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In this article, I detail how I revised a social foundations of education course to center major Supreme Court cases relating to K-12 public schools. Scholars in social foundations of education have articulated a vision for the field that fosters and promotes democracy and democratic dispositions. Focusing on the Supreme Court in a social foundations of education course is the result of two factors. First is the Supreme Court's storied role in shaping K-12 public education. Second is the Supreme Court's increasingly steep lurch toward antidemocratic jurisprudence, which many legal scholars and journalists covering the judicial branch are raising alarm over. Specifically, I paired 10 consequential Supreme Court cases relating to K-12 education identified by education lawyer Robert Kim with young adult literature. I demonstrate how and why I used young adult literature to illuminate how the law impacts the "lives of ordinary people," especially people within schools.

Drawing on theories of "radical pragmatism," this article situates the experiences and reflections of four teacher leaders at a K-12 public school to develop aspects of teacher leadership acts that are rooted in a social justice disposition. This article marries frequently established ideas and acts of teacher leadership with social justice education. By doing so, we argue that teacher leadership is neither neutral nor apolitical; teacher leadership, like teaching itself, either works to challenge inequities in schools or replicate them. Collectively, these portraits demonstrate how the theoretical aspects of social justice education are realized in the daily realities of teacher leaders.

As managers of agricultural and natural resources are confronted with uncertainties in global change impacts, the complexities associated with the interconnected cycling of nitrogen, carbon, and water present daunting management challenges. Existing models provide detailed information on specific sub-systems (e.g., land, air, water, and economics). An increasing awareness of the unintended consequences of management decisions resulting from interconnectedness of these sub-systems, however, necessitates coupled regional earth system models (EaSMs). Decision makers’ needs and priorities can be integrated into the model design and development processes to enhance decision-making relevance and “usability” of EaSMs. BioEarth is a research initiative currently under development with a focus on the U.S. Pacific Northwest region that explores the coupling of multiple stand-alone EaSMs to generate usable information for resource decision-making. Direct engagement between model developers and non-academic stakeholders involved in resource and environmental management decisions throughout the model development process is a critical component of this effort. BioEarth utilizes a bottom-up approach for its land surface model that preserves fine spatial-scale sensitivities and lateral hydrologic connectivity, which makes it unique among many regional EaSMs. This paper describes the BioEarth initiative and highlights opportunities and challenges associated with coupling multiple stand-alone models to generate usable information for agricultural and natural resource decision-making.

Cody Miller was asked to present on a panel with a fellow doctoral student and a current principal at a local elementary school for a social justice and diversity in school leadership course. Miller's experience on the panel became an informal type of capstone experience as he found himself having to argue and defend social justice teaching practices in front of a room full of current or aspiring principals. This article applies a critical lens to his experience as a guest speaker in order to unearth assumptions made about teachers from current and future administrators. He uses this perspective to problematize administrator attitudes about teacher quality and evaluations. Three major themes emerge from his writings and provide the structure for this article: the influence of master myths over school leaders, the perpetuation of gender norms within school leadership, and the unexamined institutional power school leaders hold over teachers.

The article focuses on Moses Cone Park in North Carolina, once a working estate with apple orchards, where the legacy of lead arsenate spraying for pest control in the early twentieth century still affects the soils. Topics include the significance of soils as historical archives, the need for an interdisciplinary approach combining agricultural history and soil science.

Empirical earthquake scaling relationships describe expected relationships between moment magnitude and various spatial descriptors of the earthquake rupture (along-strike length, down-dip width, rupture area, and peak and mean slip). These scaling relationships play important roles in many seismological, geological, and hazards-assessment applications. Historically, scaling relationships were defined from various seismological criteria, such as teleseismic finite-fault models or aftershock distributions. The proliferation of earthquake slip distributions from geodetic observations presents an opportunity to reassess earthquake scaling relationships using observations that more directly sample the spatial characteristics of an earthquake than seismological observations. Here, we present a database of 111 earthquake slip distributions from 73 different earthquakes that were derived from geodetic observations. The earthquakes range in magnitude from Mw 5.3 to 9.1. We extract common spatial descriptors from these slip distributions in four different ways to account for biases introduced by inversion regularization, and we regress these spatial descriptors with moment magnitude to derive new empirical scaling relationships. We additionally assess the shape characteristics of the slip distributions and report the average earthquake shape. We find that our scaling relationships differ in important ways from previous studies, and we show that these differences originate from our use of a geodetic slip-distribution database rather than from methods for extracting spatial descriptors. Notably, we find that geodetic slip distributions systematically predict smaller fault areas than seismically derived scaling relationships. Because geodetic source inversions are likely contaminated to some degree by aseismic afterslip, this relationship suggests that seismologically determined scaling relationships systematically overpredict earthquake dimensions. We find that fault length, fault width, peak slip, and mean slip differ from previous studies in ways that are more complex and magnitude dependent. Given the high-model resolution afforded by geodetic observations, our earthquake scaling relationships derived from geodetic slip distributions provide improved constraints on empirical scaling relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on Louisiana Supreme Court case Boudreaux v. Cummings, focusing on problems that arise from the Court's failure in distinguishing between a servitude and the underlying land and incompetency of Court's application of civilian interpretation of the Civil Code.