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Developing Special Education Advocates: What Changes during an Advocacy Training Program?
Get PDFBackground: Special education advocacy trainings, such as the Volunteer Advocacy Project (VAP), have the goal of training advocates who can eventually support families in accessing needed services for students with disabilities. In addition to the training goal of increasing participants\u27 special education knowledge and advocacy comfort, it is unknown if the VAP improves other participant outcomes related to later advocacy.
Specific Aims: In this study, we asked: (1) Do VAP participants improve from pre‐ to post‐test on knowledge and advocacy comfort, as well as on role identity, involvement in the disability community, and empowerment?; (2) Do participants\u27 roles and levels of education moderate improvements in these outcomes?; and (3) Do participants who are differentially higher or lower on any of these variables at the pre‐test show greater improvement from pre‐ to post‐test on one or all other variables?
Method: Participants included 70 graduates of the VAP from 2014 to 2016. These participants completed pre‐test and post‐test assessments with measures on: special education knowledge, advocacy comfort, role identity, involvement, and empowerment.
Findings: Results showed significant change in knowledge, comfort, involvement, and empowerment from pre‐test to post‐test. Only level of education significantly moderated the change in role identity from pre‐test to post‐test, with those with high school education increasing their role identity compared to those with a college degree or more. Empowerment was closely related to pre‐test levels and to change scores for all other variables.
Discussion: Implications for future research and practice are discussed, including the need to better understand moderators of treatment effect and mechanisms of change for advocacy trainings
The Challenges of American Education Reform: The Common Core Standards for School Mathematics
Get PDFTeaching and Learning for this Moment: How a Trauma Informed Lens Can Guide Our Praxis
Get PDFIn this time of COVID-19, continued and relentless violence against BIPOC, organized resistance by many young people, and violent institutionalized attempts to suppress resistance, demonstrations and social change movements, what should educators be thinking about as we return to our college classrooms? In this short piece, we share our thinking and experience about our students’ psycho-social needs and our belief that faculty must be focused both on students’ and faculty’s socio-political context and students’ and faculty’s emotional wellbeing as we think about teaching and learning for this moment
Achieving Broadened Accountability in Nonprofit Governance
Get PDFKnowledge of obstacles to achieving Broadened Accountability (BA) in the nonprofit sector and possible paths towards overcoming them has lagged. This paper attempts to stimulate research and contribute to such knowledge by exploring the role that a Community of Practice (CoP) can play in avoiding governance dilemmas and developing grounded concepts around how certain relational practices contribute to the formation of a CoP. The study\u27s ethnographic methods recorded and analyzed real-life interactions involving a board chair-CEO pair. The paper presents narrative description of these actions to convey its key contribution - a process model for overcoming obstacles to achieving BA
Security Culture: Surveillance and Responsibilization in a Prisoner Reentry Organization
Get PDFAs they have become increasingly common, prisoner reentry organizations have become a topic of interest to ethnographers, particularly those focused on race crime and justice. Reentry organizations are typically understood in terms of the social services they provide with the purpose of easing their clients’ social reintegration after incarceration. However, ethnographers of nonprofit prisoner reentry organizations have interpreted them as linked to a broader project of disciplinary poverty governance. Based on participant observation and interview evidence of a government-run prisoner reentry organization in a large northeastern city, I argue that an overarching security culture structured not only the organization’s security and surveillance practices, but also its disciplinary service provision. I argue that security culture also helps explain staff attitudes toward clients, and clients’ response to the organization as an extension of their experience of punishment. This ethnography builds on previous work through its specific examination of frequently taken-for-granted concrete security practices in conjunction with social service programming in order to highlight the overall effects of a government-run prisoner reentry organization’s security culture
Young Adult Financial Literacy and Its Underlying Factors
Get PDFThis thesis discusses the current state of financial education and young adult financial literacy in the United States. Financial literacy is the level of personal finance knowledge an individual requires to make beneficial financial decisions. The United States faces a financial literacy crisis in young adults evidenced by failing scores of assessments administered by the Jump$tart Coalition, a leader in researching financial literacy in young adults. This thesis presents research and analysis of personal finance assessment scores from students of Franklin High School, Massachusetts. Assessments were administered to personal finance, business, and history students. The majority of students failed the assessment, and this thesis explores possible factors explaining why
Stem Cell Therapy as an Alternative for Osteoarthritis of the Knee
Get PDFIn this thesis, I introduce the disease of osteoarthritis and the popular treatments in use for patients today. I will pay specific attention to the knee replacement because it is the most common treatment for end stage osteoarthritis. Finally, I will look at the up and coming stem cell therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee through an examination of case studies currently being run around the world. To conclude, I will suggest which treatment appears to be the best treatment for each specific patient
Obesity Promotes Cooperation of Cancer Stem-Like Cells and Macrophages to Enhance Mammary Tumor Angiogenesis
Get PDFObesity is correlated with worsened prognosis and treatment resistance in breast cancer. Macrophage-targeted therapies are currently in clinical trials, however, little is known about how obesity may impact treatment efficacy. Within breast adipose tissue, obesity leads to chronic, macrophage-driven inflammation, suggesting that obese breast cancer patients may benefit from these therapies. Using a high fat diet model of obesity, we orthotopically transplanted cancer cell lines into the mammary glands of obese and lean mice. We quantified changes in tumor invasiveness, angiogenesis and metastasis, and examined the efficacy of macrophage depletion to diminish tumor progression in obese and lean mice. Mammary tumors from obese mice grew significantly faster, were enriched for cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) and were more locally invasive and metastatic. Tumor cells isolated from obese mice demonstrated enhanced expression of stem cell-related pathways including Sox2 and Notch2. Despite more rapid growth, mammary tumors from obese mice had reduced necrosis, higher blood vessel density, and greater macrophage recruitment. Depletion of macrophages in obese tumor-bearing mice resulted in increased tumor necrosis, reduced endothelial cells, and enhanced recruitment of CD8+ T cells compared to IgG-treated controls. Macrophages may be an important clinical target to improve treatment options for obese breast cancer patients
Barely Bonded: Affective Politics and the Gendered Struggle for Water in Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru
Get PDFAffect is increasingly understood as a critical element of political life and collective action in Latin America and elsewhere. It is critical to generating participation in collective action projects, sustaining or collapsing action, and how participants interpret the meanings and values of a project and the social relationships within it. More broadly, affective political experiences are markers of the sense of belonging or disaffection from others and broader political systems that are central to civic life. The meanings of participation after projects fade are often attributed mainly to the collective events themselves, and draw on one-off interviews after the events decline, or short ethnographies relatively close in time to the collective actions. As well, they often foreground the positive experiences that participants recall from collective action. Using 48 interviews and three years of participant observation, which followed 12 years of political and social engagement with women residents of Villa El Salvador (VES) in Lima, Peru, we challenge all three of these perspectives. The women were involved in a 20-year, materially successful, brokered collective action project to install water and sanitation systems in their neighborhood. The data reveal that long-term participants recalled actions in collective terms, but recounted affective experiences—mainly senses of abandonment and struggle—in individualistic terms. Unlike what most studies of collective action have concluded, these stories of being “barely bonded” to co-participants and leaders were not attributed to the collective actions themselves: they were told as part of stories of life-long gendered experiences of personal and state violence, state and family abandonment, and corrupt political practices in Peru. These affects were expressed with an insistence on sympathy from author 1, who has had long-term care relationships with people in VES. The methods and findings extend Latin American collective action scholarship that has documented disappointment and civil disaffection as outcomes of collective action, showing that longer-term forms of politics and relationships in which people’s political lives unfold (including with analysts), rather than collective action projects themselves, can reveal richer senses of the meanings of participation in collective action for civic life
The (Ab)uses of CRISPR-Mediated Human Genome Editing
Get PDFMany deleterious genes give rise to disease. In fact, a mutation of a single gene can cause over 10,000 human disorders, including, but not limited to, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, red-green color blindness, and Huntington disease. Such mutations, however, can now be precisely revised, removed, or replaced using gene-editing technologies. Most recently, CRISPR-Cas9 has been used to accurately repair disease-causing mutations and thus prevent the inheritance of genetic diseases. Many conditions, however, are nonlife-threatening and do not affect an individual’s quality of life. Should they be eradicated, too? What about treatable diseases? In addition to modifying existing genes, scientists can insert novel ones. Should scientists be able to introduce enhanced genes (i.e., select for favorable traits) such as a specific eye color, athleticism, intelligence, etc.? Where is the line drawn? Life-changing scientific discoveries are being made every day but, as with many new discoveries, comes the risk of harmful use. With each scientific breakthrough, scientists and nonscientists should come together to discuss the current state of research, expected future developments and their possible ramifications on society