Digital Commons Network^™

Flows That Teach: Multimodal Hip-Hop Pedagogy For Equity In Special Education, Camille O'Quin, Sara Jozwik

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Hip-Hop can be more than a soundtrack played at home, it can be a bridge between culture, language, and learning at school. This article shows how Hip-Hop pedagogy, translanguaging, and code-meshing can support students with disabilities, especially those who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), in the classroom setting. Grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy and translanguaging theory, the approach uses rhythm, storytelling, and performance to build narrative fluency, language awareness, and confidence. Examples include students drafting rap verses about personal experiences, holding structured cypher circles to practice turn-taking and self-expression, and blending AAVE with Mainstream American English in writing for …

Developing Flow Theory For Black Girl Genius: A Conceptual Framework Grounded In Discrit, Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, And Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Keishana L. Barnes, William C. Hunter

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Twice exceptional Black girls, those who are both intellectually gifted and identified with a disability, navigate classrooms shaped by racism, ableism, and sexism. These overlapping systems often render their brilliance illegible, leading to misidentification, exclusion, and under-support in both gifted and special education. This conceptual essay introduces Flow Theory for Black Girl Genius, a liberatory framework that considers Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit), Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, and Hip-Hop Pedagogy. DisCrit helps uncover the structural barriers that marginalize students at the intersection of race and disability. Endarkened Feminist Epistemology centers ancestral, embodied, and spiritual ways of knowing rooted in Black …

Ai In Arbitration: A Chance To Lead, Not Only A Risk To Manage, Barry Appleton

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Improving Exam Scores: Alternative Next Generation Questions In Curriculum, April Morgan

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Evidence identifies clinical judgment deficits among newly licensed nurses, supporting the integration of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) Clinical Judgment Measurement Model (NCJMM) and Next Generation NCLEX (NGN) strategies. Inconsistent NGN implementation and Assessment Technologies Institute (ATI) Comprehensive Predictor performance established the local problem. This quality improvement project evaluated the impact of implementing NCJMM-aligned NGN instructional strategies, including unfolding case studies and bow-tie questions, on students’ first-attempt achievement of the ATI Comprehensive Predictor benchmark and faculty outcomes. The primary aim was to increase the percentage of students achieving the ATI Comprehensive Predictor benchmark of 76.2% on …

John Alexander V. B. Myers

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

The Effects Of Using Hip-Hop Song Lyrics During Instruction For Students With Emotional And Behavioral Disorders, Jonte C. Taylor, Millie Rodriguez

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Hip-hop pedagogy has emerged as a culturally responsive instructional framework designed to increase student engagement, identity affirmation, and academic achievement by incorporating elements of hip-hop culture into classroom instruction. Despite growing interest in hip-hop-based education, limited empirical research has examined its effectiveness for students with disabilities, particularly students identified with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). This study investigated the effects of using hip-hop song lyrics during English language arts instruction to teach literary devices to three secondary students with EBD using a single-case multiple-baseline-across-participants probe design. Three comparison students receiving traditional textbook-based instruction were also included. Dependent variables included instructional …

Jose Lainez Bueso V. Attorney General United States Of America

2026 Decisions

Agency

Wendi Kraemer V. Township Of Rostraver

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Towards The Synthesis Of Dragonamide E And Analogs Thereof, Dante Glover

Chemistry Theses

Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by a parasite spread through the female sand fly. It is categorized as a Neglected Tropical Disease and can cause very severe symptoms, even death, if left untreated. Symptoms include skin lesions that can cause permanent scarring, and mucosal membrane infections that can cause facial deformities. More aggressive forms of leishmaniasis can lead to infections of internal organs like the liver and/or spleen and can lead to death. Drug resistance of these parasites has rendered treatment limited and the side effects of which can be harmful as well.

Scientists looking towards new treatments for tropical …

Thermophysical Property Studies: 1. Thermodynamic Consistency For Associating Compounds 2. Autoignition Temperature, Cassandra Jane Guffey

Theses and Dissertations

Accurate thermophysical property data are essential for the design, optimization, and safe operation of chemical processes. Properties such as vapor pressure, enthalpy of vaporization, heat capacity, density, and autoignition temperature--which are among the properties studied in this work--are required for equipment sizing, process simulation, hazard assessment, and economic evaluation. A major focus of this dissertation is the application of multi-property thermodynamic consistency techniques to compounds that exhibit strong vapor-phase association. These methods improve confidence in recommended property values by enforcing rigorous thermodynamic relationships among ideal-gas heat capacity, liquid heat capacity, vapor and liquid densities, vapor pressure, and enthalpy of vaporization. …

Recognition Of Autism Characteristics In Females: An Examination Of Stakeholders, Laurel Lyn Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Autism is a neurodevelopmental communication disorder, characterized by differences in social communication, attention, interests, and sensory perception. Diagnostic criteria have historically applied to males, but clinical diagnostic criteria beginning in 2022 now include slight differences in traits comprising the female phenotype. Until recently, autistic females may be missed by the professional and education community or diagnosed later than males. Like their autistic male counterparts, they face an increased risk of suicidal ideation, but they also face more difficulties in peer relationships, academic problems, and increased anxiety and depressive symptoms, but may not get supports. School-age girls spend their days with …

When The Road Leads You Home: A Self-Study Of An Appalachian Return Migrant Educator, Brianna Gerstner

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores one Appalachian educator's beliefs and judgments about her students' literacy practices after returning to her Appalachian hometown to teach at her alma mater. Upon her return, she experienced discomfort with the thoughts she had about her Appalachian students, recognizing that they reinforced stereotypes. Through the S-STEP process, the educator identifies her beliefs and judgments of her students, the teaching practice she engaged in over time, and the changes in her beliefs and judgments during a community literacy project. This period of critical self-study lasted 3 months, and the educator intentionally engaged in culturally sustaining pedagogy. Findings revealed …

Toroidal Plasmonic Nanodimers For Enhanced Near-Infrared Emission In Heterostructured Inp Quantum Dots, Arda Gülücü, Emre Ozan Polat

Turkish Journal of Physics

Near-infrared (NIR) emitters operating in the 650--900 nm spectral range are highly attractive for imaging and sensing in turbid media. However, cadmium-free InP-based quantum dots (QDs) often exhibit limited brightness owing to nonradiative recombination pathways and inefficient photon outcoupling. In particular, heterostructured InP QDs may possess band alignments that induce partial spatial separation of charge carriers, thereby reducing the electron-hole wavefunction overlap. This characteristic modifies the intrinsic recombination dynamics and increases the sensitivity of their emission to the surrounding photonic environment. Here, we investigate silver toroidal plasmonic nanoantenna dimers (Ag TPNDs) using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations as a geometry-tunable platform …

Mathematics Anxiety And Academic Performance In Mathematics, Bradley Vandermissen

Masters Projects

Mathematics anxiety represents a psychological barrier that negatively impacts student academic performance and self-efficacy across all educational levels. Many secondary mathematics students experience physiological stress, self-doubt, and reduced working memory efficiency when encountering mathematical tasks, often leading to disengagement or an over-reliance on artificial intelligence (AI as a learning shortcut rather than an educational tool. Despite the widespread nature of this issue, educators frequently lack the formal training and practical pedagogical strategies necessary to identify, manage, and alleviate mathematics anxiety within their classrooms. Rooted in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, this project addresses the underlying cognitive and biological components of mathematics …

Responsivity Education Reflection Packet For Multigenerational Caregivers, Natalie Holsky

Honors Projects

Caregivers play an essential role in supporting their child’s language development. Through everyday routines, caregivers have countless opportunities to foster strong language skills. Extensive research has examined the influence of caregiver input on language development. Comparatively little research has explored how historical trends in parenting advice across generations may shape caregivers’ use of language facilitation practices. The purpose of my honors project was to examine how generational parenting trends could inform the development of a clinic-to-home language facilitation resource. This resource was designed to help caregivers incorporate language facilitation strategies into everyday routines to increase language-rich interactions at home. A …

Education And Inequality:: Shaping Conflict And Peace In Broken Socio-Economic Structures, Anna Zherdeva, Daniel Kamphambale, Lucía Morales

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

This study engages in a critical literature review that offers insights into systemic and structural problems that immigrants face. Being forced, in many cases, to flee from their countries of origin, migrants face many challenges due to a lack of clear educational pathways, cultural integration and social lifts within the world's most advanced countries. For instance, migrants often experience labour-market resistance, as evidenced by consistent, stagnant rates of advancement into higher positions in their host countries and by their limited integration into communities and society. An additional problem is that segregation by country of origin matters significantly, as migrants face …

An Assessment Of The Multidisciplinary Approach To Fetal Echocardiography Education, Riley Allen

Masters Projects

With congenital heart disease (CHD) being the most common birth defect, there is a growing demand for utilization of fetal echocardiography (FE). In clinical practice FE requires an interdisciplinary approach to performance and patient care, and integration of techniques from both the obstetric and pediatric cardiac areas of medicine. While practitioners align on the need for an interdisciplinary approach to practice and the specific methods of performance, there is little consensus on how to comprehensively educate the sonography workforce. Literature has identified gaps in both the obstetric and pediatric cardiac sonographer education bases, predominantly focusing on the lack of specific …

Clinical Utility Of An Fda-Authorized Artificial Intelligence Imaging Platform In Interstitial Lung Disease Diagnosis, Arjun Prakash Tambe, Ryan Boente, Gautam George, Fayez Kheir, Omid Tahamtani Omran, Kavitha Selvan

Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine Faculty Papers

Background/Objectives: The diagnosis of interstitial lung disease (ILD) is challenging and frequently delayed. Clinically accessible and minimally invasive diagnostic tools are needed to expedite the diagnosis of ILD while minimizing risk to patients. Fibresolve is an imaging artificial intelligence (AI) tool recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in ILD diagnosis and made available to clinicians. The objective of this study was to describe its utility in clinical practice. Methods: We conducted a prospective, observational study of patients across the United States (US) in whom Fibresolve was utilized during routine clinical practice between July 2024 and …

Delirious Pink, Reuben Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

How to enliven a tradition as accomplished as painting? With the spirit of New York City and the techniques of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting as my backbone, I look to my friends, lovers, and fellow artists to form a thesis defined by love, color, feeling, and individuality.

Extreme Heat And Its Impact On Public Transit Ridership In Nyc, Craig Denton

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the connection between extreme heat events and public transit ridership patterns in New York City, with a particular emphasis on low-income communities. It investigates the intersection of socioeconomic factors and heat-related challenges, analyzing how extreme temperature periods influence overall transit use and why certain routes or neighborhoods experience greater declines in ridership during these events.

Utilizing existing literature, NYC-specific transit and climate datasets, and the broader context of transit equity, this research aims to inform strategies that strengthen climate resilience within urban transportation systems. The study’s findings are intended to support policy development and planning initiatives that …

Large-Scale Asymptotics In Fixed-Sample And Sequential Multiple Testing, Rahul Roy

Doctoral Theses

The advent of large-scale data acquisition technologies has led to the routine emergence of massive, dynamically evolving datasets. This has created a pressing need for statistical methodologies capable of operating effectively in both static and sequential data environments. Multiple hypotheses testing, a central tool in such settings, must therefore be adapted to both fixed-sample and sequential frameworks to ensure effective decision-making while controlling error rates. This thesis comprises two main parts. The first part addresses fixed-sample multiple testing under dependence in a Bayesian framework. Building upon the two-group mixture normal model of Bogdan et al. (2011), we extend their methodology …

Bdelloid Rotifers Harbor A Voltage-Gated Proton Channel With Distinct Mechanistic Features, Liang Yan, Chiara Boschetti, Liang Hong

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

Bdelloid rotifers are renowned for their extraordinary resilience. They can survive desiccation and long-term freezing and revive once favorable conditions return. Such remarkable survival abilities suggest that the evolution of specialized molecular adaptations sustain pH homeostasis under extreme environmental stress. In the present study, we identify and functionally characterize an isoform of the voltage-gated proton channel (Hv) from the bdelloid rotifer Adineta ricciae, which we name ArHv2. Unlike its paralog ArHv1 and human Hv1 that activate only at positive membrane potentials and contribute modestly to proton extrusion under normal conditions, the ArHv2 activates even at negative potentials, enabling rapid and …

Influence Of Transboundary Wildfire Smoke On Fine Particulate Matter Concentrations At South Texas Border Schools, Sai Deepak Pinakana, Kabir Bahadur Shah, Owen Temby, Dawid K. Wladyka, Juan L. Gonzalez, Md Saydur Rahman, Katarzyna Sepielak, Amit U. Raysoni

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Exposure to air pollutants in indoor and outdoor school environments poses significant health risks to children due to their heightened vulnerability. Increasing wildfire frequency has intensified transboundary smoke transport, with border communities among the first to experience associated air quality impacts. While the impacts of wildfires on air quality are increasingly recognized through satellite observations and modeling, ground-based observations remain scarce in under-monitored regions. Low-cost air sensors were deployed across schools in the Roma and Rio Grande City areas of Starr County, along the U.S.–Mexico border, for 146-days from November 2023 to April 2024. The raw sensor measurements were corrected …

Sex-Aware Causal Inference Assessment Of The Immune System In Complex Neurodegenerative Diseases, Frida Lona-Durazo, Ross P Byrne, Marc-Olivier Pilon, Michael D Greicius, Marie-Pierre Dubé, Michael E Belloy, Russell L Mclaughlin, Sarah A Gagliano Taliun

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Sex differences, in terms of prevalence, symptoms and disease progression, are established in the aetiology of complex neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, but the underlying biology driving these differences remains poorly understood. There is emerging evidence from genetic and functional analyses affirming the role of the immune system in such diseases, but a thorough assessment of sex differences in the link between the immune system and neurodegenerative diseases remains lacking. Here, we applied a robust causal inference approach, two-sample Mendelian randomization, to evaluate the causal effect of immune-related protein levels on three neurodegenerative diseases …

Nextlongiso: A Comprehensive Nextflow Pipeline For Multi-Dimensional Long-Read Rna-Seq Analysis, Jiang Tan, Yuqing Wu, Yidan Sun

2020-Current year OA Pubs

SUMMARY: Long-read RNA sequencing technologies, including Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), enable direct characterization of full-length transcripts and transcriptome complexity. However, analysis of long-read RNA-seq data remains fragmented across multiple tools, limiting the ability to obtain a unified view of transcript structure, expression, and regulatory variation in long-read transcriptomes. We present NextLongIso, a scalable and reproducible Nextflow pipeline that enables coordinated analysis of multiple layers of transcript regulation. Rather than focusing solely on transcript reconstruction, NextLongIso integrates transcript discovery with downstream regulatory analyses to jointly characterize alternative splicing, isoform switching, transcript boundary dynamics (including alternative promoters and …

Teaching China Beyond Eurocentrism: Intercultural Pedagogy And The Case Of The República Del Reino De La China By Jerónimo Román Zamora, Miriam Diaz Belizon

Comparative Philosophy

Interdisciplinary approaches to teaching China in Western academic contexts often reproduce Eurocentric frameworks that reduce Chinese philosophical and cultural traditions to subordinate objects of analysis. This article proposes an alternative model grounded in intercultural philosophy and the Filosofías del Sur, arguing that China should be approached not as a distant object of representation, but as an epistemic interlocutor capable of transforming philosophical education. The article develops this argument through the recovery of the República del Reino de la China, included in the 1595 edition of Repúblicas del Mundo, as a key example of early intercultural mediation from the European South. …

Tracing The Philosophy Of Toleration Through An Intercultural Lens: Theory, Challenges, And Educational Implications, Xianzhe Hui

Comparative Philosophy

Toleration is usually defined as a permissive attitude toward disagreement or dislike concerning diverse beliefs and practices. In philosophical education, toleration is emphasized both theoretically and in the way teachers and students practice it. Scholars and philosophers are familiar with the connotations and justifications of toleration attributed to Enlightenment philosophers. Toleration has often been regarded as a uniquely Western idea or virtue, rooted in the European Enlightenment values of individual rights and freedom of thought. Recently, however, this viewpoint has been challenged by scholars, who argue that the approaches to diversity in non-Western intellectual traditions should be taken into consideration. …

Intercultural Questioning: Teaching Report On A Question-Oriented Pedagogy In Teaching Chinese Philosophy, Sai Hang Kwok

Comparative Philosophy

Language and cultural barriers pose major obstacles to teaching Chinese philosophy to Western philosophy students. Without a cultural and linguistic background, students often struggle to read the original Chinese philosophical texts. Translation also involves issues of interpretation that are difficult to be settled in undergraduate-level courses. To address this situation, this paper introduces a question-oriented pedagogy called “intercultural questioning”. Instead of aiming at a comprehensive understanding of the entire Chinese philosophical tradition, the question-oriented pedagogy reveals the implicit assumptions in one’s conceptual frameworks and unexamined questions in Western philosophy through the East-West dialogue. Students can obtain philosophical insights from Chinese …

Why Minds Need Bodies: Organismic Unity And Limits Of Artificial Consciousness, Renée Snow

Comparative Philosophy

This paper argues that functional organization alone is not sufficient for phenomenal consciousness or the existence of a unified subject of experience. While many contemporary accounts of artificial consciousness assume that replicating the causal or computational structure of the brain would be sufficient for subjective experience, this paper identifies a deeper constraint: consciousness depends on organismic unity. The argument proceeds through a triangulation of conceptual, empirical, and metaphysical considerations. First, Zuboff’s thought experiment shows that functional organization can be preserved while the unity of the subject dissolves, suggesting that causal pattern replication alone cannot secure subjectivity. Second, findings from neuroscience …

Can Skepticism Be Politically Progressive? An Approach From Zhuang Zi, Tammo Lossau

Comparative Philosophy

Ancient skeptics, both in the West and East, suggest their philosophy as a form of life. One reservation about living as a skeptic is that it turns us into political conformists—this is also Jonathan Ichikawa’s (2024) objection to philosophical skepticism. Skeptics take their own perspective on the world to be limited, and in this sense they will be hesitant to fully embrace a conservative ideology. But the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus recommends that in their actions, skeptics will follow existing laws and common moral beliefs. In this paper, I want to develop a different conception of skepticism based on the …