Disability and Equity in Education Commons^™

Neighborhood Strategizing: Understanding Community Collaborations Within California Bay Area Public Schools, Windi Hazzard

Master's Projects and Capstones

For the better half of a century, education policy has been guided by economics and profit. One after another, every U.S. president since the 1960s has championed legislation that reflects neoliberal ideals of competition and profitable skills. Through the standardization of the public school system, education has become a marketplace rather than an environment for cultivating empowered learners and critical thinkers. The purpose of this field project is to show how communities are challenging the current education system in order to influence education policy in San Francisco, California. I interviewed four participants from two organizations that advocate parents’ rights as …

Getting First Job, Jolynne Lyon

Blog Posts

Blog post is about how someone’s experience with the Aggies Elevated program helped prepare them for their first job.

10 Things About People With Fibromyalgia, Storee Powell

Blog Posts

Blog post is sharing information about people with Fibromyalgia.

Attitudes Toward Accommodations And Academic Well-Being Of College Students With Disabilities, Alex Elizabeth Troccoli

Theses and Dissertations

College students with disabilities remain an understudied population, especially on topics relating to academic success. As more students with disabilities are struggling to complete their college education it calls for more research to be done to ensure students are taking advantage of any resources that can be beneficial for them. This study can contribute to empirical literature about how accommodations and other support service for college students with disabilities can impact academic well-being. The research questions advanced in the study are: 1) Is there a difference in the attitudes of students who are availing and not availing to accommodations? and …

Linda Alsop Recognized, Jolynne Lyon

Blog Posts

Blog post is about Linda Alsop’s contributions to the Deafblind community over the past 20 years.

The Rising Gap Between Rich And Poor: A Look At The Persistence Of Educational Disparities In The United States And Why We Should Worry, Roseanne L. Flores

Publications and Research

In 2001 the no child left behind act was signed into law with the promise to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their white and more affluent peers. Ribbons were cut, ceremonies were held, as America set off on a new path to ensure that all children would have the tools necessary to achieve the American Dream. Children who in the past only had access to low-quality schools would now be able to attend high-quality schools and acquire the skills necessary to become productive citizens and obtain jobs that would catapult them into the middle class. They would …

Girls Are Us: A Collection Of Oral Histories From The Jmu Community, Anne M. Sherman

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

On a campus where women make up a majority of the student population, it is especially important that female voices are heard and given a platform on which they can control their own narrative. I wanted to give those female-identifying voices that platform. I conducted a series of interviews to examine how college-aged female-identifying students feel about their identity and how they construct that identity within the climate of the JMU community. I was particularly interested in the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, and ability. I asked each person to share their stories of times when they …

An Exploratory Study To Understand Elementary School Students’ Conceptions Of Food Chains, Shelby Snowden

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Research has shown that elementary school is a critical time to pique children’s interest in science. However, many enrichment activities known to pique this interest in young children are not available to students of low socioeconomic status, English Language Learners, racial minorities, and students with disabilities. This has encouraged many higher education institutions to develop STEM outreach programs. Because of the cognitive gap between STEM professionals and young children and the logistics of implementing student-centered activities in heterogeneous classrooms, programs usually consist of activities that impress students with “sophisticated” science but are beyond the cognitive levels of most students and …

Congratulations To Graduates, Jolynne Lyon

Blog Posts

Blog post is congratulating CPD employees who are graduating.

1st Annual Diversifying Stem Think Tank, Adrienne Coleman

Diversifying STEM Think Tank

Goal: To understand from the perspectives of STEM professionals, Educators, and Diversity/Inclusion Officers strategies to diversify and strengthen the STEM education to career pipeline.

Diversity Speaker Series: Dr. Anna Kaatz, Anna Kaatz

Speaker Series

Dr. Anna Kaatz is the Director of Computational Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Her research focuses on broadening the diversity of the science and medical workforce, which is an evidence-based approach to promote research innovation and to address human health disparities. Dr. Kaatz's current projects seek to understand reasons why highly qualified women and racial/ethnic minorities tend to fare worse in peer review processes, such as for NIH grants and journal manuscripts, which limits their participation in research careers. This work applies research from social psychology and techniques from data and text mining, computational linguistics, and machine learning to mine …

Writing In Journals As A Tool For Expressing Ourselves: A 6-8 Week Long Writing Curriculum For A 3rd/4th Grade, Self-Contained, Special Education Classroom., Christine Carosotto

Graduate Student Independent Studies

The following writing curriculum is intended for students aged 8-12 years old in a 12:1, self-contained special education classroom setting. Through journal writing instruction, this curriculum aims to provide support to students struggling with foundational writing skills. These skills include: topic selection, stamina, organization, awareness of audience and sentence clarity. This unit’s theoretical foundation is grounded by the core components of a Writers Workshop model, the belief in developing social and oral language skills as a pre-writing tool and the importance of providing writing opportunities that incorporate choice in both topic and response format in order to increase motivation and …

"Brace Yourself": Motor Disabilities In Children's Literature, Jillian Bober

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This thesis presents the writing and sharing of an original work “Brace Yourself” with a group of second grade children including clinical and legal background as well as review of selected children’s literature with similar themes. The study incorporates samples of student responses to the story and discussion of curricular themes related to inclusion and school values.

The Effects Of Spoken Accent On Verbal Working Memory Performance, Faithe Snyder

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Undergraduate Honors Theses

Language diversity is continually increasing in the United States. In the 2007 American Community Survey taken by the U.S. Census Bureau, it was found that about 20 percent of the U.S. population spoke a language other than English at home. As language diversity increases in the country, the language diversity of individuals diagnosed with cognitive or communicative impairments also increases. As a result, understanding how language and spoken accent difference affects the accuracy of diagnostic testing becomes an important question. A large challenge facing speech-language pathologists regarding culturally and linguistically diverse clients is distinguishing communication differences from communication disorders. As …

Reconstruction Of The Destroyed Sinjali Secondary School, Isabella Kaganowski

Sustainability and Social Justice

This practitioner paper chronicles my involvement of the grant writing proposal that was designed on behalf of a non-for-profit organization, the Association of Dalit Women’s Advancement of Nepal (ADWAN), in order to secure funding and donations for the reconstruction of the destroyed Sinjali Secondary School in Gorkha district, Taklung village, after a 2015 earthquake struck Nepal. The proposal was guided by and collaborated with Professor Jude Fernando of Clark University, as Professor Fernando was able to visit Taklung village and gather information about the needs in the educational sector damaged by the earthquake. Literature review and research was gathered to …

Principles Of The Hidden Heritage Of Correctional Education And Prison Reform, Thom Gehring

Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

Abstract

In all fields of education, theory is in advance of practice (MacCormick, 1931, p. xii).

This essay provides a summary of the historical research themes of the Center for the Study of Correctional Education (CSCE) in the field of prison reform and its leading edge, correctional education. Those themes have been applied at CSCE’s system of parolee schools, the California State University, San Bernardino Reentry Initiative (CSRI). The essay addresses the professional contributions of four contributors or heroes of the correctional education: Alexander Maconochie at a penal colony in the South Pacific, William George among juveniles in New York …

Understanding Noncompliance: A Qualitative Content Analysis Of Title Ix Sexual Misconduct Violations Using The Office For Civil Rights Investigative Findings, Lenore N. Schaffer Nee Malone

Dissertations

On April 4, 2011 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) reminding higher education institutions (HEIs) of their obligations under Title IX to respond to complaints of sexual misconduct. The 2011 DCL was meant to be a guidance document to assist HEIs in complying with Title IX, but many higher education administrators expressed frustrations concerning some of OCR’s requirements. Since releasing the 2011 DCL, OCR has opened more than 200 Title IX investigations at HEIs across the nation. When OCR concludes that a HEI has failed to comply with Title IX, …

School Transition From Elementary To Middle School: Perceptions From Economically Disadvantaged Students, Keith M. Mcgee Sr.

Theses and Dissertations from 2017

The purpose of this study was to investigate school transition from elementary to middle school from the perceptions of economically disadvantaged students. Through the investigation, a determination was made on whether there is a difference in the level of connectedness among economically disadvantaged students between the low performing and higher performing schools. The study was a quantitative research design. The target population of the study was economically disadvantaged students in four middle schools in an urban school district located in the central region of the state. All of the four middle schools contained sixth through eighth-grade configurations and were designated …

Adopting Children With Down Syndrome: A Qualitative Study Of Family Experiences, Emily L. Richter

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study is to qualitatively investigate and compare the family beliefs, values, and perceptions of parenting of families who have adopted children with Down syndrome (DS) to parents who have biological children with DS. Participants in the study included 27 parents of biological children with DS and six parents of adopted children with DS. Participants were interviewed through a digital survey that was distributed through Qualtrics Online Survey Software. Quantitative analysis placed the participants into groups and qualitative analysis was used to identify beliefs, values, and perceptions. Results showed that while both adoptive and biological parents indicated …

Parent Perspectives On Transition Services And Expectations For Transition-Age Students With Disabilities In A Virtual School Setting, Heather Raithel

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Students with disabilities often experience difficulties as they transition from school to adult life. This project examined the perspectives of parents of transition-age students with disabilities enrolled in a full-time virtual school setting. The first dependent variable was parent satisfaction with transition services for students in the virtual school including relevancy and quality of student and parent trainings and information on transition, inter-agency collaboration, community-based learning experiences, staff knowledge and communication, transition specific courses, and appropriateness of the IEP transition plan. The second dependent variable was parent expectations for students as they exit school in regards to independent living, post-secondary …