Digital Commons Network^™

Reports And Commands: Deciphering A Health Exhibition Using The Speaking Mnemonic, David H. Lee

Publications and Research

The Amazing You exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry had over 400 different multimedia health exhibits. Visitors walked through life stages, from conception through death, the exhibits at first showcasing developmental milestones, then diseases and chronic conditions associated with ageing. Museum executives described the exhibition as a public health intervention that stressed disease prevention, screening and behaviour change. This piece considers the question: What makes an exhibition be a health intervention? To describe complexities of the communication environment I use a mnemonic device called SPEAKING, an acronym for ‘Scene/Setting, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalites, Norms and …

Active Learning With Silent Participation, A.E. Dreyfuss

Publications and Research

Silence by participants in peer-led learning sessions is often viewed as lack of engagement and interpreted as lack of participation or interest. This paper addresses facets of silence, suggesting linguistic, cultural, and other reasons for quietude, and provides methods of facilitation that incorporate silence to give voice to noiseless participation as a bridge to learning.

“Los Programadores Debieron Pensarse Como Dos Veces”: Exploring The Intersections Of Language, Power And Technology With Bi/Multilingual Students, Sara Vogel

Publications and Research

Critical computing approaches to K-12 Computer Science (CS) education aim to promote justice in computing and the wider world. Despite being intertwined with inequitable power dynamics in computing, issues of linguistic (in)justice have received less attention in critical computing. In this article, I draw on theoretical ideas from sociolinguistics and critical computing to analyze qualitative data collected in computing and technology-integrated language and humanities classes serving emergent bi/multilingual middle school students. Conversations about language, technology, and power were close at hand in focal classrooms, and surfaced in moments when students acted as users and critics of, and tinkerers with digital …

Foundations Of Linguistics And Identity In L2 Teaching And Learning: Agency Through Linguistic Enrichment, Differentiated Instruction And Teacher Identity, Marnie Jo Petray, Rebecca Shapiro, Gladys M. Vega

Publications and Research

Language, procedure, and identity are L2 teaching/learning essentials that may promote agency and stimulate synergies among knowledge, practice, and reflection (Diaz Maggioli, 2014; Duff, 2012). This meta-report presents three studies that collectively advance agency and endorse linguistic foundations as enrichment, differentiated instruction as engagement, and teacher identity as empowerment. All of these theoretical constructs are key to successful L2 teaching and acquisition. Study 1 quantitatively reports on introductory linguistics’ presence or absence in 114 master’s programs at 54 US institutions. Findings suggest that linguistics’ curricular presence is inconsistent and training for optimal impact in the L2 classroom is lacking. Given …

Safety And Belonging In Immigrant-Serving Districts: Domains Of Educator Practice In A Charged Political Landscape, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Dafney Blanca Dabach, Ariana Mangual Figueroa

Publications and Research

Drawing from a context of reception framework, this article asks the following questions: How do educators describe issues of safety and belonging in the context of a charged immigration policy climate? What practices have educators developed to support immigrant-origin youth? And, what are the relationships between educators’ perceptions of safety and belonging and educator practices? We analyze educators’ survey responses administered across six school districts in different contexts across the United States, including the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. We synthesize four domains of educator practice: signaling affirmation, building shared knowledge and capacity, finding and mobilizing resources, and creating space …

The Influence Of China/Asia On The West, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

This chapter provides a description of cultural communication between China and Europe before 20th century. It discusses the influence of Chinese materials to Western libraries, archives and museums.

A Vision For Science Gateways: Bridging The Gap And Broadening The Outreach, Sandra Gesing, Steven R. Brandt, Shannon Bradley, Mark Potkewitz, Kirk F. Kee, Noreen Y. Whysel, Mark J. Perri, Sean B. Cleveland, Annalie Rugg, Jack A. Smith

Publications and Research

The future for science gateways warrants exploration as we consider the possibilities that extend well beyond science and high performance computing into new interfaces, applications and user communities. In this paper, we look retrospectively at the successes of representative gateways thus far. This serves to highlight existing gaps gateways need to overcome in areas such as accessibility, usability and interoperability, and in the need for broader outreach by drawing insights from technology adoption research. We explore two particularly promising opportunities for gateways - computational social sciences and virtual reality – and make the case for the gateway community to be …

Distribución De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En Los Apartados Del Trabajo Fin De Máster Escrito En Español Y En Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This study correlates with a research study published in the journal Pragmalingüística, in which the contrastive use of the rhetorical functions of citations in master’s theses in Spanish and English was studied. The main objective pursued by this new research is to determine which rhetorical functions are used most frequently in the different parts of a master’s thesis and what these can accomplish in each part of the text. Following Petrić (2007), a computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citation was used to study this phenomenon in a corpus of sixteen (16) theses of which eight (8) were …

Public Knowledge, Emily Drabinski

Publications and Research

An editorial framing the author's perspective on book reviews as a form of scholarly communication.

Instructional Design With The Ice Approach In Academic Libraries: A Framework That Integrates Assessing, Learning, And Teaching, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

One-shot instruction in academic libraries is a librarian-controlled bibliographic instruction that responds to the point of information need for subject-related courses. The assessment of teaching effectiveness tends to take a summative approach, which provides an answer to what students learned but does not address how they learned. This column theoretically explores the framework of Ideas-Connections-Extensions (ICE) in library instruction and the classroom setting, which demonstrates learning outcomes and explores the learning journey, and integrates assessment, learning, and teaching through collaborative efforts by academic librarians and classroom faculty.

Parental Beliefs And Knowledge, Children’S Home Language Experiences, And School Readiness: The Dual Language Perspective, Rufan Luo, Lulu Song, Carla Villacis, Gloria Santiago-Bonilla

Publications and Research

Parental beliefs and knowledge about child development affect how they construct children’s home learning experiences, which in turn impact children’s developmental outcomes. A rapidly growing population of dual language learners (DLLs) highlights the need for a better understanding of parents’ beliefs and knowledge about dual language development and practices to support DLLs. The current study examined the dual language beliefs and knowledge of parents of Spanish-English preschool DLLs (n = 32). We further asked how socioeconomic and sociocultural factors were associated with parental beliefs and knowledge, and how parental beliefs and knowledge related to DLLs’ home dual language experiences and …

Monolingual And Bilingual Language Networks In Healthy Subjects Using Functional Mri And Graph Theory, Qiongge Li, Luca Pasquini, Gino Del Ferraro, Madeleine Gene, Kyung K. Peck, Hernán A. Makse, Andrei I. Holodny

Publications and Research

Bilingualism requires control of multiple language systems, and may lead to architectural differences in language networks obtained from clinical fMRI tasks. Emerging connectivity metrics such as k-core may capture these differences, highlighting crucial network components based on resiliency. We investigated the influence of bilingualism on clinical fMRI language tasks and characterized bilingual networks using connectivity metrics to provide a patient care benchmark. Sixteen right-handed subjects (mean age 42-years; nine males) without neurological history were included: eight native English-speaking monolinguals and eight native Spanish-speaking (L1) bilinguals with acquired English (L2). All subjects underwent fMRI with gold-standard clinical language tasks. Starting from …

A Lexical And Syntactic Study Of Research Article Titles In Library Science And Scientometrics, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

Title of a research article is an abstract of the abstract. Titles play a decisive role in convincing readers at first sight whether articles are worth reading or not. Not only do research article titles show how carefully words are chosen by authors, but also reflect disciplinary differences in terms of title words and structure between hard sciences and soft sciences. This study examined the lexical density and syntactic structure of 690 research article titles chosen from five Library Science and Scientometrics journals, aiming to reveal disciplinary differences. The result suggested both Library Science and Scientometrics have almost the same …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Understanding The Nature And Dimensions Of Litigation Crowdfunding: A Visual Analytics Approach, Viju Raghupathi, Jie Ren, Wullianallur Raghupathi

Publications and Research

The escalating cost of civil litigation is leaving many defendants and plaintiffs unable to meet legal expenses such as attorney fees, court charges and others. This significantly impacts their ability to sue or defend themselves effectively. Related to this phenomenon is the ethics discussion around access to justice and crowdfunding. This article explores the dimensions that explain the phenomenon of litigation crowdfunding. Using data from CrowdJustice, a popular Internet fundraising platform used to assist in turning legal cases into publicly funded social cases, we study litigation crowdfunding through the lenses of the number of pledges, goal achievement, target amount, length …

Gifts From The Dark: Learning From The Incarceration Experience [Chapter 12], Joni Schwartz, John R. Chaney

Publications and Research

While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience argues that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other talented individuals who, despite the disorienting dilemma of incarceration, are models of adult transformative learning that positively impact the world. The authors interweave narratives with both qualitative and quantitative research references to analyze the role of solitude, writing, non-verbal communication; race and gender; physical exercise; education; technology; family …

Testimonio And Counterstorytelling By Immigrant-Origin Children And Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Wendy Barrales

Publications and Research

This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonio—a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle. Our goal is to foreground first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children and youth in order to gain insight into what they believe we should know about them. We argue for the power of testimonio to communicate both extraordinary hardship and everyday experiences …

On The Future Of Ijsl: Trans-Collaboration And How To Overcome The Structural Constraints On Knowledge Production, Distribution And Dissemination, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

In this essay, using as a point of departure his dilemma to accept or not the invitation to be a member of IJSL’s Editorial Board, del Valle discusses the limitations that academic publishing places on scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences: their choice of objects and analytical protocols, and the modes of distribution and dissemination of their production. The constraints imposed by highly bureaucratized universities and publishing companies are set against the intellectual imperative to build academic fields grounded in equality and inclusion. The essay concludes with some thinly drawn goals towards more dynamic trans-collaborative forms of knowledge …

Bibliodiversity At The Centre: Decolonizing Open Access, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

The promise of open access for the global South has not been fully met. Publishing is dominated by Northern publishers who disadvantage Southern authors through platform capitalism and open access models requiring article processing charges to publish. The South can reclaim and decolonize open access, nurturing scholarly communities, by employing bibliodiversity, a sustainable, anticolonial ethos and practice developed in Latin America. Self-determination and locality are at the core of bibliodiversity which rejects the domination of international, English-language journal publishing. As articulated by the Jussieu Call, varied scholarly community-based, non-profit, and sustainable models for open access are integral to bibliodiversity as …

Women In Public Administration In The United States: Leadership, Gender Stereotypes, And Bias, Sofia Calsy, Maria J. D’Agostino

Publications and Research

In the public and private sectors, women continue to address multiple hurdles despite diversity and equity initiatives. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce but are still a minority in leadership positions worldwide in multiple sectors, including nonprofit, corporate, government, medicine, education, military, and religion. In the United States women represent 60% of bachelor’s degrees earned at universities and outpace men in master’s and doctoral programs. However, a significant body of research illustrates that women’s upward mobility has been concentrated in middle management positions. Women hold 52% of all management and professional roles in the U.S. job market, including …

Using Verb Extension To Gauge Children’S Verb Meaning Construals: The Case Of Chinese, Weiyi Ma, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Lulu Song, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

Publications and Research

Verb extension is a crucial gauge of the acquisition of verb meaning. In English, studies suggest that young children show conservative extension. An important test of whether an early conservative extension is a general phenomenon or a function of the input language is made possible by Chinese, a language in which verbs are more frequent and acquired earlier. This study tested whether 3-year-old Chinese children extended a group of familiar verbs that specify various ways to carry objects. Shown videos that portrayed typical, mid-typical, or atypical carrying actions (as verified by Chinese adults), children were asked to judge whether they …

Making Sense Of Researcher Positionality In Foundational Literacy Studies Research, Amy J. Wan

Publications and Research

This article is an examination of researcher positionality in literacy studies research through a historiographical study of Brian Street.

Recruitment Of International Students Through A Synthesis Of English As A Second Language Instruction, Social Justice, And Service Learning, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Universities across the U.S. have increasingly emphasized internationalization, leading to rising numbers of international students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. However, these students tend to gravitate toward larger research-intensive universities with many other institutions seeing no increase in international student enrollments. Little is known concerning how to attract international students to regional institutions lacking name recognition. To address the above and promote internationalization through increasing the presence of students from abroad, an academic department at a regional public U.S. college used needs analysis to develop a pilot program for Japanese university students (N = 13). The program involved a …

The Teaching Zone: Square Pegs In Round Holes, Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This article explores six years of student data to discover why students who appear not to have read a lengthy book are able to execute a successful paper designed around that text.

The Communicative Function Of Gender In Italian, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

An analysis of gender in modern literary Italianbased on attested examples from various genres. The evidence-based hypothesis, thoroughly noncanonical, proposes a system of morphologically signaled meanings, and these are not the traditional categories “feminine” and “masculine.” Even the familiar and misleading term “gender” is replaced. The analysis concerns primarily what is typically called “gram­matical gender,” although it stands to inform too the use of Italian in communication having to do with human cultural gender. The analysis concerns primarily what is called here “variable gender” (essentially, adjectives) although it stands to inform too the problem of “invariable gender” (essentially, nouns).

Response To There Are No Hard-To-Serve Learners, Only Ill-Served Ones By Erik Jacobson, Montclair State University, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

A decade and a half ago, the community of adult educators to which I belonged called the phenomenon that Jacobson describes in There Are No Hard-to-Serve Learners as “creaming.” This is the practice of choosing to serve certain students, in this case those with high scores on their initial GED® practice test or students with advanced TABE® scores, so that we fulfilled our performance objectives and more easily demonstrated employability. We knew what we were doing. The reasons were economic; we needed to show outcomes that would continue to make our adult education program eligible for funding.

Belonging And Becoming In Academia: A Conceptual Framework, Maria Savva, Lynn P. Nygaard

Publications and Research

Establishing the conceptual framework for this book as a whole, this chapter looks at the process of developing an academic identity through the lens of ‘becoming’ a scholar, with particular emphasis on the challenges facing international, part-time EdD students. This process involves not only an intellectual breakthrough, but also an emerging sense of belonging. The inner journey – which intersects with and shapes academic progress – comprises a complex set of interactions between the social groups to which we belong, our beliefs about ourselves that come about through experience, the various contexts in which we operate, the position we hold …

Understanding The Personal Significance Of Our Academic Choices, Maria Savva

Publications and Research

Savva maps the intrapersonal journey that paralleled her academic journey as an international doctoral student based in Cyprus. She describes changes in her research question and how she used the solitude often associated with the doctoral journey to create a space whereby she looked inwards to better understand her academic choices and her relationship to those choices. Through critical examination, she was able to gain a deeper understanding of the extrinsic and intrinsic factors behind her decision to pursue a doctorate and her selection of research topic. This, in turn, allowed her to harness the qualities of agency and resilience …

The ‘Peripheral’ Student In Academia: An Analysis, Maria Savva, Lynn P. Nygaard

Publications and Research

Pulling together the various themes that emerged within and across the narratives, this chapter explores four broad categories of challenges and opportunities:

1. Demands associated with being a ‘peripheral’ student and the function of social networks in developing a sense of belonging.
2. Issues related to supervisory and other faculty relationships.
3. Struggles related to identity, language and/or culture.
4. The role of expert, novice and ‘impostor’ labels in internalizing a scholarly identity.

Each category is unpacked, while also examining the personal characteristics and institutional features that helped the authors along the journey to becoming scholars. After each section, implications for institutional policy and …

Wikipedia And Scholarpedia: A Comparative Case Study And Its Implications To Information Literacy, Junli Diao, Stefka Tzanova, Anthony Bishop

Publications and Research

The free online Wikipedia receives increasing attention from academic librarians; however, its counterpart Scholarpedia seems to be neglected. This case study selected two articles bearing the same title Intentionality from Scholarpedia and Wikipedia and brought them under scrutiny of their microstructure and macrostructure. Both microstructure and macrostructure analysis indicated that the addressed readership of the two encyclopedic articles is understandably different in terms of readability and content. The comparative case study concluded with empirical implications that both online, free encyclopedias provide academic librarians with pedagogical instruments to help students engage in authentic knowledge construction.