Dede received a research award from the Traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES).  In addition, Dede received an institutional award from the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) program. This latter program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and provides fellowships for faculty members to conduct research overseas in the fields of modern language and area studies for  three to 12 months.  The terms of the awards stipulate that Dede cannot accept both fellowships, so he is in the enviable position of having to decide between the two.

Dede’s research project is titled “Contact and Change in the Chinese Dialects of Qinghai.” Four months in China will allow Dede to gather naturalistic speech samples from native speakers of Qinghai Chinese dialects, train local researchers in language-gathering and documentation techniques, and work with local scholars on the social history of northeastern Qinghai to further elucidate the historical language-contact scenario and subsequent evolution that created the mixed language phenomenon there today. Generally, this will allow for the testing of theories of language evolution.

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.”

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.

Proctor and a research team have been talking with Oregonians and surveying the general population about their experiences with nature and pursuit of perfecting the co-existence between humans and the environment.

“‘You find that people working for a utopian future have tremendous fear about things turning out differently,’” Proctor explains in the column. ‘Utopias are often framed against a dystopian nightmare,’ he adds, producing a kind of all-or-nothing fixation on perfection and its perfect opposite.”

Proctor’s project was also the focus of a recent article in The Oregonian, detailing the survey and citing some of its initial results.

USA Today  ‘The End’ as a weapon

The Oregonian Shaping dreams—and nightmares—about natural world

In her senior thesis,  The Little Clinic that Could: Neoliberalism, Structural Violence, and Community Resistance in Portland, Oregon, Jorgensen details the socio-economic effects of a local health clinic struggling to serve the uninsured. She writes:

“Unable to obtain sustainable funding, the clinic is in danger of being absorbed into the very system its directors had previously resisted. It must adopt bureaucratic policies to qualify for federal funding, which concomitantly entails accepting notions about patient prioritization that prevent the most vulnerable community members from accessing health care. Following the transition of this community clinic into a public entity reveals how the guidelines under which federal clinics function are in opposition to the purpose for which they are created and funded. If these federally funded clinics are unable to provide quality care for the uninsured, then what are they structured to do? How do these federal clinics represent political agendas and long‐standing historical processes which continue to reproduce inequality and enforce normalized standards upon vulnerable patient populations?”

With coverage this month in Scientific American and New Scientist, as well as several international newspapers, Autumn’s research has extended its global reach. On Saturday, October 25, Autumn will be featured on an episode of Weird Connections on The Science Channel.

Autumn’s research has already crisscrossed the globe, appearing on five continents in hundreds of newspapers, journals, books, television programs, and Internet articles. Recently, Autumn’s research has been used as a stepping stone in the invention of a strong and sticky adhesive similar to a gecko’s feet, discovered by researchers at U.C. Berkeley. Explore this interactive map of some major media placements from recent years to discover the international impact of Autumn’s work.

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.

The amplification system required both Kirschner and her students to speak into a microphone, which created a more constructive, cooperative learning atmosphere. Though Kirschner’s original reason for utilizing this system was to aide her early neurosensory hearing loss, she was pleasantly surprised when not only her hearing improved, but her students’ learning experience was also amplified. “A happy byproduct of success in that area is the discovery that people with and without hearing loss benefit from such amplification in discussion settings. An even happier one is that the ability to listen, focus and hear others better, and to become mindful of habits and practices that make good discussion possible, seemed to feel intrinsically rewarding to students,” writes Kirschner.

Kirschner points out that, although many schools throughout Oregon have installed these sound-field systems, no other study—aside from her own—has assessed the effects of student voice amplification.

Inside Higher Ed (Washington, D.C.) Amplified Learning

Autumn will present How Geckos Stick and Why We Care  as part of  Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Science Pub, a monthly event designed for a general adult audience to learn  about advances in science and technology from leading researchers and scientists in an approachable, relaxed setting that includes food and drinks.  Autumn’s research on geckos and their adhesion capabilities has grown into a new field of study at the interface between biology, physics, and materials science. He has authored over 40 scientific papers and his research is featured in textbooks, encyclopedias, and popular books including The Nanotech Pioneers: Where Are They Taking Us? Every major television network has covered his work, as have hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles worldwide.

The event takes place on Tuesday, Sept. 30, at Portland’s Mission Theater & Pub, 1624 NW Glisan, at 7 p.m. (doors open at 5 p.m.). No reservations or tickets are needed; doors open at 5 p.m.

An article by Duncan and seniors David Calkins and Mariya Chavarha has been published by the American Chemical Society. The article, titled “Secondary Orbital Effect in the Electrocyclic Ring Closure of 7-Azahepta-1,2,4,6-tetraene - a CASSCF Molecular Orbital Study,” can be read online, at the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The New York Times (New York, N.Y.) The odds for a retirement nest egg, recalculated

In March, Aguilera presented “Restoring and Preserving Indigenous Languages: Three Indigenous Communities’ Successes with Language Immersion Models” at the American Education Research Association conference in New York. Aguilera’s presentation analyzed the language immersion models that are meant to revitalize and preserve the native languages of indigenous communities in grades K-12.

Jarman has been appointed board member of the Association of Prospect Researchers for Advancement – Northwest Chapter (APRA-NW).