Jessica Watkins

With the Novel Engineering approach, “students become excited about what they are reading, writing, designing, and building! This excitement in turn helps them make strides in engineering and literacy, as well as in their abilities to work together, think creatively and analytically, and communicate their ideas.” —from Chapter 1 of Novel EngineeringThis book will both introduce your students to an exciting integrated curriculum and support you as you use it in your own elementary or middle school classroom. Novel Engineering shows how your students can work through engineering design challenges inspired by a broad range of literature—novels and short stories, biographies and histories, or even picture books. By way of introduction, the book offers clear conceptual background and practical advice on how the approach works: Your students pull information from literature to identify a problem. Then, using details from the story or text, they go through an engineering design process to develop functional solutions for their “clients”—the book’s characters. To support your efforts and bring the concept to life, the book gives you five in-depth case studies featuring the use of novels, a biography, and a nonfiction historical text. In addition to demonstrating what a Novel Engineering project looks like in an actual classroom, the case studies give you practice in thinking about what your students’ work might look like and how you would respond. One case describes a class in which students help the shipwrecked Swiss Family Robinson build a shelter to keep them cool under the hot sun. Another tells of students who design a hearing aid for the main character in El Deafo—and then style it as a fashion accessory. You’ll see that the books used in the case studies are just suggestions. You don’t have to adopt texts outside your existing English language arts or social studies curriculum. You also don’t have to buy a specific building-materials kit. You just have to embrace the idea that literacy and engineering can support each other in your classroom—and then watch the excitement build.

Get the complete set. The coloring book completes the fantastic book My Grandad's a Bear. The complete set includes My Grandad's a Bear book, a Coloring book, and journals. Ava is a young girl living a routine life with her parents. Her Saturday is interrupted by a visit from her granddad. His appearance and actions convince Ava that her hairy granddad is a bear. Ava sets out to trap the bear and bring her grandad back until an emotional revelation brings them back to a familiar place.

Ava is a young girl living a routine life with her parents. Her Saturday is interrupted by a visit from her granddad. His appearance and actions convince Ava that her hairy granddad is a bear. Ava sets out to trap the bear and bring her grandad back until an emotional revelation brings them back to a familiar place.

Ava is a young girl living a routine life with her parents. Her Saturday is interrupted by a visit from her granddad. His appearance and actions convince Ava that her hairy granddad is a bear. Ava sets out to trap the bear and bring her grandad back until an emotional revelation brings them back to a familiar place.

Middle Eastern police forces have a reputation for carrying out repression and surveillance on behalf of authoritarian regimes, despite frequently under enforcing the law. But what is their role in co-creating and sustaining social order? In this book, Jessica Watkins focuses on the development of the Jordanian police institution to demonstrate that rather than being primarily concerned with law enforcement, the police are first and foremost concerned with order. In Jordan, social order combines the influence of longstanding tribal practices with regime efforts to promote neoliberal economic policies alongside a sense of civic duty amongst citizens. Rather than focusing on the 'high policing' of offences deemed to threaten state security, Watkins explores the 'low policing' of interpersonal disputes including assault, theft, murder, traffic accidents, and domestic abuse to shed light on the varied strategies of power deployed by the police alongside other societal actors to procure hegemonic 'consent'.

Building on a framework for integrating civil and military counterinsurgency (COIN) first presented in prior RAND research, this volume presents an approach to the civil component of counterinsurgency that builds on detailed background, context analysis, and threat analysis to identify and develop critical civil COIN activities and illustrates them with three case studies from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Regardless of its outcome, the Iraq War has had a transformative effect on the Middle East. To equip U. S. policymakers to better manage the war's long-term consequences, the authors analyzed its effects on the regional balance of power, local perceptions of U. S. credibility, the domestic stability of neighboring states, and trends in terrorism after conducting extensive interviews in the region and drawing from an array of local media sources.

U. S. withdrawal could affect Iraq's internal security and stability, which could, in turn, affect U. S. strategic interests and the safety of U. S. troops and civilians in Iraq. U. S. policy-makers need a dynamic analytic framework with which to examine the shifting motivations and capabilities of the actors that affect Iraq's security. Within this framework, the United States should be able to contribute to continued strengthening of the internal security and stability of Iraq even as it withdraws its forces.