Digital Commons Network^™

Challenging Stem Learning Spaces: The Paradigm Of Contemplative Traditions As The Bedrock Of Creativity And Healing, Raaghav Pandya, Christopher Emdin

Publications and Research

As the post-pandemic classroom and pedagogy evolve to remedy oppressive norms, young people’s mental health and alienation has taken front stage (Rahmani & Zitouni, 2022). Traditional STEM learning spaces often teach inquiry as a linear, non-deviated approach to problems about self and nature (Hrisa & Psillos, 2022). Furthermore, because our classrooms often strip students and educators of their inherent creative abilities through constant assessments, improvement scales, and market-driven expectations, classrooms cease to become places of healing (Pandya, 2021). Eastern wisdom traditions and their associated philosophies provide a unique pedagogical lens that emphasizes a deep inquiry into self, empathy, and creativity …

Adapting Dramaturgical Pedagogy Into A Practical Framework For Young Dramaturgs, Kirby Lee

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Dramaturgy, while more established as practice in professional theatre, remains inconsistently applied and often underutilized in university theatre contexts. Despite its historical significance and continued evolution, some theatre companies and many academic institutions still struggle to clearly define or effectively integrate the dramaturg’s role. This thesis hopes to create a framework for novice dramaturgs by examining the origins and development of dramaturgy, analyzing its shifting functions in contemporary theatre, offering my own dramaturgical experiences through the lens of three quite different plays and finally, establishing basic principles of the discipline. Beyond its historical and professional contexts, this study investigates the …

Neofeudalism And Its Historical Unraveling. A Review Of Jodi Dean’S Capital’S Grave: Neofeudalism And The New Class Struggle (Verso Books, 2025), Jiang Lan

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

American Marxism political scholar Jodi Dean’s concept stands out from the numerous neofeudalism intellectual currents. In her early work, she proposed the concept of “communicative capitalism” as a more advanced form relative to traditional capitalism. However, in the development of her thought during the early 21st century, she demonstrated a trajectory from political critique to the critique of communicative political economy. Having become aware of the issue raised by McKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead concerning capitalism’s descent into an even more dire historical phase, Dean too perceives contemporary capitalism as potentially entering a state of decline, transitioning into a …

Peace Counseling In The Scientific Spotlight: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Global Research Trends, Wahyu Nanda Eka Saputra

Buletin Konseling Inovatif

This study aims to map global trends in peace counseling research using a bibliometric approach. Data were taken only from the Scopus database, focusing on publications containing keywords related to peace counseling, such as peace counseling, peace psychotherapy, and peacebuilding therapy. The analysis was conducted on 769 selected documents published between 1937 and 2025. The results showed a significant increase in publications since 2020, reflecting the growing need for counseling approaches that support peace and psychological well-being. Authors from various countries made different contributions, with the United States dominating the number of publications and citations, while developing countries such as …

Global Learning And Cultural Responsiveness In Stem Education: Case Study Insights From The Uae, Norita Ahmad

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This study explores how digital pedagogy can be used to advance global learning and cultural responsiveness in STEM education, with a specific focus on responsible consumption and production (SDG12). Drawing on three undergraduate courses at the American University of Sharjah, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Python for Business Analytics, and Information Systems Strategy, this paper applies the CoDesignS Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) framework to examine how sustainability principles are embedded in course design, pedagogy, and student engagement. Through structured project-based learning, ethical data practices, and culturally relevant content, students develop key sustainability competencies while enhancing their intercultural awareness and digital …

From Essays To Embodiment: Reimagining Student-Centered Assessment Through Creative Practice, Rory Bester, Carla Lever, Bongani Kona, Mona Hakimi

Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education

This essay explores the experience of implementing podcast-based assessment in ‘Feeling History, Making History,’ a semester-long course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa. The course is designed to cultivate broad-based critical and interdisciplinary skill sets in first-year Humanities students. Through pedagogical reflection across three consecutive iterations of this course, we investigate how creative assessment practices such as podcasting both enabled our students to bring their whole “selves” into the academy and productively challenged our own preconceived notions about effective, decolonial pedagogy.

“We Talked About Straight People Sex”: The Health Education Experiences Of Queer And Trans Youth In Utah, Sonny Partola

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

This article explores how Utah’s health education curriculum shapes the experiences of queer and trans youth. Drawing on critical ethnography conducted at an urban public high school, the study foregrounds the voices of six queer and trans students. Findings reveal that abstinence-focused and heteronormative curricula render these youth invisible, exclude critical information on queer, trans, and intersex health, and compromise students’ well-being. Participants described feelings of discomfort, irrelevance, and pressure to act as informal educators for peers. Their accounts highlight the urgent need for queerly responsive health education that affirms diverse identities, normalizes inclusion, and provides accurate, relevant information. Such …

An Accountability Myth: A Critical Analysis On High-Stakes Testing In U.S. Schools, Noelle E. Haskell

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

High-stakes testing has become synonymous with the United States (U.S.) education system. This began in the early 1900’s through the form of intelligence testing which was developed by several U.S. psychologists. Since then, high-stakes testing has taken on many forms. Popular policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) have all taken aim at increasing academic achievement and holding schools accountable through high-stakes, standardized tests. Even through its varying forms, high-stakes tests have continued to perpetuate inequalities. Considering this, the current study examines how the rhetoric used in describing …

Beyond The Episode: A Case For Serial Literacy In Efl Education Classrooms, Julie Intveen, Tim Illigens

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Serial storytelling, characterized by its interplay of vertical (episodic) and horizontal (long-form) narrative structures, offers a unique opportunity for media literacy in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education. This paper argues for the development of a serial literacy framework, a concept that expands traditional film literacy models to accommodate the distinct demands of serialized narratives. By using Inventing Anna (Rhimes, 2022) as a case study, the study explores how serial storytelling fosters engagement with themes of identity construction, ethical ambiguity, and transmedial storytelling. This paper elaborates on serial literacy, considering its implications within foreign language learning contexts. The study …

A Children’S Rights Approach To Critical Media Literacy In Language Education: Developing Children’S Agency In A Digital Networked World, Frauke Matz, Jeff Share

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Children are growing up in a culture of digitality, one infused in digital communication in and out of school (Faverio & Sidotti, 2024; Stalder, 2018). They are immersed in a digital networked world, which plays a significant role in how they develop their literacies and identities (Cannon et al., 2022) across languages. To help them participate as “active thinkers and citizens in their own right” (Wall, 2016, p. 86), educators could consider the potential of critical media literacy in language education as a pedagogical response to the commercial exploitation of information, and the liberatory potential of critical thinking and creative …

From Dictionary To Classroom: Philippine English In The Oxford English Dictionary And Language Education In The Philippines, Danica Salazar

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

The present article offers an overview of the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) continuing efforts to improve its coverage of words originating from world varieties of English, such as those spoken in Anglophone communities in postcolonial Southeast Asia. In these new centers of English, millions of second-language speakers use a variety of linguistic mechanisms to adapt the English word store to their unique cultural and social milieu, and the OED is documenting this distinctive vocabulary by including a wider range of lexical innovations from Southeast Asian varieties of English that more accurately reflect the way that the language is being used …

Remixing The Integrative Model Of Pedagogy Through Varied Hip-Hop Contexts, Colleen A. Wilkinson, Caitlin Riegel, Elizabeth Falzone

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Embedding literature which promotes positive views of disabilities into teacher preparation programs is not an uncommon practice (Hansen et al., 2023; Yu & Meyer, 2024). However, multimedia, such as music and television, allow a more inclusive approach to disability studies. Hip-Hop music serves to represent the underrepresented in society and the overrepresented in disability categories. This paper describes how to incorporate three multimedia projects utilizing an Integrative Model of Pedagogy and Hip-Hop into teacher preparation programs for more inclusive, strategic and reflective teacher candidates. Within each project the instructor embeds specific High-Leverage Practices for students with disabilities and culturally responsive …

Examining The Effects Of Video Modeling To Enhance Culturally Specific Social Greeting Skills In Preschoolers With Asd In Saudi Arabia, Sarah Alzahrani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A lack of social communication skills, including initiation and responding, has been a prominent characteristic of children diagnosed with ASD (Kanner, 1943; Kroeger et al., 2007). Enhancing these skills in children with ASD during early childhood is crucial to their future relationships, friendships, participation in communal activities, and overall lowering the likelihood of adverse long-term effects, giving significance to this age as a pivotal period for enhancing various skills (Hart Barnett, 2018). Failure to provide interventions to address social communication in children with ASD, specifically in cultures that value this skill, can impede their integration into that society. Thus, this …

Abc Pharmaceutical Company Change Model: Implementing J.P. Kotter's 8-Step And Adkar Change Models For Ethical Alignment, Shelbi B. Chandler, Amalfi Gayosso, Alison Lawton, Ali Holness-Roland

The Scholarship Without Borders Journal

In this paper, we use the pseudonym ABC Pharmaceuticals (ABC) to refer to the company under examination, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). ABC Pharmaceutical (ABC) must assess, adapt, and change to ensure regulatory compliance, maintain and attract employees, and remain competitive. ABC has a history of erroneous practices and is at risk internally with employees, and externally with regulators and the public sectors. The authors applied J.P. Kotter’s (1996) 8-step and the ADKAR (Hiatt, 2006) models for change management. J.P. Kotter’s top-down model addresses leadership’s role in creating a compelling vision aligned with its actions, and the ADKAR bottom-up model assesses employees’ readiness …

Atmospheres Create Interest: Experiencing And Utilizing Shared Situations, Andreas Rauh

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

Even though atmospheres are usually only subtly perceived in the manner of a felt body in everyday life, they possess a specific efficacy. They hold the potential to address people in their felt-bodily constitution and to arouse interest in the shared situation. In the following, the phenomenon of atmosphere is explored through case analyses from an art education project and defined as a shared situation in contrast to affect and mood. This is followed by an examination of the fundamental importance of atmosphere for learning environments. With a focus on pedagogical relationships, the role of atmospheres in educational contexts and …

Two Years Of Iqts: Its Current State, And Implications For English Itt By Distance Learning, Oliver C S Au Yeung

Plymouth Interdisciplinary Education Open Journal

International qualified teacher status (iQTS), a new programme which enables candidates to qualify while teaching overseas, marks one of the latest major developments in England’s teacher training system. This study endeavours to survey its current state and make an assessment of the nature of its training. The literature review situates the programme in the historical trajectory of English initial teacher training (ITT) and, in turn, the higher education and socio-economic contexts. As an analytic framework, Furlong’s fourfold categorisation of teachers’ knowledge is used to represent competing approaches to teacher training. It is argued that the liberal approach, emphasising a broad, …

Teachers’ Views About School Playtime: A Systematic Literature Review, Misbah Khan, Cathy Atkinson

International Journal of Playwork Practice

School playtime exists in varying forms across the world, and there is an extensive evidence-base pointing to its beneficial effects on children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recognises these benefits and provides clear guidance to international organisations, including schools, on protecting children’s right to play. However, legislative and societal pressures have led to teacher practices which facilitate the erosion of school playtime. Teachers’ beliefs and their practices are considered to be interlinked and therefore the aim of this systematic literature review is to consolidate existing research on teachers’ views about playtime and consider how …

A Phenomenological Study: The Lived Experiences Of Social Studies Teachers’ Perceptions Of Building Rapport To Enhance Classroom Management, Jesse Darren Newcomer

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutic-phenomenological study was to gain a profound understanding of what secondary education social studies teachers experience when they increase strategies to build rapport with students to strengthen classroom management techniques. There were 10 participants who teach in Central Pennsylvania public school districts. The theory guiding this study was self-determination theory by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, given the study's social-emotional focus. The central research question guiding this study was, “What are social studies teachers’ perceptions of how building rapport with students influences classroom management?” There were three sub-questions: What type of motivation is used when developing …

Predicting Emotional Intelligence Based On Cultural Dimensions And Narcissism Among Military And Educational Leaders, Juan P. Remy

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative predictive correlational design study is to examine how well cross-cultural dimensions and narcissistic tendencies predict emotional intelligence among military and educational leaders. This study is important because it will identify how cross-cultural dimensions and narcissistic tendencies influence the emotional intelligence of military and educational leaders. The sample consisted of 90 of 122 military leaders who had attended any professional military education (PME), and 120 educational leaders were recruited from a population of 183 within a military school district in the central United States. The data were collected using the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF), …

The Current State Of Global Engagement Within U.S. Jesuit Institutions: Challenges And Opportunities, Han Yan, Lin Lu

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

Jesuit education aims to cultivate global citizens who actively engage with the world and champion social justice. As economic and social ties grow increasingly interconnected, Jesuit institutions need to develop innovative international learning opportunities for students. In this study, using publicly available IIE Open Doors data from the past two decades, we assess international student enrollment and study abroad initiatives at U.S. Jesuit institutions and compare these metrics against national trends. The results suggest that U.S. Jesuit institutions have substantial potential to invest in and reap the benefits of global engagement. Grounded in the Jesuit mission and the Inspirational Paradigm …

Being Radical Community: “Pleasure Activism” In Higher Education, Misty D. Saribal, Taisha Mcmickens Dr.

Feminist Pedagogy

This paper argues for the necessity of pleasure in abolitionist pedagogy as a condition for sustaining movements toward collective liberation. Grounded in abolition feminism and radical pedagogy, it introduces the “Pleasure Activism Lineage” (PAL) as a tool for cultivating campus movement communities through joy, care, and collective resistance. Drawing on adrienne maree brown’s framework of pleasure activism, the PAL assignment invites students and educators to trace transformative influences, reclaim subversive forms of joy, and build solidarities rooted in liberatory traditions. By centering pleasure as a site of resistance, this project disrupts the pitifully punitive logics and pessimistically professionalizing ethos of …

Cv: Jung Kim (Literacy), Jung Kim

Education Department Faculty Curricula Vitae

No abstract provided.

Cv: Joanna Maravilla (Literacy), Joanna Maravilla

Education Department Faculty Curricula Vitae

No abstract provided.

Culturally Responsive Assessment And Mtss Toolkit For Multilingual Learners, Morgan Kaltz

Masters Projects

English Learners (ELs) are often assessed using tools that fail to account for their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, leading to inaccurate conclusions about their academic abilities. This project addresses the problem of non–culturally responsive assessment by developing a framework and resources to help teachers design and implement assessments that more accurately reflect what multilingual learners know and can do. Rooted in the principles of Culturally Responsive Assessment (CRA) and aligned with the WIDA English Language Development Standards, this project supports educators in integrating language development with equitable instructional practices.

The project includes creating teacher-friendly tools, such as culturally responsive assessment …

Social Development Dynamics Of Students In Inclusive Education In Indonesia, Nur Hidayat Nh

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

This narrative review analyses the social development of students with special needs in Indonesian inclusive schools by synthesising five high-quality empirical studies (indexed SINTA 1–3) published between 2018 and 2023. Addressing three research questions, the synthesis reveals heterogeneous and generally limited social development trajectories shaped primarily by ecological interactions rather than inherent disability characteristics. Key barriers include symbolic inclusion, inadequate teacher training in multimodal strategies, low peer acceptance, and systemic resource deficits, whereas facilitators encompass contextualised multimodal communication, active family involvement, and supportive institutional leadership. Effective interventions depend on coordinated teacher–parent–peer triangulation, leveraging local sign language, structured peer-mediated activities, and …

'The Rest Is Silence': Reframing Stasis As Integral To Creative Practice, Corinna Di Niro, Pablo Muslera

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This duoethnographic study examines the relationship between motion and stasis in creative practice through the lens of two creative educators working in postgraduate and undergraduate Creative Industries. Drawing on our combined experiences as practitioners and educators at SAE University College, we explore how creative blockages can be reframed as productive rather than problematic, challenging dominant productivity paradigms in contemporary creative industries and education. Through structured dialogic exchange, we investigate three interconnected themes: the rhythmic nature of creative practice, the pedagogical value of embracing productive stasis, and the tension between institutional timelines and creative development. We consider how encouraging SAE creative …

Beyond The Grade: Validity In Global Virtual Team Peer Evaluation, Maria Randazzo-Davis, Phd., Christopher Nelson , Phd., Hillary Nelson, Graduate Student

International Journal for Business Education

This study examines how peer evaluation functions in global virtual teams, a setting that reflects the collaborative demands of contemporary international business education. The authors tested whether peer evaluation subscales, total peer-report score, and various indicators of team diversity predict team performance, assessed by instructors in a sample of 2,012 students from 445 X-Culture teams. The variables that were good predictors of team performance included the quality of team communication, work ethic, technical competence, generation of ideas, peer engagement, and peer writing skills. Less predictive of performance were leadership and effort ratings. In addition, students' self-ratings (i.e., peer ratings) were, …

Teacher Candidates’ Attempts To Implement Anti-Ableist Pedagogy And The Constraints Therein, Benjamin Barnett-Perry

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In this qualitative study, I interviewed four special education teacher candidates with a stated interest in enacting anti-ableist pedagogy in their student teaching placements. I drew on Holland et al.’s (1998) figured worlds to examine their attempts to enact anti-ableist pedagogy in their classrooms and their navigation of the hierarchy within their placements. Participants entered their student teaching eager to implement anti-ableist pedagogy. However, their attempts at implementation were often met with pushback from a variety of sources and a new understanding of how much they could actually accomplish from their place at the bottom of the school hierarchy. Findings …

Foundational Phases For Community Development: A Model For Enhancing Cooperative Extension’S Role Within The Community, George Grant, Kristina Hains

Journal of Human Sciences and Extension

The Cooperative Extension System (CES) plays a vital role in community education and development across the United States. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the historical and present-day significance of the CES as a catalyst for community development practice, while overlaying a community development model applicable to CES. A literature review is provided on the historical origins, organizational structure, and leadership responsibilities of agents and specialists relevant to community development research and practice. The researchers suggest a novel conceptual model, the Foundational Phases for Community Development, to assist agents and specialists across all areas of programming for engaging …

An Impact Study Of Young Women's Leadership Development: A Case Study Of Kosovo, Linda Gjergji

Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the leadership development trajectories of young women in Kosovo engaged in a global leadership program, offering significant insights into their capabilities, aspirations, and the barriers they face in pursuit of leadership roles. Using a qualitative instrumental case study approach, this study examines how participation in global leadership initiatives fosters skill development, self-awareness, and civic engagement among young women in a traditionally male-dominated society. The conceptual framework of the study is comprised of Erikson's theory of Psychosocial Development (Erikson, 1968) and Positive Youth Development (Lerner, 2005). Data was collected through online semi-structured interviews and an arts-based method, revealing …