Search results

This paper reports on the results of a research project aimed at estimating the costs of border crossing transit time and uncertainty for the U.S. and Canadian economies. The cost estimates are based on a review of prior reports, some 20 site visits to seven key crossings, and 173 interviews of knowledgeable organizations/persons. The key finding is that border transit time and uncertainty are costing some U.S.$4.01 billion, or 1.05% of total 2001 merchandise trade, and 1.58% of truck-based trade levels. The primary implication of the research is that it provides a baseline estimate of costs that can be used in cost-benefit analysis of alternative border management strategies.

This chapter presents an institutional analysis of two organizations established by union members to give labor a voice in regional economic development in western New York (WNY), one that emerged in the 1970s another created in the 1990s. Employing the institutionalist comparative case method, the analysis highlights the organizations' similarities and differences. Then, drawing attention to key “limiting” factors, a theory is outlined, offering three scenarios for future labor involvement in WNY economic development. Central to those scenarios is the finding that labor needs not only a voice but also a suitable message.

Our contribution to ISATT's 40th Anniversary Yearbook focusing on Studying Teaching and Teacher Education grows out of our experiences across time in diverse Lands/Place, situations, and relationships. The knowledge we center have grown through relationships and experiences of great violence and harm alongside experiences and relationships where we have experienced abiding commitments to wholeness and healing. Our individual and collective attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions in the stories we live, tell, retell, and relive about striving to live in good ways, in ethically relational ways, has connected us over time. Living alongside and thinking with one another has shaped our movements beyond the colonial and human-centric understandings of stories of/as experience and thinking with stories that often dominate in (research for) teacher education and development. Attending the spiritual dimensions of stories of experience expands the educative potential of thinking with stories. As humans who are composing lives as educators on Indigenous lands where the colonial project continues to be genocidal for Indigenous peoples and Lands/Place, attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions of experience feels imperative if the next generations of children and youth in schools, and adults in teacher education and development, are to experience these places as educative and non-violent, and as opening potential to interrupt the pervasive colonial narratives that continue to dominate.

This personal essay explores the palpable connections between music, memory, dreams and language through the lenses of international auto travel, a commingling of the author’s adult and adolescent recollections and a rock’n’roll band called the Tragically Hip. The vitality of Canadian music, radio, growing up on the US-Canada border, new parenthood and familial bonds are through-line themes. Death takes centre stage, of course, via rumination on the Tragically Hip’s final performance of its final song in 2016 – during which most, if not all, listeners and viewers knew that the group’s singer, Gord Downie, would shortly thereafter succumb to a terminal illness.

Hazardous and radioactive wastes are routinely disposed of in shallow land disposal facilities at sites that have undergone environmental remediation. These residual contaminants, which remain on-site in these isolation facilities, continue to pose risks to humans and the environment and represent extremely long-term liabilities that require continuous management.

This paper draws upon the experiences generated from two federal programs established in response to the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA) of 1978 and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. Operational issues arising at existing sites suggest that there is a need to better integrate the management functions at contaminant isolation facilities. To protect human health and safeguard the natural environment, more sustainable environmental protection systems are required for the long-term management of residual contaminants. A series of logic diagrams are introduced to improve the integration and management of remedial processes, engineered barriers and institutional controls. These institutional responsibilities need to be monitored and maintained by the appropriate site stewards to ensure continued system performance.

The ability travelers have to learn about the destination, explore and visualize activities and events, and book accommodations through the destinations' websites likely affects tourism visit behavior. Information availability, utility, and value of information on websites are the essential factors in the process of planning a vacation. This study compares the websites of America's three largest tourist destination states: California (visitcalifornia.com), Florida (visitflorida.com), and New York (iloveny.com). The study compares the three destination websites' quality, quantity, and utility through an evaluation rubric comprised of 22 attributes. One hypothesis that the study examines is that destination websites are assessable in order of good, better, best. The findings indicate that California provides the most useful and valuable information and is easiest to use. The assessment of visitcalifornia.com as the best website is the result of applying attribute rubrics covering hotel booking, events calendars, maps, and ability to create a trip.

Purpose – This chapter discusses youth participation in a Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW). Participants were predominantly Black youth residing in an urban community with a rich history and important community resources such as libraries and churches. The SJLW used a variety of print texts, videos, artwork, documents, and other texts to explore the topic of police brutality and other justice-related topics.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This chapter uses the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model as a lens to revisit the SJLW as designed and implemented by the first author Tiffany Nyachae. Nyachae designed and implemented the SJLW as space to inspire students to engage in critical thinking and analysis of authentic texts, and to use these textual interactions as an impetus for activism in their community. With the help of her co-authors, Nyachae reflects on the SJLW through a GRR lens to describe how students were scaffolded and supported as they moved toward activism.

Findings – Students brought their own understandings of police brutality and awareness of activism to the SJLW. These prior understandings were shaped both by their own lived experiences but also by their awareness of and interaction with social media. During the SJLW, youth read and discussed the novels All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (2015) and Hush by Jacqueline Woodson (2002). The youth engaged in activities and discussions about how prevalent issues in each novel connected to larger social and political concerns. Students discussed the current events, engaged in reflective writing, read short pieces, and analyzed documents and videos. The SJLW was successful in such a way that all students felt comfortable voicing their opinions, even when opinions differed from their peers. Students demonstrated critical thinking about issues related to justice. All students completed an action plan to address injustice in their community. While applying the GRR to this context and reflecting, first author Nyachae began to consider the other scaffolds for youth that could have been included, particularly one youth, JaQuan, who was skeptical about what his community had done to support him. Nyachae revisits the SJLW to consider how the GRR helped to reveal the need for additional scaffolding that JaQuan or other youth may have needed from leaders in the SJLW. A literature review also revealed that very few literacy practices have brought together the GRR and social justice teaching or learning.

Research Limitations/Implications – This chapter demonstrates that the GRR framework can be effectively applied to a justice-centered teaching and learning context as a reflective tool. Since very little research exists on using the GRR framework with justice-centered teaching, there is a need for additional research in this area as the GRR model offers many affordances for researchers and teachers. There is also a need for literacy researchers to consider elements of justice even when applying the GRR framework to any classroom or out-of-school context with children and youth.

Practical Implications – The GRR can be a useful tool for reflecting the practices of literacy and justice-centered teaching. Just as the GRR can be a useful framework to help teachers think about teaching reading comprehension, it can be an effective tool to help teachers think about supporting students to grow from awareness to activism in justice-centered teaching and learning.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter is one of only a handful of published works that brings together a social justice perspective with the GRR.

During early childhood, Indians and non-Indians learn a definition of “Indianness” (Merskin, 1998, p. 159). Around 18 months of age, human beings begin to recognize themselves as distinct and separate from their mothers and others (Lacan, 1977). By age 6, most attributes of personality formation are already established (Biber, 1984). The content of the information that consciously and unconsciously reaches children is critical for the formation of a healthy, grounded sense of self and respect for others. Today, in the absence of personal interaction with an indigenous person, non-Indian perceptions inevitably come from other sources. These mental images, the “pictures in our heads” as Lippmann (1922/1961, p. 33) calls them, come from parents, teachers, textbooks, movies, television programs, cartoons, songs, commercials, art, and product logos. American Indian images, music, and names have, since the beginning of the 20th century, been incorporated into many American advertising campaigns and marketing efforts, demarcating and consuming Indian as exotic “Other” in the popular imagination (Merskin, 1998). Whereas a century ago sheet music covers and patent medicine bottles featured “coppery, feather-topped visage of the Indian” (Larson, 1937, p. 338), today's Land O’ Lake's butter boxes display a doe-eyed, buckskin-clad Indian “princess.” The fact that there never were Indian “princesses” (a European concept), and most Indians do not have the kind of European features and social “availability” that trade characters do, goes largely unquestioned. These stereotypes are pervasive, but not necessarily consistent, varying over time and place from the “artificially idealistic” (noble savage) to images of “mystical environmentalists or uneducated, alcoholic bingo-players confined to reservations” (Mihesuah, 1996, p. 9). Today, a trip down the grocery store aisle still reveals ice cream bars, beef jerky, corn meal, baking powder, malt liquor, butter, honey, sugar, sour cream, chewing tobacco packages, and a plethora of other products emblazoned with images of American Indians. To discern how labels on products and brand names reinforce long-held stereotypical beliefs, we must consider embedded ideological beliefs that perpetuate and reinforce this process.