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This paper draws on Bakhtin's (1981) notions of discourse and ideological becoming to investigate how adolescents' experiences with young adult literature and other texts might inform their thinking around issues of social justice. We engaged in a number of activities with the young adolescent participants: thought maps, illustrations of poignant scenes, written accounts of personal experiences, and focus group interviews. Using these activities as our data for this paper, we explain how the young adolescent participants called upon discourses of social justice to engage in the process of ideological becoming. Thus, the paper concludes that texts have the potential to affect students' ways of thinking and being in profound ways.

There is currently a dearth of research inquiring into the ways that pre-service teachers (PSTs) are prepared to teach writing, including reading and responding to student writing. Furthermore, although the benefits of a practice-based approach to teacher education are widely cited, increasing financial and legislative pressures to shorten the length of university-based teacher education programs and to migrate to online spaces present challenges for including opportunities for PSTs to practice. In this study, we inquired into the experiences of one group of PSTs as they completed a digital Pen Pal Project, wherein they were partnered with sixth grade students to learn about and practice responding to student writing. Data analysis indicated that PSTs engaged in many different types of feedback yet struggled to provide specific feedback aligned with students' competencies as readers and writers. We draw on these findings to offer recommendations to teacher educators as they leverage digital spaces to realize the benefits of practice-based learning in preparing PSTs to teach writing.

Highlights • Inverted iridium crucibles with residual charge were cleaned through melting. • Melt-out was carefully controlled by monitoring thermal arrest. • The beginning and end of melting was clearly observed. Abstract A limiting challenge of single crystal growth utilizing the Czochralski method is reusing crucibles after a growth because of the residual charge left in the crucible. It is shown that clean-out of residual charge from crucibles can be completed efficiently by monitoring thermal arrest during heating at a constant linear increase of power. This technique was demonstrated for removal of a range of oxide charges from iridium crucibles of varying sizes and for removal of copper charge from a graphite crucible. This simple and repeatable technique removes the need to use brute mechanical force, highly corrosive chemicals, or highly accurate temperature measurement to recover and reuse crucibles from crystal growths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scintillators are materials that luminesce upon absorption of ionizing radiation. Because of this unique capability, scintillators are employed in fields utilizing radiation detection, such as medical imaging and cargo scanning. Inorganic single crystal scintillators are commonly used because of their excellent optical properties; however, fabricating single crystals is time, labor, and resource- intensive. Polycrystalline scintillators offer improved uniformity in composition and lower fabrication time and cost. Dopants often control the scintillator performance, so quantifying and optimizing the dopant concentration in the scintillator is critical to efficient development. To produce powder for garnet polycrystalline scintillators of the composition Y2LuAl5O12:Ce, a reverse-strike co-precipitation method was used. This method involves addition of a stoichiometric metal-nitrate salt solution into ammonium bicarbonate to precipitate a precursor, which is then calcined to produce the final scintillator material. A set of samples with varying cerium dopant concentrations were produced. Additionally, samples were taken at each step of the co- precipitation process and analyzed via ICP-MS, quantifying composition and revealing parameters that can be refined. Powder x-ray diffraction confirmed the phase purity of the final powder, validating the co-precipitation method. Identifying and improving alternative synthesis routes and formats for scintillators alleviates restrictions and difficulties in production, opening the door to new applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]