Digital Commons Network^™

Community Asset Inquiry: A Model For Esol Teacher Praxis In Family And Community Engagement, Felice Atesoglu Russell, Amanda Richey

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

In this article, we present findings from our qualitative, self-study research on the development and implementation of two course assignments (community asset maps and oral histories) designed to support practicing teachers’ praxis in working with English learner (EL) students within the context of family and community engagement. Providing an example of how English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher praxis might be developed, findings are framed by our Community Asset Inquiry model. This model, grounded in equity literacy and transformative family and community engagement supports teachers’ development of praxis in support of an asset-based approach, deep knowledge of …

“I Don’T Love Language; I Love Children”: Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, And Beliefs About Linguistics And Their Choice To Major In Speech-Language Pathology, Michelle Veyvoda, Amanda Howerton-Fox

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

Purpose: This pilot study explored the linguistic attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs of undergraduate majors in speech-language pathology (SLP) and the role an interest in linguistics played in their choice of the SLP major.

Method: Fifteen undergraduate students declared as SLP majors participated in this mixed-methods study. Participants responded to a survey and open-ended questions measuring their knowledge about and interest in linguistics; they also wrote a narrative essay describing their decision to major in SLP. Data was collected via Qualtrics. Descriptive statistics were done on the quantitative data, and thematic coding using NVivo 12.1.0 was done on qualitative …

Letter From The Editors, Christine E. Ashby, Julia M. White

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, 12.2, Julia White

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

No abstract provided.

The Chinese Communist Party And The Uyghurs: Securitization And How Ethnic Minorities Are Oppressed In An Multi-Ethnic State, Justin C. Mascarin

International ResearchScape Journal

Since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has convinced its own populace as well as foreign countries that increasing security measures in the Xinjiang region are necessary. In 2014, in response to terror attacks, the Chinese Government announced the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism” aimed at the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and more specifically the Uyghur ethnic minority. This paper will analyze the oppression of the Uyghurs in China through securitization theory and the political and ethnic theories to construct a better understanding of how large multi-ethnic states legitimize oppressing minority …

No Nazis In Valhalla: Understanding The Use (And Misuse) Of Nordic Cultural Markers In Third Reich Era Germany, Lena Nighswander

International ResearchScape Journal

While medieval concepts are frequently used as a means for the general public to understand emerging global political institutions around the world, they also have immense capability to be purposely misused by political groups due to the generally vague and misguided understanding of these concepts by the masses. At one core of these movements is the legacy of Vikings and the misrepresentation of their history by far-right political groups, especially in mid-20^th century Europe, in order to push a fictitious agenda of a prosperous, all-white race of seafaring warriors. Through the appropriation of medieval Old Norse imagery and mythology, …

'Where Many Paths And Errands Meet': Travel Writing In The Lord Of The Rings, Will Glover

Journal of Tolkien Research

In this paper I examine The Lord of the Rings through the lens of genre criticism. I take issue with the commonplace characterisation of the work as an ‘epic’ or a ‘romance’, a tendency that has restricted interpretations of the work and tied criticism of it too exclusively to that of medieval literature. I argue that the work should be viewed as a modern novel: an open-ended and capacious text comprised of numerous generic traditions, including the previously overlooked genre of travel literature. After establishing a working definition of travel writing, I analyse The Lord of the Rings's paratextual …

Platica: Personalized Language Acquisition Training & Instruction Chatbot Assistant, Nam Tran, Philip Cori, Andres Morales, Evan Johnson

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

English is immensely important and useful in our society, however there are many people across the world who are learning English as a second language and have limited options to practice. Casual English conversations with native speakers is one of the most proven and immersive ways to practice a language. However, not everyone has those opportunities or the resources to attend ESL classes. We aim to solve this issue with our project PLATICA, a robust, low-cost mobile application that anyone can use to build experience conversing in English. PLATICA takes advantage of state-of-the-art deep learning and natural language processing techniques …

Pivot 2020: Editorial, Renata Marques Leitão, Lesley-Ann Noel

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

No abstract provided.

The Intellectual Transformation Of Modern Design Discourses In The Eastern Mediterranean Region (Emr), Qassim Saad

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This study will offer an overview of applied discourses of design in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR), including Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Since the 1940s, these countries have been known for their pioneering statues, creative engagements, and influence on shaping, resourcing, and sustaining the emergent project of modernity in the EMR. Studies of these countries’ contemporary design discourses are underdeveloped, with extremely limited studies addressing their context and practices. This study will survey identical phases throughout the contemporary history of these countries, exploring and critically reviewing key themes in their regional sociopolitical rhetoric since the 1950s. The …

Linguistic Integration In India: A Persistence Of Hegemony, Jayasri Sridhar

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

India is a nation of tremendous cultural diversity and a potential pluriverse in itself. The layered issue of linguistic integration is a very relevant one in realizing this potential. In this paper, I explore how the propagation of Hindi as the lingua franca of India creates feelings of resentment among other language groups through a field study conducted in the village of Ranekpar in Gujarat in January 2020. While Hindi imposition has been met with stiff resistance from non- Hindi speaking communities, English seems to retain its popular status as a language of power and opportunity, despite being occasionally spurned …

(De)Institution Design: Decolonizing Design Discourse In Uruguay, Lucia Trias Cornú

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Design is a relatively new discipline in Uruguay. The dominant discourse, linked to Industrial Design-ID, has its beginnings in the foundation of the Centre of Industrial Design-CDI in 1987. This research is an invitation to look further into how ID has played a role in Uruguay -as a global-south country- related to economic and social structures introduced with the implementation of neoliberal production policies. In line with current global-south design discourses, the research aims to understand the role of institutions in the formation of design discourse(s) in Uruguay by approaching the CDI’s foundation from a decolonial worldview. Following the idea …

Opening Up Our Gated Community, Arvind Lodaya

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Teaching design in a non-Western culture makes one vaguely aware of its embedded cultural and technological determinants, such as the machine aesthetic or mass production techniques and materials. When this is juxtaposed against local design traditions and cultures of practice – many of which pre-date post-war Europe – these ‘normalisations’ become glaringly self-evident. Design education in the non-Western context, therefore, becomes more an acculturation project (along with its shadow, ‘deculturation’) than one involving technical training. This paper attempts to narrate this epiphanic experience of a designer-educator, which has met with instant and widespread resonance when sharing this with peers from …

Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics., Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell

Articles

Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have …

Mental Contrasting As A Technique To Lower Learners' Levels Of Anxiety When Completing Communicative Tasks In A Chinese Beginning Classroom, Tzu-Hsiang Chien

Theses and Dissertations

Learning a foreign language is stressful. If learners are anxious, they might be less confident and less willing to communicate (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément, & Noels, 1998). Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) are widely used in the field of personal health, career pursuit among others. I introduce mental contrasting techniques to Chinese teaching and learning to see if MCII help learners lower their anxiety level. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale is implemented to test participants’ self-perceived anxiety. Participants’ cortisol in saliva serve as a manifestation of participants’ anxiety (i.e., stress) levels and as a measure of the changes of their …

Spatial Production And Nomadic Subjectivities In A Buddhist Learning Space, Chau Bao Le

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Space and place are an integral part in the geographies of education, therefore, knowledge about culturally complex and ethnically diverse transnational communities could inform curricular innovations that meet the needs of individual students. This year-long ethnographic study challenged the prevailing realities that U.S. schools continue to devalue the experiences and cultural backgrounds of immigrant youth, which caused students from ethnic, cultural, racial, linguistic, and religious minority groups to feel structurally excluded and marginalized. Through examining the spatial production and nomadic subjectivities enacted over time in a transnational, diasporic space of a Buddhist temple in a U.S. southern state, the study …

Skylight Opening Degree Prediction Method Based On Parallel Clustering, Deng Li, Yu Yue, Honglin Pang, Minrui Fei

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To process the massive distributed data and control the agricultural facilities intelligently, a parallel Dirichlet Process Mixture Model (DPMM) clustering method was proposed based on Spark. With this method, the prediction model of greenhouse skylight opening degree was obtained by training the agricultural environmental and facilities data. The model was used to predict the greenhouse skylight opening degree. Through several comparison experiments, both the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed parallel clustering were verified, the prediction accuracy was calculated. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has higher efficiency and accuracy.

Spanish For Business: Past, Present, And Future (Opinion), Carlos M. Coria-Sánchez

Global Advances in Business Communication

Spanish for Business has witnessed a lack of growth in academia for the last five years in colleges and universities that offer either a major, minor, or certificate in this area. This article follows those five years of development not only in the number of students taking Spanish for Business and Business Culture classes but also in the way administrators and other faculty members do not consider this to be an area worth research and publication. In the meantime, the number of positions advertised for faculty to teach these courses has gradually decreased during this time period.

Lsp In Canadian Higher Education: What We Can Learn From Program Reviews, Judith A. Ainsworth

Global Advances in Business Communication

Using university periodic program review documents, this study investigated the major stakes in offering programs in language study for field specific purposes, or languages for specific purposes (LSP), at Canadian institutions of higher education, and the most frequent recommendations found in the external reviewers’ reports. A conceptual framework of the LSP field was developed for thematic coding using QDA Miner, a mixed-method approach to data analysis. The qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that the three most important stakes for the discipline are relevance for employment needs, correspondence to stakeholder needs and interdisciplinary cooperation. The external reviewers recommended 1) developing strategies …

Early Isotopic Evidence For Maize As A Staple Grain In The Americas, Douglas J. Kennett, Keith M. Prufer, Brendan J. Culleton, Richard J. George, Mark Robinson, Willa R. Trask, Gina M. Buckley, Emily Moes, Emily J. Kate, Thomas K. Harper, Lexi O'Donnell, Erin E. Ray, Ethan C. Hill, Asia Alsgaard, Christopher Merriman, Clayton Meredith, Heather J H Edgar, Jaime J. Awe, Said M. Gutierrez

Pathology Research and Scholarship

Maize is a cultigen of global economic importance, but when it first became a staple grain in the Americas, was unknown and contested. Here, we report direct isotopic dietary evidence from 52 radiocarbon-dated human skeletons from two remarkably well-preserved rock-shelter contexts in the Maya Mountains of Belize spanning the past 10,000 years. Individuals dating before ~4700 calendar years before present (cal B.P.) show no clear evidence for the consumption of maize. Evidence for substantial maize consumption (~30% of total diet) appears in some individuals between 4700 and 4000 cal B.P. Isotopic evidence after 4000 cal B.P. indicates that maize became …

Formative Research To Design A Culturally-Appropriate Cancer Clinical Trial Education Program To Increase Participation Of African American And Latino Communities, Jennifer Cunningham-Erves, Claudia Barajas, Tilicia Mayo-Gamble, Caree R. Mcafee, Pamela Hull, Maureen Sanderson, Juan Canedo, Katina Beard, Consuelo H. Wilkins

Health Policy & Community Health: Faculty Publications

Background: Addressing knowledge deficiencies about cancer clinical trials and biospecimen donation can potentially improve participation among racial and ethnic minorities. This paper describes the formative research process used to design a culturally-appropriate cancer clinical trials education program for African American and Latino communities. We characterized community member feedback and its integration into the program.

Methods: We incorporated three engagement approaches into the formative research process to iteratively develop the program: including community-based organization (CBO) leaders as research team members, conducting focus groups and cognitive interviews with community members as reviewers/consultants, and interacting with two community advisory groups. An …

June 3, 2020 Faculty Senate Minutes, University Of South Carolina

Faculty Senate

No abstract provided.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, By Nadège T. Clitandre, Ana B. Rodríguez Navas

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Application Of The Anfis Approach For Estimating The Mechanical Properties Of Sandstones, Yasin Abdi, Amin Taheri-Garavand

Emirates Journal for Engineering Research

The reliable determination of the geomechanical parameters of rocks such as unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and elastic modulus (E) using laboratory methods is difficult and time-consuming. In this regard, the development of predictive models for the estimation of these properties seems to be essential in rock engineering projects. The main purpose of this work is to construct an ANFIS approach to estimate the UCS and E of sandstones. For this purpose, a database of laboratory tests conducted on 130 sandstone samples was prepared. The data included porosity, P-wave velocity, dry density, slake durability index, and water absorption as input variables …

Retaining School Psychologists: The Role Of District Level Administrative Supervisors, Rachel Ruth Butler

Theses and Dissertations

The school psychologist shortage has been a persistent problem in education, and there is a lack of research on what current administrative supervisors are doing to address shortages. This study examined the perceptions of district leaders regarding the recruitment and retention of school psychologists. Participants included 19 administrative supervisors in public school districts in Colorado (CO), Utah (UT), Nevada (NV), and Wyoming (WY). Data for this qualitative study were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with administrative supervisors of school psychologists. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed for common themes. A total of 10 themes were identified, and the first theme reflected …

Justice For Juristac: Using International And Comparative Law To Protect Indigenous Lands, Zartner, Dana

Santa Clara Journal of International Law

Justice for Juristac: Using International and Comparative Law to Protect Indigenous Lands

Framing The Center: Belize And Panamá Within The Central American Imagined Community., Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey

SUURJ: Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper explores the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of Belize and Panamá’s exclusion from the Central American “imagined community”—that is, the definition of which countries comprise “Central America.” While there are seven countries that geographically exist in the region, not all seven are always classified as belonging to Central America due to factors such as differences in histories, racial distribution, and cultural expressions, among others. The aim of this article is to more fully explore and analyze the many reasons behind these exclusions and to propose a reconsideration of the narrative, thereby creating the possibility of an expanded and …

Letters Of Comment, Janet P. Reedman, Mary Mcdermott Shideler, Joe R. Christopher, Cindy Rako, Pat Reynolds, Diane Lynne Pavlac, Sarah Beach, Angelee Sailer Anderson, Stanley E. Anderson, Ron Blizzard

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Minority Communities’ Rights In The Republic Of Kosovo Under The Eu Law, Ilir Hajraj

European Union Policy Studies Graduate Symposium

This paper scrutinizes the legal rights of ethnic minorities in the Republic of Kosovo. Specifically, it addresses the constitutional regime and the principles regarding minorities therein, meaning the variety of mechanisms for the promotion and protection of minority rights in domestic order of the Republic of Kosovo on one hand, and in the European Union integration path on the other. The paper starts off with the introduction to the topic, explaining the concept of minorities and continuing to explain fundamentals of the constitutional system of Kosovo, confining to the key principles of minority rights’ protection framework. The paper proceeds to …

It’S All Relative: How Linguists And Anthropologists View Language Differently, Thomas Pedtke

Spectrum

No abstract provided.