The rationale for this study was to evaluate the home literacy environments of educators and non-educators to investigate whether educators provide "richer" home environments than non-educator mothers. This research explores the mothers' perceptions of their children, views of reading, methods of promoting a positive reading environment, dealing with personal demands and emotions, and their expectations related to promoting reading. The participants in the study are 2 elementary school teachers with preschool children and 2 non-educator mothers with preschool children. Results indicated that being an educator is not an isolated characteristic of providing a rich home environment. The educational attainment of the mother was discovered to have greater influence on home literacy environment than the mother's profession. Higher educated mothers provided richer home environments than their less educated counterparts.

Cooperative needs play a critical role in the organisation of natural systems of communications. A number of recent studies in multi-agent reinforcement learning have established that artificial intelligence agents are similarly able to develop functional communication when required to complete a cooperative task. This thesis studies the emergence of communication in reinforcement learning agents, using a custom card game environment as a test-bed. Two contrasting approaches encompassing continuous and discrete modes of communication were appraised experimentally. Based on the average game completion rate, the agents provisioned with a continuous communication channel consistently exceed the no-communication baseline. A qualitative analysis of the agents’ behavioural strategies reveals a clearly defined communication protocol as well as the deployment of playing tactics unseen in the baseline agents. On the other hand, the agents equipped with the discrete channel fail to learn to utilise it effectively, ultimately showing no improvement from the baseline.

On Christmas Day in 1841, Fanny Hensel presented her husband with a Christmas gift—Das Jahr—a piano cycle comprised of twelve pieces, each one depicting a month of The Year. Not long thereafter, Fanny and husband Wilhelm would collaborate to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, reworking Das Jahr and expanding it by two additional expressions: vignettes drawn into the score by Wilhelm, and epigrams, snippets of poetry by master German poets. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: “What meaning is achieved by the intersection of the three modalities present in Das Jahr: textual (epigram), visual (vignette), and aural (music)?” The methodology considers the broader texts from which the epigrams are drawn in conjunction with Wilhelm’s vignettes and Hensel’s sonic landscape to arrive at an emergent meaning. An informed musical analysis drawing on formal considerations, contour, metaphor in music, topic theory, and harmonic function has been employed to arrive at the interpretation that will be presented. By analyzing these three modalities in conjunction with one another, a compelling narrative emerges, whereby the words of poets, the artwork of Wilhelm, and the aural world of Fanny conjoin to tell a story, one that relies upon the relationship between text, art, and music.

Thesis advisor: Lauri Johnson / This qualitative case study examined the perceptions of school and district leaders about fostering teacher leadership, specifically to support emergent bilingual and Latinx students in a public school district in the state of Massachusetts. The most recent model of transformational leadership developed from Leithwood’s research in schools (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2000) served as the conceptual framework. Data collection included 13 individual semi-structured interviews with district, building and teacher leaders as well as field notes and document reviews. Findings indicated that school and district leaders perceived they support formal and informal teacher leadership practices for emergent bilingual and Latinx students. Top-down approaches to collaboration and professional development impacted the development of teachers as leaders, creating barriers and challenges in each of three components of transformational leadership (setting direction, developing people, and redesigning the organization). Recommendations include establishing a collective vision for promoting and developing teacher leadership. Future research could be designed to better understand how teacher leadership is enacted to support issues around equity and social justice, and how we might encourage more teacher leadership among marginalized groups. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

abstract: Here I develop the connection between thermodynamics, entanglement, and gravity. I begin by showing that the classical null energy condition (NEC) can arise as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics applied to local holographic screens. This is accomplished by essentially reversing the steps of Hawking's area theorem, leading to the Ricci convergence condition as an input, from which an application of Einstein's equations yields the NEC. Using the same argument, I show logarithmic quantum corrections to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula do not alter the form of the Ricci convergence condition, but obscure its connection to the NEC. Then, by attributing thermodynamics to the stretched horizon of future lightcones -- a timelike hypersurface generated by a collection of radially accelerating observers with constant and uniform proper acceleration -- I derive Einstein's equations from the Clausius relation. Based on this derivation I uncover a local first law of gravity, connecting gravitational entropy to matter energy and work. I then provide an entanglement interpretation of stretched lightcone thermodynamics by extending the entanglement equilibrium proposal. Specifically I show that the condition of fixed volume can be understood as subtracting the irreversible contribution to the thermodynamic entropy. Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, I then provide a microscopic explanation of the 'thermodynamic volume' -- the conjugate variable to the pressure in extended black hole thermodynamics -- and reveal the super-entropicity of three-dimensional AdS black holes is due to the gravitational entropy overcounting the number of available dual CFT states. Finally, I conclude by providing a recent generlization of the extended first law of entanglement, and study its non-trivial 2+1- and 1+1-dimensional limits. This thesis is self-contained and pedagogical by including useful background content relevant to emergent gravity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Physics 2020

Over the last century, teaching techniques and philosophies have changed extensively in the art classroom. Teaching methods have spanned a range that stretches from highly rigid, to self-expressive, more learner centered approaches. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest and research regarding the role of creativity in visual art education. This research project focused on the qualities of effective art instruction using elements from a number of historical ideologies, with the intent to study creative development in students. The research used a case-study methodology informed by a reflective, action research methodology. Research was used to determine effective engagement, and discover teaching strategies using fun and playful exploration that motivate students to be as creative as possible, discover what they are interested in, and engage them in their own artistic research. The application of this research is to inform and improve my own teaching practice, and to explore the qualities of effective learner centered art instruction for middle school age students.

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Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur det går till när bibliotekarier inom projektet Bokstart skall göra urvalet av böcker till förskolors kapprumsbibliotek, samt vilka kriterier de utgår från i detta arbete. Studien syftar även till att undersöka hur vårdnadshavarna på bokstartsförskolorna upplever det befintliga barnboksutbudet i kapprumsbiblioteken. Den empiri som ligger till grund för studien samlades in genom intervjuer med bibliotekarier samt enkätformulär till vårdnadshavare på bokstartsförskolorna. Empirin har analyserats och diskuterats utifrån ett organisationsteoretiskt perspektiv (Flaa m.fl., 1998), samt de centrala teoretiska begrepp som studien utgår ifrån, dvs. samverkan, samarbete och samordning, samt literacy, emergent literacy, family literacy och mångfald.  Resultatet visar att samtliga bibliotekarier redogör för en och samma process när det kommer till urvalet av böcker till kapprumsbiblioteken, närmare bestämt att detta sker i ett samarbete med kapprumsansvarig personal på respektive förskola. Studiens resultat pekar dock på betydelsen av ett fungerande samarbete med personalen på förskolan, detta för att bibliotekarierna skall kunna få information om den barngrupp som de skall anpassa urvalet efter. Studien synliggjorde även vilka aspekter de enskilda bibliotekarierna tar i beaktande när de gör sina urval. Därtill visar resultatet att vårdnadshavarna vid bokstartsförskolorna i stora drag ställer sig positiva till det utbud av böcker som de erbjuds i kapprumsbiblioteken. Närmare hälften av vårdnadshavarna anser dessutom att kapprumsbiblioteket har ökat deras barns intresse för läsning och böcker. Överlag bekräftar studien tidigare forskning, bland annat vikten av att yrkesverksamma gör medvetna val av böcker så att det finns något som passar alla barn, samt betydelsen av att böckerna speglar den mångfald av individer som finns i samhället (Koss, 2015; Lynch, 2016; Price, Ostrosky & Mouzourou, 2016). Studien har i sin helhet gett en bild av hur betydelsefulla kapprumsbiblioteken kan vara om samarbetet fungerar så att budskapet om läsningens och böckernas betydelse sträcker sig ända från biblioteket till hemmet via förskolan.

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