playa Bonita and the Monte Hermoso beach near Punta Alta.”

Ault also published an article in Curriculum Inquiry in December. “Achieving ‘Querencia’: Integrating a Sense of Place with Disciplined Thinking” explores the Spanish word “querencia,” and the concept of how the self attaches feelings and beliefs to an environment.

Gross published “Scholar Saints and Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante” in the Italian issue of Modern Language Notes (MLN) in January. Published by Johns Hopkins Press, each volume of MLN has one issue per year on French, Italian, German, and Spanish literature and covers all time periods. MLN focuses on critical literary studies in these four languages as well as recent work in comparative literature. Gross’ article discusses Boccaccio’s biography of Dante, which has long frustrated readers, and how it can be understood in part as a rewriting of the life of St. Thomas Aquinas.

de Paula co-published two textbooks in 2009: Quanta, Matter and Change — A Molecular Approach to Physical Chemistry with Professors Peter Atkins of Oxford University and Ronald Friedman of Indiana University Purdue University and Elements of Physical Chemistry, 5th Edition with Professor Atkins. Translations of  de Paula’s textbooks with Atkins have been published in Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

de Paula co-wrote the fourth and fifth editions of Elements of Physical Chemistry. The text is a brief introduction to physical chemistry, the branch of chemistry that helps scientists understand the underlying principles that govern the structure and reactivity of atoms and molecules.

Quanta, Matter, and Change is a first edition textbook that shows the whole of physical chemistry through the lens of quantum theory, the most sophisticated theory currently available for the understanding of matter at the atomic and molecular levels.  de Paula spent a great deal of effort in presenting the material in a way that is accessible to students who may come to it with different levels of preparation in mathematics.

In total,  de Paula has co-written four textbooks, all in print and undergoing continual revision. Among these texts, Physical Chemistry is the world’s leading textbook in the discipline of physical chemistry.

Lewis & Clark students have collected data for the Franklin lab every August since 2006 as part of the Environmental Service Project. Alum and 2006 Break Away trip leader Brian Erickson ‘06 said, “We returned to plots that were established 30-plus years previously and remeasured every five to 10 years to provide an ongoing image of forest dynamics over time. The students collected high-quality data, worked extremely hard, learned a lot, and had a good time in the process.”

New York Times (New York, NY) Environment Blamed in Western Tree Deaths

Seattle Times (Seattle, Wash.) Regional warming hurting NW forests, study says

BBC News (London, UK) Climate shift ‘killing US trees’

Brown recently appeared on a panel introducing “The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life,” a collection of essays about the political and social climate in the black community.  This book tells the stories of black males from the hip-hop generation and tackles issues on surviving and living in today’s world.  Brown’s chapter is titled “Moving Toward Mental Wellness,” and he will be hosting a seminar in February based on the work.

Brown’s “Moving Toward Mental Wellness” opens with a personal story about his father’s recovery from his fourth heart attack in ten years. Brown writes, “My father’s fight was not against flesh and blood but against the dark forces of the world. New combatants emerged daily, whether racism, sexism, corruption, police brutality[…]and he battled them all with great vigilance.”

Lochner and Scalettar coauthored a study on the postsynaptic colocalization of neuromodulatory proteins with five undergraduate students (Conor Jacobs ‘09, Mariya Chavarha ‘08, Kevin McAllister ‘08, Erika Spangler ‘07, Linnaea Schuttner ‘06) that was featured on the cover of the September issue of Developmental Neurobiology. Titled “Efficient Copackaging and Cotransport Yields Postsynaptic Colocalization of Neuromodulators Associated with Synaptic Plasticity,” their collaborative work shows how the proteins studied are known to enhance synaptic communication in the hippocampus. This research was supported by grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and by the Rogers Summer Research Program.

Developmental Neurobiology publishes research primarily on development and plasticity in the nervous system, with an emphasis on experimental work.

Read more about Lochner and Scalettar’s collaborative research in The Chronicle.

“Educating Democratic Citizens in Troubled Times: Qualitative Studies of Current Efforts” (SUNY Press, 2008), a new book by Bixby, will be published in November.  This book offers a groundbreaking examination of citizenship education programs that serve contemporary youth in schools and communities across the United States. These programs include social studies classes and curricula, school governance, and community-based education perspectives of educators and youth involved in these civic education efforts. The contributors offer rich analyses of how mainstream and alternative programs are envisioned and enacted, and the most important factors that shape them. A variety of theoretical lenses and qualitative methodologies are used, including ethnography, focus group interviews, and content analyses of textbooks.

In June, McWilliams published an article in the Code4Lib Journal titled “Developing an Academic Image Collection with Flickr.” The article discusses technical aspects of the up-and-coming online collection of contemporary ceramics images, accessCeramics, founded by Assistant Director for Systems and Technical Services at the Watzek Library Mark Dahl and Assistant Professor of Art and Program Head of Ceramics Ted Vogel. Dahl and Vogel recently received a grant of $19,000 from the non-profit organization NITLE to help jumpstart this online collection, which will not only be used in classroom settings, but will be open to the general public as well.