Digital Commons Network^™

Reading Beyond Research Results: The Hidden Curriculum In A College And Urban High Schools Partnership, Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers

Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

The article draws from a study of a Gear Up partnership between a predominantly white middle class college and four urban high schools with a majority of low-income students of color. Teacher education candidates participated in community engagement through Gear Up at four urban high schools. The study shows that both college and high school students benefited from the partnership. However, employing internal and anticolonial theoretical lenses reveals the hidden curriculum that the positive results attained from the partnership may serve to buttress the myth of dominant culture’s supremacy.

Design Thinking (A Visual Critique), Ricardo Sosa

Learn X Design Conference Series

This visual submission presents a provocative visual argument (Blair 2012) that aims to interrogate the mainstream “Design Thinking” approach adopted in a variety of contexts including in an increasing number of design schools. By reducing complex high-order practices and mapping them onto the five-step DT sequence, the paper invites readers to interrogate the value, validity and usefulness of portraying design activity in such terms. What is gained and lost by reducing rich and complex activities as well-defined processes? What may these mappings suggest about how we teach and learn to navigate the rich territories of design? What is occluded in …

A Study On The Development Of An Educational Board Game For Cultural Heritage Using A Design Thinking Approach, Lung Chieh Chao, Ju-May Wen

Learn X Design Conference Series

This study addresses the pressing challenge of preserving and effectively teaching Indigenous languages and cultures in the context of globalization. Centering on the Paiwan Indigenous culture in Qijia Village, Pingtung County, the research investigates how design thinking can be employed to develop an educational board game that responds to the language learning needs of children. The study adopts the five stages of design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Through interviews and observations, the needs of students and teachers are identified, and culturally relevant elements are incorporated into the game design to enhance both language acquisition and cultural awareness. …

Exploring Cultural Frames And The Visual Language Of Rituals, Amrita Datta, Amy Fortunato

Learn X Design Conference Series

In Visual Communication Design, significant emphasis on intercultural communication has aided the development of intercultural competence. This case study investigates how design education can develop cross-cultural awareness by focusing on how cultural frames evolve through experiences and societal perception while becoming increasingly layered and complex. To fully extricate oneself from one's cultural context is challenging, but raising awareness of its limitations and subtleties is achievable. Recognizing diverse cultural frames can broaden one's perspective, leading to a more nuanced understanding of both the articulation and consumption of messaging in visual communication. Two educators located in different socio-political contexts in the United …

Multilingual Design, Isabel Meirelles, Diane Mikhael, Lesley-Ann Noel, Lesley-Ann Noel

Learn X Design Conference Series

This conversation is an interview between three professors from a university located in a large cosmopolitan city in Canada. The interview to understand the motivation behind the similar approaches of two of the professors. During the conversation, the professors explore the complexity and opportunities for curricula innovation when teaching design in a very diverse context. They explore how themes of pluriversality, multiculturalism, identities, resilience, and how complicated intersectionality and the local context intertwine and have impacted their curricula, and how these themes can inform the design classes. The professors’ focus in the conversation is on pedagogical strategies, specifically, how they …

Artificial Intelligence In Future Art And Design Education, Tore Andre Ringvold, Ingri Strand, Peter Haakonsen, Kari Saasen Strand

Learn X Design Conference Series

What future challenges and opportunities might AI bring to art and design education, and how can the educational system best be prepared? In a changing society, rapid technological developments can change the need for competences. An example of rapidly evolving technology is artificial intelligence, here limited to text-to-image generation. This is technology where you can write a text to generate an image in a digital system that is trained by large amounts of image and text combinations. Towards an unknown future with constantly new technological innovations, we should have an open but critical look at the opportunities and challenges that …

Design Thinking Pedagogy In A Culture Of Information Immediacy, Ahu Yolac, Philip Plowright

Learn X Design Conference Series

This paper investigates design thinking pedagogy within the context of information immediacy, analysing student work from the Design Principles studio, an interdisciplinary introductory course for first-year students enrolled in five professional design programs. The course emphasizes foundational design thinking skills, including divergent and convergent thinking, abstraction, coherence, cohesiveness, and the hierarchical organization of project information. Through qualitative analysis of student projects, we identify three distinct patterns of engagement: procedural application, emerging integration, and flexible, critical workflow. These patterns reveal how students navigate and internalize design thinking tactics in an era of abundant information and digital tools. We discuss the pedagogical …

Design Pedagogies To Engage Students In Design For Persons With Dementia Through A Multidisciplinary Collaborative Approach, Cláudia Lima

Learn X Design Conference Series

This paper addresses design pedagogies in a Portuguese university aimed at educating and engaging undergraduate students in design practices that meet emerging societal challenges related to health and wellbeing. It explores contributions of design in dementia contexts through a multidisciplinary approach involving students and faculty, health professionals and persons with dementia. The students were assigned to design sensory and cognitive stimulation artefacts for persons with dementia who attend the “Memória de Mim” Day Centre, a service run by the Alzheimer Portugal association. A fundamental premise was to draw on the biographical and cultural features as well as the life stories …

Disconnected Measures: Exploring The Relationship Between Critical Thinking Tests And Design Studio Outcomes, Philip Plowright, Ahu Yolac

Learn X Design Conference Series

This analysis investigates the deployment of the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (CCTT-Z) as a placement tool to assess incoming students' readiness for a design thinking studio at the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University. In 2018, the college shifted its first-year curriculum from an arts-based model to one grounded in design thinking, emphasizing process orientated practices focused on cognitive skill development, problem-solving, and human-centred design. The college aimed to identify students potentially unprepared for the cognitive demands of design thinking so focused support could be actualized. In Fall 2024, the CCTT-Z was administered to 149 …

How To Sketch Things With Words?, Suleyman Enes Himaki, Ozge Merzali Celikoglu, Elif Sen Himaki

Learn X Design Conference Series

This study investigates the relationship between verbal and visual modes of thinking among novice design students, focusing on their mutual influences and exchanges. Conducted within an undergraduate course, Design Communication II, the study engaged eleven students in a series of exercises and workshops over a fourteen-week period designed to facilitate transitions between verbal and visual thinking. The research aimed to explore the effects of incorporating verbal exercises into a drawing course, understand how students respond to a curriculum that equally emphasizes verbal and visual activities, and assess the impact of verbal discussions on visual communication methods. Using participant observation as …

Everyday Interactions With The Tecnosphere: A Critical Educational Path, Annapaola Vacanti, Alessandro Lodovini

Learn X Design Conference Series

Contemporary design risks becoming irrelevant or complicit in a technocratic agenda that prioritizes evidence over values unless future designers are trained to critically understand technology and its impacts on social, economic, political, environmental, and psychological structures. What role does design play in this process? What stance will tomorrow’s designer embrace? These questions form the backbone of the Theories and History of Design course at Università Iuav di Venezia, which focused on the transformation of everyday actions mediated by technology. At the sociological level, two perspectives collide: a critical approach that acknowledges risks to individual freedoms and a techno-optimist view that …

Framework For Ethical Worldbuilding With Solidarity-Driven Co-Design, Laura Cechanowicz, Steven Zuiker, Michelle Jordan, Ed Finn, Ruth Wylie

Learn X Design Conference Series

Diversity is a fundamental resource in co-design processes; however, centering wide-ranging participants around a design rather than individual, disciplinary, or other forms of expertise can be challenging. Expanding the scope of design to include the entanglements of temporality and community amplifies these challenges. Addressing these challenges requires a reconfiguration of the fundamental relationships between designers, researchers, research participants, collaborators, and the land and place where research and design outcomes occur, including a deeper form of engagement with communities. Despite the substantial groundwork existing approaches have developed, emerging efforts challenge us to conceptualize an ethical approach for recognizing, working with, and …

From Diamonds To Braids: New Metaphors For Teaching Transformative Design, Melanie Kahl

Learn X Design Conference Series

Drawing from my experience as a hybrid practitioner-educator, this pedagogical statement examines how we teach the invisible dimensions of transformative design. While traditional design process diagrams and metaphors—from squiggles to diamonds—effectively structure design activities, they fall short in teaching students how to facilitate transformative design processes. I propose braiding as a complementary cross-cultural metaphor that illuminates the concurrent processes woven through design work. I define four fundamental strands that expert practitioners weave into complex design processes: learning (growing capacity), narrative (weaving stories), relationships (growing connections and trust), and change (rehearsing transformation). This framework emerged from my practice of teaching students …

Teaching Contemporary Design Methods In Highly Regulated Industries: A Case Study, Jasmine Sarin, Asawer Ahyed, Santosh Basapur, Raj Shah, Zach Pino

Learn X Design Conference Series

This paper presents an examination of teaching contemporary design methods to professionals in highly regulated industries; defined as sectors characterized by extensive government oversight, strict compliance requirements, standardized processes, and formal risk management protocols that significantly constrain operational decision-making and innovation approaches. While design thinking has gained widespread adoption across many sectors, professionals in highly regulated industries often need help with design approaches due to perceived conflicts with evidence-based practices and regulatory requirements. Through a structured series of workshops, we contended with these dynamics while introducing systems thinking and futuring methods to medical researchers and community navigators. The study addresses …

Service-Learning Pathologies And Prognoses, Roy Schwartzman

Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

This essay diagnoses and suggests treatments for several pathologies that afflict service-learning. Structural challenges include geographic isolation and optimization of institutional administration. Student challenges include reinforcing stereotypes, deficiencies in practical skills, elitism regarding suitable service, underdeveloped empathy, and excessive focus on time spent in service. Community partner challenges include appropriately defining student labor and systematically under-reporting negative experiences. The prognosis explores how service-learning projects could instigate student engagement with the systemic nature of social injustice.

A Method For Assessing Token Importance In Code-Switched Text Through Language Boundary Analysis, Mithun Kumar S R

Defensive Publications Series

Existing explainable AI (XAI) attribution methods for natural language processing (NLP) models may have difficulty determining token importance in code-switched text, potentially leading to explanations that do not fully capture the emphasis conveyed by switching languages or the structural role of words at language boundaries. A method is described that can address this by performing token-level language identification to locate boundaries between languages in an input text. A contextual weighting engine can then assign weights to tokens within a code-switched segment and to boundary tokens adjacent to the switch. These weights may be used to modulate raw attribution scores generated …

Transformative Opportunities For Community Engagement Within Teacher Education: Creating Opportunities To Prepare Preservice Teachers For Urban Environments In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell

Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

Preservice teachers need meaningful opportunities to engage in authentic community activities that expand their cultural horizons and frames of reference, strengthening their preparation for urban teaching. Abramson Science and Technology Magnet in New Orleans East opened the 2007-08 school year without a library or functioning classroom libraries. Providing access to books is a cornerstone of reading development; thus, Louisiana State University education candidates engaged in a project that established classroom libraries in every K-8 classroom.

Recent Arrivals: Refugee Resettlement In Nebraska, Emira Ibrahimpašić, Julia Reilly

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

One of the stories Nebraskans tell themselves is that the story of Nebraska is a story of immigration. One of the most recent versions of this story is that Nebraska is one of the best and most welcoming places in the country to be a resettled refugee. In many respects, this narrative is true, but as with all narratives, reality is more complicated. This chapter attempts to paint a fuller picture by providing a detailed history of the foundation of Nebraska’s refugee resettlement program, and an overview of five of the most populous refugee communities in Nebraska. First, we survey …

The Impacts Of The Lack Of Access To Information And Communication Technologies (Ict) On African American Students, Alisha Shanta Williams

Student Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study is to examine the relationship between the lack of access to information and communication technologies and the grade point averages among African American students in Arkansas Rural Delta schools. The problem addressed in this qualitative phenomenological study is limited access to technology among African American students in the Rural Arkansas Delta and its influence on grade point averages and overall academic success. This research strived to explore and portray the experiences of students facing extenuating circumstances and barriers with technological resources and the effect on their achievement. The methodology used is qualitative, and …

One Is The Loneliest Number: The Impact Of Social Isolation On Blaberus Discoidalis, Jaden Jackson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Isolation in humans and its consequences has been documented by researchers as early as the 1700s (McNeil et al., 1984). More recently, interest in the impact of social isolation has been renewed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the studies covering social isolation and the COVID-19 pandemic rely on self-report measures obtained through questionaries or interviews. Studying social isolation experimentally is difficult due to risk factors associated with isolating one from conspecifics. This is particularly true when studying humans. Animal models of social isolation are important as they allow for implementation of necessary controls needed to establish …

The Rider (2025-09-22), Daniela Martinez Salazar

The Rider Archives

Vol. 11, No. 4

Retracted: Idea Density And Grammatical Complexity As Neurocognitive Markers, Diego Iacono, Gloria Feltis

Department of Neurology Faculty Papers

Language, a uniquely human cognitive faculty, is fundamentally characterized by its capacity for complex thoughts and structured expressions. This review examines two critical measures of linguistic performance: idea density (ID) and grammatical complexity (GC). ID quantifies the richness of information conveyed per unit of language, reflecting semantic efficiency and conceptual processing. GC, conversely, measures the structural sophistication of syntax, indicative of hierarchical organization and rule-based operations. We explore the neurobiological underpinnings of these measures, identifying key brain regions and white matter pathways involved in their generation and comprehension. This includes linking ID to a distributed network of semantic hubs, like …

Chimes: September 22, 2025, Calvin University

Chimes

Parking prices increase: How are students feeling? by Addy Offutt & Ian Tjoelker

"Famous last words": Calvin Theatre Company's latest 24-hour theatre by McKenna Wilkilson

Student Senate's bright hopes for a new year by Jorie Cho

Dining in looks different this year: Ex-ploring dining hall changes by Evangeline Anga

Constitution Day celebration sparks dialogue on campus by Ella Vanden Berg

To cut language is to cut identity: A call to Calvin's conscience by Sarah Sparling

The Sudanese Identity In The Mirror Of Colonial And Post-Independence History, Abdalla Galaleldeen

The Journal of Social Encounters

After independence, Sudan’s political elite adopted colonial-inspired policies that sought to divide the country into North and South (Arabs versus Africans). This policy was further reinforced by the civil wars and by the failures of the Sudanese political elite to construct a cohesive national identity. In the post-independence period, one elite group aligned itself with an Arab identity, while another embraced an African identity. Logically, therefore, both identities—Islamic-Arab and African—encompass the majority of the population. Yet, while Islamists and Africanists each claimed to represent this majority, neither addressed the contradictions inherent in their positions. As the tension between the Islamic-Arab …

Engaging The Somali Diaspora: A Case Study Of One Agency’S Community Programming Approach, Farhia Abdi

The Journal of Social Encounters

This case study investigates how a local community agency engages with the Somali diaspora to design and implement culturally responsive services, such as the Settlement and Integration Program. It also explores the potential of fostering meaningful dialogue with community members to inform the development of culturally sensitive programming. The research question guiding this study was developed by findings from previous research, which highlighted the significance of community engagement, sustained dialogue, and the necessity for agencies to design clearly defined programs. These programs should prioritize active participation from community members in both the creation and implementation of tailored initiatives.

Dalit Poetry On The Eve Of Indian Independence: Gurram Jashuva And The Quest For Critical Consciousness And Collective Remembering, Chris Conway

The Journal of Social Encounters

The Dalit Literary movement irrupted on the scene in the early 1970s in the state of Maharashtra, India. Unblinking in its criticism of casteism and unnerving in its depiction of Dalit oppression, the movement sought to concretize the political aims of B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) through cultivating a critical Dalit consciousness liberated from caste identity and history. The movement enjoyed success in uniting Dalit groups across the country under this new name. However, fifty years later a new generation of Dalit and Dalit-supporting thinkers have begun to critically examine the implications of Dalit identity focusing particularly on its rootedness in suffering …

Democracy, Rights, Historical Memory, And Interfaith Relations In The Works Of Fatima Mernissi And Asma Uddin, Jon Armajani

The Journal of Social Encounters

The works of Moroccan-born Muslim scholar Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015) and United States-born Muslim scholar Asma T. Uddin (b. 1980) are distinctive contributions in modern conversations about the intersections of Islam, law, human and civil rights as well as historical memory and interfaith relations (AncestryLibrary, n.d.; Fox, 2015; Florida Bar, n.d.; Justia Lawyers, n.d.; Rodoski, 2011; Sadiqi, 2018).[i] Mernissi, who was a professor of sociology at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, and Uddin, who is an attorney and scholar based in the United States, are influential and delve into the intricate relationships between Islamic ideas and modern legal frameworks, …

Our Bare Life: The Care Manifesto, Homo Sacer, And Hannah Arendt On Memory, Spontaneous Community, And Postwar Authoritarianism, Sam Grayck

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Problem Videogame Playing Scale: A Preliminary Study Of Measurement Invariance Between English And Malay, Jia Yuin Fam, Rumaya Juhari, Zainal Madon, Mohd Najmi Daud

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

Purpose: Distinguishing between problematic and non-problematic gamers is a priority concern. Although the Problem Videogame Playing (PVP) Scale might be useful as a screening tool of IGD, there is little evidence to support the measurement invariance of the PVP scale. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the English and Malay versions of the PVP scale. Methods: A total of 646 secondary school students aged between 12 and 18 years were recruited to participate in this study. Results: The unidimensional structure of the PVP scale was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. The PVP scale correlates well with other …

Teacher Perceptions Of The Mental Health And Socio-Emotional Challenges Of English Language Learners, Nilufer Guler, Dincer Guler, Kyle Bush

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

A fast-growing percentage of students in K–12 classrooms are English language learner (ELL) students, and a large number of these students are experiencing a vast array of academic and non-academic challenges at school. Many ELL challenges involve inadequate socio-emotional learning (SEL) skill development, as well as mental health obstacles, and many schools are not equipped with the resources needed to address and resolve these challenges for ELLs.

In this study, we focus on teacher observations of the SEL and mental health challenges that K–12 students face. In the initial survey, 120 teachers participated regarding ELLs and these challenges. Following the …