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Dance Drama Fusion: A Reflection on Community Pedagogy, Practice, and Arts Education
Full text linkFor our senior thesis project, we conducted five theater and dance workshops for youth that centered around emotional identification and movement-based storytelling at three community sites within the Hartford region. We did two workshops with the YWCA KidsLink at two of their after-school programs, two workshops at the Montessori Magnet School, and one workshop with the Boys and Girls Club. We chose this project with the intention of growing as educators and building relationships with community partner organizations. A community partner organization is “an existing organization within the community who already serves the target population in some way” (Community Access to Child Health). A successful community partnership shares a common goal. Through this project, we intersected our interest in being theater and dance educators with the desire to work in the Hartford community. This project is an expansion of what we have learned regarding arts and community work in the Theater and Dance department, with a target audience of youth
Building Trust to Extinguish Burnout: A Qualitative Study of Hospital, State, and Federal Policies that Impact Pediatric Nurse Burnout in Connecticut
Full text linkThis thesis explores how federal and state governments, as well as individual hospitals, respond or fail to respond to pediatric nurse burnout. The problem of nurse burnout is not new, and can cause nurses to make mistakes on shift, experience increased anxiety and depression, and increase risk of patient death or injury. Solutions to burnout in healthcare workers have been organized at the hospital, state, and federal government level. However, this thesis examines a lack of research on pediatric nurse burnout more specifically. After reviewing the national landscape of hospital-based solutions, short-term policy solutions, and long-term policy solutions, I examine the effects of policies within one hospital and state through twelve interviews with pediatric nurses at Connecticut Children’s Hospital. I find that in pediatric nurses, burnout is cyclical and relational – reliant on fluctuations in staffing patterns and resulting dynamics both among nurses and between nurses and hospital management. Because nurses often do not trust hospital administrators, anti-burnout programs that require more hospital involvement are utilized less and viewed more negatively, especially by nurses who have lower trust in the hospital. Regarding state-level policies, nurses want to be involved in creating ratios (as Connecticut’s current policy enables), but they also want the government to have a strong enforcement mechanism to hold hospitals accountable for staffing ratios. Even though they seek government enforcement, nurses express doubt that policymakers understand or care about their specific circumstances. Overall, I find multiple policy solutions to the problem of nursing burnout in Connecticut, at the hospital level, short-term state level, and long-term state level. Connecticut Children’s could increase the effectiveness and awareness of preexisting programs, combat the cyclical nature of burnout by hiring break nurses on each unit to address understaffing, and address the relationality of burnout by adding nurse retention programs to encourage trust in the hospital. For the short-term, the state should alter its current staffing ratio policy to increase its own power in enforcement and allow nurses to report unsafe ratios. Finally, over the long-term, the state should make substantial contributions to nursing schools to help build out the nursing pipeline in a way that shows they value professional nurse expertise
The Influence of Preventive Dental Care and its Role on the Patient-Provider Relationship
Full text linkTrinity College Student Participation and Engagement During and After Online Learning
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic put professors and students in difficult positions of virtual learning, and students in the class of 2024 were put in a particularly difficult situation as their first experience of college was filled with isolation and fear. Since the pandemic happened so recently, there is limited research investigating the differences in student engagement and performance with online classes compared to in-person, however, those that have conducted research have found that online does not facilitate communication and engagement to the degree that in-person does. My research study aims to answer the question, how do Trinity College students and faculty describe classroom engagement and participation between the periods of online learning (2020-2021) versus face-to-face learning (2022-2023)? Through qualitative interviews with professors and students at Trinity College, I found that students and faculty reported a significant deficit in classroom participation and engagement during the online learning period which was mitigated when returning to in-person learning. These findings emphasize the importance of in-person learning and call into question the value of online classes at Trinity College
Correlating structural changes in thermoresponsive hydrogels to the optical response of embedded plasmonic nanoparticles
No full textStimuli-responsive microgels, composed of small beads with soft, deformable polymer networks swollen through a combination of synthetic control over the polymer and its interaction with water, form a versatile platform for development of multifunctional and biocompatible sensors. The interfacial structural variation of such materials at a nanometer length scale is essential to their function, but not yet fully comprehended. Here, we take advantage of the plasmonic response of a gold nanorod embedded in a thermoresponsive microgel (AuNR@PNIPMAm) to monitor structural changes in the hydrogel directly near the nanorod surface. By direct comparison of the plasmon response against measurements of the hydrogel structure from dynamic light scattering and nuclear magnetic resonance, we find that the microgel shell of batch-polymerized AuNR@PNIPMAm exhibits a heterogeneous volume phase transition reflected by different onset temperatures for changes in the hydrodyanmic radius (RH) and plasmon resonance, respectively. The new approach of contrasting plasmonic response (a measure of local surface hydrogel structure) with RH and relaxation times paves a new path to gain valuable insight for the design of plasmonic sensors based on stimuli-responsive hydrogels
Resilience in Resistance: The Meloni Government\u27s Influence on Roman Social Centers
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Language Positioning Within Peer Discourse in Dual Language Classrooms
Full text linkBilingualism and biliteracy represent one of the goals for dual language education, but prior research shows that the separationist manner through which programs are structured contradicts this goal. To understand these problems, this study applies a critical framework. Through the lens of positioning theory, I explore peer discourse to discover how students are positioned as bilingual or monolingual speakers in peer interactions in order to understand the nuance of bilingualism within dual language classrooms. This is important for the group of students researched in this study because the language positions they continually undertake ultimately have long-lasting impacts on their emerging identities. To gather data, observations of 18 third-grade students (around eight years old) enrolled at the Dwight Bellizzi Dual Language Academy in Hartford, Connecticut were conducted over a seven-week period in two classrooms with different languages of instruction: Spanish and English. Through analyzing descriptive field notes collected during observations, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: How does the implementation of the school’s formal structure, a 50-50 language immersion model, influence the classroom atmospheres where informal peer interactions occur? How do students discursively position themselves and their peers as bilingual or monolingual speakers? Field notes were first analyzed at a broad level to contextualize the atmospheres in which peer interactions occurred. Secondly, an analysis of peer interactions revealed four themes in which elements of bilingualism are present in each: translation, language code-switching, using a language different from the conversational context, and private communication. I argue that although the school’s formal structure separates the two languages of instruction, the positioning that occurs within informal peer discourse contradicts prior research as it reveals students are engaging with bilingualism
In-Class Engagement and Trinity College Professors: The Student of Color Experience
Full text linkTrinity College has provided students with various classroom experiences that have allowed them to excel in further understanding of the world. These courses have given students the chance to not only connect and engage with the material, but they’ve also been at the forefront for students to use this knowledge to transform the communities around them. However, this is not an experience that is always the same for students of color here at the college. Here at a predominantly-white institution (PWI), students of color live their day-to-day lives often one a few in their classes. They are in spaces that challenge the ways that their identity can be recognized and acknowledged in relation “to which college students of color feel like they belong to the community on their respective campuses” (Hussain and Jones 64). Classrooms aren’t just physical spaces, for they are spaces that are engrained in how people can learn within a community of supportive peers and educators; nevertheless, it must be considered just how much students of color can learn and engage in these spaces with professors who don’t truly grasp their perspective in connection to their identities. In this paper, I aim to learn more about this to answer the following questions: What are Trinity College students of color’s experiences with professors of various racial identities? How do they assert that their experiences are related to their descriptions of in-class engagement? In writing this paper, I interviewed eight Trinity College junior and senior students of color, asking questions geared toward learning more about their individual engagement in their classes and how their identity coincides with how they perceive the racial identities of their Trinity professors. This helped me to come to the argument that students of color at Trinity feel that while some White professors have strongly established inclusive classroom spaces and relationships with students of color, other White professors are negligent of their identity and how they’re creating an inclusive classroom space; this causes differing styles of in-class engagement for students of color. It’s also argued that these varying experiences are due to the content being taught and how professors of various racial identities uphold culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP)