Murray State University

As the United States ages, loneliness and associated health challenges increasingly surface. Loneliness has profound effects on health and well-being. Appreciative inquiry's strengths-based emphasis on positive lived experience was applied to protocol design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. We then paired appreciative inquiry with grounded theory's systematic, inductive approach to analysis, enabling us to develop actionable recommendations for educational programs supporting longevity. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with older adults aged 80 and above. Themes were compared to the Blue Zones Power (R) Framework for context. The four I's of appreciative inquiry: inquire, imagine, innovate, and implement were used as an interpretive lens for discussing key findings. Four themes emerged: purpose, relationships with family and friends, stress management, and keys to longevity. Participants highlighted how daily chores, caretaking, and spirituality contributed to life's purpose. Spirituality also provided a sense of meaning and connection. Relationships were crucial, with strong social ties enhancing well-being and sense of purpose. When tied to spirituality, stress management strategies, including rest and recreation, were linked to perceptions of longevity. Maintaining a positive attitude and having a reliable support network were essential. Educational programs should adopt a holistic approach that integrates life purpose, spirituality, relationships, and stress reduction as a unified set of activities connected through the shared thread of social connection. Policymakers are encouraged to fund community-based initiatives that enhance social connection through reauthorization of the Older Americans Act. Senior centers and faith-based organizations should be empowered to implement such programs with rationale supported by empirical findings.

More than three-quarters of current teachers report experiencing burnout and intentions to exit the profession sooner than expected. Art teachers encounter unique complexities when designing curriculum since they often work independently without the district-provided resources available to colleagues. This qualplanning and offers insight for teacher educators as they incorporate AI tools into in this study, using ChatGPT during their lesson planning process. Grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the study examines both cognitive and affective dimensions involved in AI integration. The results indicate three major roles of AI: creative partner for ideation and content development, technical assistant for efficiency and organization, and problematic collaborator with inherent limitations and risks. While AI enhanced pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge and idea generation for most participants, concerns emerged regarding dependency risks, communication barriers and ethical considerations. This study suggests the need to balance efficiency gains with critical engagement, empha-sizing that AI should augment rather than replace teacher expertise. Teacher educators must proactively integrate AI literacy into methods courses, teaching preservice teachers to engage iteratively and critically with AI as a collaborative tool that can meaningfully reduce burnout while preserving the authenticity and professional judgment essential to quality teaching.

Purpose This study aims to redirect attention from traditional analyses of environmental performance towards examining firms that exhibit "zero" environmental performance - those that entirely neglect ecological practices. Specifically, it investigates the institutional drivers (i.e. coercive and mimetic pressure) behind the worldwide tendency of firms to adopt non-environmentalist behaviors. By highlighting the practices of these firms, the research seeks to alert regulators and practitioners to a critical yet under-examined issue, particularly in the context of escalating ecological challenges and the pressing need to address climate change.Design/methodology/approach Our approach is grounded in neo-institutional theory, emphasizing the role of institutional pressures in shaping organizational behavior towards environmentalism. We analyze an extensive international dataset comprising 59,172 firm-year observations collected from 2002 to 2019 by employing a fixed-effects logistic regression model. Our methodology involves examining the impact of coercive pressure, represented by the quality of public governance and mimetic pressure, indicated by affiliation with polluting industries, on firms' environmental practices or the lack thereof.Findings The analysis reveals that public governance quality (a form of coercive pressures) significantly deters firms from neglecting environmental practices, particularly in areas of eco-innovation, emissions and resource consumption reduction. Interestingly, while affiliation with polluting industries (a form of mimetic pressure) generally discourages non-environmental behavior, it paradoxically encourages non-eco-innovative engagement. Over the study period, we observe a gradual decline in the tendency of firms to ignore environmentalism and its three key components, suggesting an increasing institutional influence on corporate environmental practices. However, further analyses also indicate that public regulations are not as impactful in recent periods as they used to be in deterring firms from neglecting environmental practices.Practical implications Given the global nature of climate change and ecological concerns, preventing environmental exploitation should be a collective goal for all nations via strengthening public governance quality. Additionally, while polluting industries tend to adopt eco-friendly practices due to institutional pressures, their resistance to eco-innovation raises questions about long-term ecological solutions.Originality/value This research contributes to the existing literature by focusing on a largely unexamined segment of firms - those with "zero" environmental performance. By employing a novel approach that scrutinizes the effects of institutional pressures on the neglect of environmental practices, our study offers fresh insights into how coercive and mimetic forces can either hinder or facilitate non-environmentalist behavior in the business sector.

Systemic racial violence, the militarization of the police, and injustice are serious issues that continue to plague schools and communities across the United States. Though politicians have tried to ban the use of critical race theory in schools, more educators are seeking critical pedagogical practices to interrupt and address systemic racism in schools. Critical Race English Education (CREE) combines critical race theory and critical literacy theory to address racism in schools, dismantle the white -washed cannon, and promote black and brown literacies in English classrooms. This article explores how English teachers put CREE into practice at the height of the 2020 election by using the novel "The Hate You Give" by Angie Thomas. Teachers navigated their own fears and a volatile political climate to elevate the voices of marginalized students and cultivate critical literacy and allyship in their classrooms. The researcher is a black teacher educator and former English teacher who interviewed and observed English teachers as they practiced CREE in different high schools. In exploring these stories, educators can learn more about allyship and engagement with marginalized communities through Critical Race English Education.

This paper studies eigenvector constraints for adjacency hypermatrices of uniform hypergraphs using matroid circuits. Building on Pearson’s circuit relations, we define the circuit constraint space L(H) as the span of all Pearson relation vectors associated to circuits of the transversal matroid of the Levi graph. This yields a basis-independent parameter count π(H):=|V(H)|−dim(L(H)), which bounds the degrees of freedom for transformed eigenvectors associated with nonzero eigenvalues. We compare L(H) with basis-dependent spaces LB(ΛB), obtained by choosing one Pearson relation from each fundamental circuit relative to a matroid basis. Under a triangular independence condition and constraint-efficiency, we prove π(H)=rank(M(H)). We verify this equality for loose paths, hyperstars, and sunflowers. We also develop a constraint ideal interpretation, study symmetry via automorphism actions, and use the resulting constraints to construct structured initializations for shifted higher-order power methods. The numerical examples illustrate how these structured initializations can influence observed iteration dynamics, without establishing a general convergence or acceleration theorem.