Digital Commons Network^™

How United States Policy Is Hurting Puerto Rico’S Students, Chris Soto

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Discussions about the challenges facing Puerto Rico’s education system often ignore the profound and lasting impact of United States policies that have systematically discriminated against the territory’s students. Today’s education system reflects a layered trauma—one rooted in colonial marginalization and reinforced by a post-1965 federal education framework that has consistently failed to adequately serve Puerto Rico’s youth.

This report highlights the impact of U.S. policy on Puerto Rico’s students compared to those in the 50 states and District of Columbia. Focusing on resource inequities, the exclusion from federal programs, and the limited influence on education policymakers in Washington D.C., Puerto …

Enabling Coercive Drivers With Green Supply Chain Management Practices To Gain Performance Nexus Through External Collaboration And Monitoring, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Businesses primarily provide products or services, expand operations, and generate profits. However, they frequently disregard the environmental and economic consequences of their actions as they strive for profitability and growth. Consequently, the main objective of this research was to examine the impact of a multifaceted supply chain function on performance. Data were collected from 415 respondents employed in various manufacturing companies within a developing economy. The hypotheses were evaluated using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) through Smart PLS. The findings discovered that ten of the thirteen hypotheses tested were supported, while three were not. Coercive drivers were observed to significantly influence …

Recognition Of Service: Information For Faculty Seeking Tenure, Certificate Of Continuous Employment (Cce), And Promotion, The Center For Excellence In Teaching, Learning, & Leadership, Soniya Munshi, Elena Sigman

Open Educational Resources

Service is an important element of the faculty experience at Queens College. In Spring 2025, the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CETLL) convened two panels about fulfilling expectations for service activities for QC faculty at various stages of tenure and promotion. Each of the panels was comprised of deans, department chairs, and faculty members, including a Provost’s Faculty Fellow.

The panels aimed to address recurring faculty questions about service, including:

• what activities are recognized as faculty service

• how to document service activities

• how service activities factor into tenure, promotion, and CCE decisions

This informational document condenses the …

Lidt For Femtosecond Laser Optical Components, Viviana K. Vladutescu, Mikhail Polyanskiy, Dismas Choge, Tahsinur Rahman, Tianyi Zhao, Marcus Babzien, William Li, Antonio Verderesa, Igor Pogorelski

Publications and Research

Optical technology is pushed to the upper limits of damage with the advent of ultrafast high-power (UFHP) lasers. UFHP are at the forefront of particle accelerators, being used in interaction with electron beams to produce high-gradient electron acceleration, generation of compact radiation sources like inverse Compton scattering and free electron lasers. The UFHP laser levels, repetition rates, and operating environmental conditions lower the damage threshold of the optical components of femtosecond lasers uttering them useless if not used in the given parameters. In this regard, the present study provides the threshold levels for various optical components used in 800nm femtosecond …

Writing Workshop Journal: A Student-Centered Guide For College Composition, Tanya Zhelezcheva

Open Educational Resources

This comprehensive OER workbook supports ENGL 101 (Composition) students through a structured journal-based writing system. The resource combines Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles with post-process pedagogy to offer diverse pathways for student learning and writing development.

The workbook features:

- 4-component journal entry structure (exercises, reflection, next steps)

- 40+ writing exercises across four categories (Foundation Skills, Reading Logs, Drafting, Growth Mindset)

- Extensive planning and organizational tools (weekly/monthly calendars, goal-setting frameworks)

- Metacognitive reflection exercises that build writing awareness - Backward planning and time management strategies

- Evidence-based approaches to developing thesis statements, integrating sources, and crafting arguments …

Rape Myth Acceptance, Pretrial Publicity, And Decision-Making: An Examination Of Perceptions Of Victim Credibility And Perpetrator Guilt In A Real-World Sexual Assault Case, Lindsey Strouse

Student Theses

This study explores how the media narratives and political perspective of pretrial publicity (PTP) can influence jurors’ perceptions in sexual assault cases, raising significant concerns about justice in courtrooms. Specifically, it examines whether media framing of a real-life sexual assault case — through varying media narratives, with media that either challenges or endorses rape myths, and media source (liberal vs. conservative) — affects mock jurors’ rape myth acceptance (RMA), views of victim credibility, and judgements of perpetrator guilt. Participants first completed a RMA scale, then read mock news articles varying in media narrative and political affiliations (media source), followed by …

Does Idiosyncratic Volatility Follow A Random-Walk? Evidence From U.S. Stocks, Zihan Cao, Ossama Elhadary

Publications and Research

In asset pricing literature, idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) measures the firm-specific risk that is not explained by broader market movements. In this study, I investigate whether the idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) of individual stocks follows a random-walk. Using monthly residuals from the Fama-French three-factor model (Fama & French, 1993), I estimate IVOL for more than 11,000 U.S. stocks, and apply the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test (Said & Dickey, 1984) to determine whether IVOL behaves like a random-walk. While most stocks display random-walk behavior, the proportion varies across industries, with some sectors showing deviations from random-walk behavior. Stocks with different levels of average return …

The Transtheoretical Model Of Behavior Change To Promote Anti-Racist Behaviors In Medical Settings, Amanda Almond

Publications and Research

Abstract: This paper proposes the application of the transtheoretical model, a stage-matched process for effecting change, to better encourage anti-racist behaviors and methods among health care professionals in medical settings. Despite widespread organizational implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are aimed at reducing racial health and healthcare inequities across the United States, the absence of a theoretical framework for change has made it all but impossible to standardize meaningful anti-racist practices – a point of particular concern as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back DEI efforts and requirements alike. Translational and clinical sciences aim for a gold …

Biography Of A Friendship: Maryat Lee And Flannery O’Connor, Carole K. Harris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Urban Renewal And The Displacement Of Puerto Ricans In Lincoln Square, Jorge Soldevilla-Irizarry, Laura Colón Meléndez, Cristel Jusino Díaz, Damayra Figueroa-Lazu

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

This report focuses an overlooked Puerto Rican community in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, called Lincoln Square, during the 1950s, where more than 3,000 Puerto Ricans had lived prior to the Lincoln Center urban renewal project. As part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts  “Legacies of San Juan Hill”  initiative, the Lincoln Center archives offered CENTRO’s Data Hub access to 2,130 digitized site occupation records pertaining to 165 distinct addresses of tenants residing within the site of what would become the city’s premier performance center. These records invite a necessary retrospective reassessment and reframing of the scripts that bolstered …

Engagement By Design: Belongingness, Cultural Value Orientations, And Pathways Into Emerging Technologies, Daisuke Akiba, Michael Perrone, Caterina Almendral, Rebecca Garte

Publications and Research

This theoretical article examines how belongingness, defined as the sense that one’s participation is legitimate and valued, interacts with cultural value orientations to help explain persistent disparities in U.S. technology engagement, including emerging technologies, across racial and ethnic groups. While structural barriers (e.g., racism, poverty, linguistic bias, etc.) remain essential to understanding such inequity, we argue that engagement patterns in technology also reflect how different cultural communities may define and experience belongingness in relation to digital domains. Drawing on Triandis and Gelfand’s framework, and focusing specifically on educational contexts, we propose the Belongingness through Cultural Value Alignment (BCVA) model, whereby …

Zero Textbook Low Cost Syllabus For English 2100 (Writing 1), Anne Grevenitis

Open Educational Resources

In English 2100, our focus will be on autoethnography as a genre of writing. To write an autoethnography is to examine the value of the personal and use traditional modes of research to flesh out the narrative of the self. Through diverse research methods (interviews and site observation) and a multiple-step writing process (journaling, drafting and peer reviewing), your autoethnography should make a substantive contribution, have aesthetic merit, have reflexivity, make an impact, and express a reality.

Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project: Reflecting On Identity And Oral History At A Community College, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

In this article, I share narrators’ stories from the Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project based at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, to illustrate how Covid-19 and increased anti-Asian hate during the pandemic shaped Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) identities in Queens, New York. Narrators’ stories shed light on how Black Lives Matter impacted their own understanding of race and racialization, particularly as AAPI identity and race relate to the Model Minority Myth. This project also laid the groundwork to develop a broader oral history culture at the college, developing faculty pedagogy to incorporate oral history interviews and interviewing into …

Feminist Scholarly Editing: A Provocation, Marlowe Daly-Galeano, Melissa J. Homestead, Claudia Stokes, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

This essay examines the feminist challenges posed by the protocols and history of scholarly editing. Prompted by the recent revival of bibliographical studies, the essay seeks to instigate a similar reconsideration of scholarly editing, bibliography’s counterpart in textual criticism. Scholarly editing has a vexed history with regard to women and gender: women writers were seldom the beneficiaries of editorial attention, but editors regularly used gendered metaphors to describe their work and often relied on the unacknowledged labor of women. This essay examines the history of sexism within the field of scholarly editing, illustrates the challenges and promises of editing women’s …

Eng 110 Rhetorical Situation Worksheet, Catrina E. Vininski, Missy Watson

Open Educational Resources

This rhetorical situation worksheet asks students to analyze a text based on the rhetorical situation. Students must identify the significance of the context for which the text was published, the author of the text, the genre, the audience, the purpose, the argument, and the evidence that the author uses to support their claims. This can be used for course readings, films, or other types of texts that you assign over the course of the semester.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Env 3070 (Agroecology), Benjamin Iuliano

Open Educational Resources

Our relationships with the food we eat are deeply personal, but also connect us to a wide array of people, plants, animals, and landscapes around the world. Encompassing a diversity of scholarly approaches, the field of agroecology seeks to understand the interactions among these components, draw attention to the consequences of our present industrial food system, and create the conditions for more sustainable and just futures. In this course, students will learn about the science, practice, and social movement of agroecology through lectures, course discussions, field trips, and hands-on activities.

Freshman Comp Ii Eng 24xx, Joao M. Da Silva

Open Educational Resources

This course uses a memoir to elicit themes related to addiction, family and interpersonal relationships. Additionally, it invites students to develop their own voices as they engage with academic discourse in the disciplines of psychology and addiction studies.

Education First Year Seminar, Edf101 Fall 2025: Syllabus, Givanni Ildefonso-Sánchez

Open Educational Resources

The Education First Year Seminar (EDF 101) is required of all new students majoring in Education. Its goals are to introduce students to the liberal arts, campus culture, and the education field. The course also aims to develop a better understanding of the learning process and acquire essential academic skills. Taught by ELA faculty and supported by Peers Advisors and co-curricular professionals, this course addresses issues related to contemporary college life and to the field of education (birth through 12th Grade).

Entering college marks the beginning of a journey towards greater knowledge, the discovery of a new identity as a …

Foundations In Bilingual Education, Eln123, Fall 2025: Syllabus, Bede Mccormack

Open Educational Resources

Foundations of Bilingual Education (ELN123) is a writing intensive course that requires students to be engaged in several high and low stakes writing activities throughout the semester. This requirement will be fulfilled through several informal written assignments and a formal written assignment. Course topics include cultural, psychological, socioeconomic, linguistic, cognitive and curricular factors that affect the academic achievement of emergent bilingual students. It introduces the philosophical, legal, and sociological aspects of bilingual education, and prepares reflective educators through the use of a teacher education ePortfolio. It also satisfies the Urban Studies requirement at LaGuardia. This course is equivalent to a …

From Seapower To Shining Seapower, Michael Lee

Publications and Research

The liberal world order is dead: the United States has abandoned both the domestic and international institutional commitments that enabled it to function. How can liberal democracy survive in an increasingly hostile world? How can liberal democracies grow powerful enough to defend themselves without becoming the empires they fear? I argue that seapowers have historically represented a distinct kind of hegemon, that is more amenable to international cooperation, and democracy at home. Moreover, the transition from declining seapowers to rising ones has played a vital role in preserving a space for more liberal states (relative to their historical context), such …

Syllabus: Ssw Field Instruction 3, Katrina Hannan

Open Educational Resources

Designed to integrate social work knowledge, skills, and values, these courses utilize ecosystems and strengths perspectives alongside a cultural competence model to develop foundational practice competencies for entry-level social work practice. As core elements of the educational program, they bridge academic learning with practical application, enabling students to apply classroom knowledge in real-world settings. The practicum experience emphasizes strategies for engaging with diverse populations, advocating for human rights, and promoting social and economic justice. This hands-on experience fosters the development of practice skills that enhance social well-being and prepare students for effective, ethical social work across micro, mezzo, and macro …

Art Forms: Born Out Of Necessity, Urmi Duttagupta

Publications and Research

This collection of artworks expresses the artist’s profound passion for mathematics and life’s complex balance. As a female mathematician, she uses artistic expression and intricate patterns to evoke mathematical beauty and feminine strength, celebrating the presence and resilience of women in mathematics.

From Summer Institute To Action: Advancing Equity And Inclusion In Stem Classrooms, Sandie Han, Nadia Kennedy, Malgorzata Marciniak, Diana Samaroo

Publications and Research

This Editor’s Note provides background on the CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy Summer Institute for Equitable and Inclusive STEM Teaching and Learning and introduces the articles featured in this special issue.

Validation And Trend Analysis Of Satellite-Derived Surface Water Temperature Observations Over Adirondack Lakes, Marzi Azarderakhsh, Carolien Mossel, Abdou Rachid Bah, Aisha Malik, Fahmeda Khanom, Jonathan Borrelli, Pete Mcintyre, Hamidreza Norouzi, Kevin Rose

Publications and Research

This study aims to validate and evaluate satellite remote sensing observations from the Landsat series over 135 lakes in the Adirondack State Park, located in upstate New York, and to examine their surface temperature trends over the past 40 years. It utilizes data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), along with Landsat 5 and 7. Park-scale results were derived by extracting MODIS surface temperatures within the park boundary, while lake-scale results were estimated using Landsat 5 (1984-2012) and Landsat 7 (1999-2023) observations. In addition, field observations were utilized to perform a comprehensive validation and evaluation of satellite-based surface temperature …

In The Name Of Awareness: Audience, Venue, And The Politics Of Witnessing Human Rights Violations, Barberán Reinares, Eunah Lee

Publications and Research

Human rights scholar Wendy Kozol has posed a series of challenging questions regarding women’s human rights: “How are experiences of suffering represented? By whom? In what venues? And for which audiences?” This article seeks to address Kozol’s inquiry regarding representations of sexual violence and context by considering the Comfort Women Wanted installation at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The curators of this exhibit, partly sponsored by the Sex Workers Project, seem to have framed this art display within the conflicting feminist debates on sexual slavery and sex work, thus conflating “comfort women” survivors with sex workers within …

Designing Equity-Focused Pedagogy In Mathematics Teacher Preparation With Digital Data Tools, Nadia Stoyanova Kennedy, Boyan Kostadinov, Sandie Han

Publications and Research

This study examines the implementation of a course module that integrated computing and data analysis. The module aimed to engage prospective mathematics teachers in the practice of working with datasets and analyzing data to investigate questions related to local Brooklyn schools, as well as to gain deeper insight into the students and communities where they conduct their field experiences. Throughout the module, teacher candidates explored issues such as student learning opportunities, achievement gaps, school segregation, educational (in)equity, and other social justice concerns through readings, data analysis, and direct engagement. They shared and reflected on their findings with peers, deepening their …

Professional Development Workshops For Faculty On Addressing Implicit Bias In Computer Science Education, Sandie Han, Diana Samaroo, Janet Liou-Mark, Boyan Kostadinov, Johann Thiel, Suhua Zeng

Publications and Research

The "Understanding Implicit Bias" workshops were offered to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) faculty at an urban minority-serving undergraduate institution with a focus on addressing the gender gap in computer science. The workshops aimed to raise awareness of implicit (unconscious) biases and provide practical strategies for addressing them, fostering a more inclusive classroom environment. Analysis of pre- and post-survey responses indicated an increase in participants' awareness of implicit biases in their discipline and a greater openness to taking steps to address them, suggesting the workshops' potential impact on promoting inclusive teaching practices.

John Domini, Fellow Traveler, George K. Guida

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Tutoring Online During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Use Of Critical Incidents To Improve Practice, A.E. Dreyfuss, Jose Armando Sanchez Diaz, Barakat Adigun, Helen Baraki, Thalyia Thompson

Publications and Research

Developing expertise in the practice of online tutoring is presented by peer tutors who provided support to students with synchronous sessions with the onset of COVID-19. The experiences and learning of peer tutors were probed through the use of critical incidents (Flanagan, 1954), and how weekly training meetings provided support to them, creating a collaboration among the tutors and the training manager.

A Few Millimeters Of Bone: How Male Supremacists Leverage Scientific Sexism To Reinforce Misogynistic Ideologies, Robin O'Hanlon

Publications and Research

In recent years, male supremacist actors have reinforced their misogynistic worldviews by using narrative strategies centered on authoritative “common sense” and scientific “fact.” This paper presents a thematic narrative analysis of The Incel Wiki and the Wiki4Men, representing the first formal analysis of the wiki for the men’s rights organization A Voice for Men. The analysis indicates male supremacists use techniques including misappropriation of scientific information, manipulation of statistics, and leveraging pseudoscientific information to develop their narrative strategies of supremacy. The most consistent narrative strategies of scientific sexism on the wikis are male victimhood, denial of inequality between men and …