Digital Commons Network^™

Sharing A Vision With An International Partner Through Photographs, Leah S. Dunn, Diane Ceo-Difrancesco, Rakhi Srivastava

Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to establish a shared vision between the academic program and the international service-learning partner. Through the use of photovoice (Collier & Collier, 1986), we conducted a needs assessment to determine the partner’s priorities. Analysis of inter-view transcripts and photos yielded themes representing the partner’s needs and were the basis of the shared vision, adding clarity to the purpose of the experience.

Tom Wingfield Is The Villain: A Re-Examination Of The Glass Menagerie, Genevive K. Bevell

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This essay is an exploration of the play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, through a feminist lens that offers a new interpretation of the famous play, supported by evidence from Williams’s own personal history, feminist interpretations of Williams’s work, and the discussion of what a protagonist really is. I argue that Tom, who is traditionally considered the protagonist, operates as an unreliable narrator and, therefore, the antagonist to Amanda and his sister Laura, impeding their happiness and sense of well-being. I propose that The Glass Menagerie is not about a man defying societal expectations or choosing happiness in …

Dilemmas Encountered While Planning Social And/Or Political Elementary Mathematics Tasks, Amanda Sugimoto, Simon Byeonguk Han, Courtney Koestler, Eva Thanheiser, Mathew Felton-Koestler, Molly Robinson

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

A mathematical task rooted in social and/or political contexts has the potential to engage students in exploring their own real-ities and learning about the realities of others while building their mathematical knowledge. While there are planning and in-structional practices recommended for these types of tasks, no single practice can fully capture the nuances and challenges thatteachers might encounter. Therefore, this study identified dilemmas encountered by a team of mathematics education research-ers while planning a mathematical task rooted in social and/or political contexts. Using qualitative analysis, the researchersidentified three planning dilemmas: (a) what social and/or political goal to establish, (b) how …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Eu-Substituted Bismuth-Based Superconductors Via Chemical Sol-Gel Method, Firas Salim Abed, Lamia K. Abbas

Baghdad Science Journal

The study seeks to investigate the role of Eu substitution in improving the characteristics of bismuth-based superconductors, employing the sol-gel technique as a flexible synthesis methodology. The study is focused on superconductor samples of the composition Bi_1.7-xPb_0.3Eu_xSr_1.9Ba_0.1Ca2Cu3O_10+δ, where x ranged from 0.0 to 0.5 through systematic investigation where the Pb and Ba are maintained at fixed values 0.3 and 0.1 respectively. The influence of partially substituting Eu for Bi on superconducting characteristics was thoroughly explored. Electrical resistivity measurements unveiled a notable enhancement in critical temperature (Tc) with …

Improving Staff Knowledge On Hourly Rounding Using The 4ps To Reduce The Fall Rate, Chukwuemeka Igboanugo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

I designed this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project to develop an educational program that increases staff knowledge of hourly rounding using an evidence-based approach, specifically pain, position, potty, and possession (the 4Ps), to prevent falls among residents in a long-term care facility. According to facility leadership, the observed gap in practice was the nursing staff members’ lack of knowledge in performing hourly rounding. The facility’s fall records for the lockdown units indicated a surge in fall rate, with 32 falls among 62 residents per month, reflecting a need for action. The practice-focused question guiding the project was: For staff …

Language Teacher Agency Of Dual Language Bilingual Education Teachers: Incorporating Translanguaging And Funds Of Knowledge In Blended Learning, Grace Jue Yeon Kim

Faculty Journal Articles

Bilingual teachers enact agency as language policymakers and advocate for

students in providing holistic support. This ethnographic study examines 2nd

and 4th grade Spanish-English dual language bilingual education teachers’

agentive actions in implementing pedagogical strategies informed by translanguaging

and funds of knowledge during blended learning in 2021. The

findings revealed that the teachers identified challenges and posed questions

as they transitioned to blended learning for the first time. They celebrated

the positives of returning to in-person schooling, agentively

navigated the new environment, and provided holistic support for the

students. The teachers also supported emergent bilingual students’ language

and content learning …

Understanding Cancer Survivorship Care Needs Using Amazon Reviews: Content Analysis, Algorithm Development, And Validation Study, Liwei Wang, Qiuhao Lu, Rui Li, Taylor B. Harrison, Heling Jia, Ming Huang, Heidi Dowst, Rui Zhang, Hoda Badr, Jungwei W. Fan, Hongfang Liu

Department of Medical Oncology Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Complementary therapies are being increasingly used by cancer survivors. As a channel for customers to share their feelings, outcomes, and perceived knowledge about the products purchased from e-commerce platforms, Amazon consumer reviews are a valuable real-world data source for understanding cancer survivorship care needs.

OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aimed to highlight the potential of using Amazon consumer reviews as a novel source for identifying cancer survivorship care needs, particularly related to symptom self-management. Specifically, we present a publicly available, manually annotated corpus derived from Amazon reviews of health-related products and develop baseline natural language processing models using deep …

Understanding Cancer Survivorship Care Needs Using Amazon Reviews: Content Analysis, Algorithm Development, And Validation Study, Liwei Wang, Qiuhao Lu, Rui Li, Taylor B Harrison, Heling Jia, Ming Huang, Heidi Dowst, Rui Zhang, Hoda Badr, Jungwei W Fan, Hongfang Liu

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Complementary therapies are being increasingly used by cancer survivors. As a channel for customers to share their feelings, outcomes, and perceived knowledge about the products purchased from e-commerce platforms, Amazon consumer reviews are a valuable real-world data source for understanding cancer survivorship care needs.

Objective: In this study, we aimed to highlight the potential of using Amazon consumer reviews as a novel source for identifying cancer survivorship care needs, particularly related to symptom self-management. Specifically, we present a publicly available, manually annotated corpus derived from Amazon reviews of health-related products and develop baseline natural language processing models using deep …

Reconsidering The American Dream And U.S. Latino Culture In A College Spanish Service-Learning Course, Zak K. Montgomery, Serena B. Ugoretz, Sarah E. Montgomery, Sarah Vander Zanden, Ashley Jorgensen, Mirsa Rudic

Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education

This study explores how a joint Photovoice project about the American Dream between a U.S. Latino culture course and a multicultural middle school class influenced college students’ perceptions of Latino culture. In addition to outlining the service-learning course design, the study also analyzes the trajectory of the students’ understanding of the American Dream. As a result of the partnership, college students’ American Dreams shifted away from the archetypal personal success narrative toward a more civically- oriented approach.

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