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Thermal Physiology of a Warm-Adapted Temperate Lizard, the Texas Spotted Whiptail
No full textThe Texas spotted whiptail (Aspidoscelis gularis) is a relatively large, diurnal lizard found in various habitats in South Texas. The species is an active forager that tends to move about in the warmest parts of the day. The lizard is known for being notoriously fast and hard to capture. Our research investigated the thermal physiology of Aspidoscelis gularis, including measurements of metabolic rate, thermal preference, and sprint speed at ecologically relevant temperatures. The results of this study showed that A. gularis has a relatively high metabolic rate for its size and maintains a high field-active body temperature. As expected, their thermal performance peaks near their voluntary thermal maximum. These results suggest that A. gularis is well-adapted to life in warm environments. However, the elevated metabolic rate and high field-active body temperature represent a high energy expenditure that must be offset by constant foraging and careful thermoregulation to ensure survival
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder Predicting Prospective and Retrospective Memory
No full textThis study examined the relationship between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom severity on general memory. We hypothesized that elevated scores in ADHD and/or ASD symptom severity would have lower scores in memory. Participants were Texas A&M University-San Antonio students and community members, consisting of 70 participants (75.7% female). The age range was 18-58 (M = 24.17; SD = 7.76). Ethnicity demographics was mostly Latinx (64.3% Latinx). ADHD symptom severity was measured using the Adult ADHD self-report scale (ASRS-v1.1) and ASD symptom severity was measured using the Ritvo Autism-Asperger\u27s diagnostic scale (RAADS-14). Memory was measured using the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). Students registered for the survey via the TAMUSA Sona system and were redirected to Qualtrics. Individuals with elevated ADHD symptom severity had better general memory. This challenges previous research which characterizes ADHD to be associated with memory and attention deficits
Viviendo entre dos lenguas: Voces transgresoras de estudiantes hispanos bilingües en Oregon
Get PDFViviendo en dos lenguas que se origina como un proyecto de recopilación de historias personales escritas por jóvenes estudiantes cuya lengua de herencia es el español. MI objetivo es compartir esta experiencia pedagógica denominada con la esperanza de que pueda ser la inspiración para proyectos educativos de similar índole. Este proyecto nace en las aulas tanto presenciales como virtuales como un ejercicio de recuperación de la memoria y revalorización de la lengua de herencia y culmina con la publicación de una antología bilingüe compuesta por escritos producidos por los estudiantes en la clase de Español para Hablantes nativos y de herencia desde el año 2020 hasta 2022 en la escuela comunitaria de Chemeketa en Salem – Oregon y publicada en el 2023. El objetivo de la clase es desarrollar competencias comunicativas y/o lingüísticas por medio de la reflexión sobre temas como identidad, migración, cultura y lengua, desde una perspectiva crítica y personal.
Esta experiencia parte de la siguiente problemática ¿Cómo lograr que los estudiantes mejoren las habilidades lingüísticas de una lengua semi censurada, ocupada y desvalorizada como lo es el español? Recuperando la memoria perdida, los aprendizajes previos, los recuerdos, recreando toda esa memoria recuperada en escritura. Y es ahí donde está el poder de estos testimonios: en su registro, por lo tanto, la metodología de este proyecto está enmarcada en la historia oral. Este tipo de proyectos ya tiene una tradición en la historiografía y los han llamado historias de la vida cotidiana y se
El testimonio es un espacio donde lo subalterno puede cobrar voz. Los escritos de estos estudiantes reflejan identidades excluidas de la circulación discursiva tradicional y brindan una posibilidad más de replantear la visión homogeneizante y colonizante con la que se ha escrito la historia de los migrantes, por lo tanto, el recuperar estas voces es un acto necesario.
Memoria e historia
Bilingüismo
Alteridad
Resistencia cultural
Identidad hispánica
Escritura y testimonio
Español como lengua de herencia
Biculturalida
The Gen Z Heritage Learner: Redefining the SHL Program for a post-pandemic generation
Get PDFThe purpose of this presentation is to reflect on some of the perspectives, beliefs and policies that lie behind the definition, understanding and framework of ‘success’ (Beaudrie, 2020) according to the Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) programs, and the design on which these programs rely to develop their curricular foundation for the upcoming generation of heritage learners.
How ‘success’ materializes depends on what is the specific profile of Heritage Language Speaker (HLS) used as reference according to each SHL program’s perspective (Carreira, 2012). The larger vision upheld on what is the SHL Education specific purpose, deeply influences the theories and perspectives used to inform the language programs’ curricula and practices believed to better suit the heritage language speakers’ needs in their path to success. However, the main questions remained unanswered: (RQ1) To what extent do SHL programs’ definition of ‘success’ aligns with the genuine sociolinguistic needs of the Gen Z Heritage Learners (HL)? and (RQ2) how could current education policies and curricular goals be reframed to provide affordances for a more community-engaged, sociolinguistically-informed, and critically aware learning ecology to emerge?
In this presentation we will: i) discuss the need for heritage language programs and their pedagogies as a institutionalize, yet distinct strand of the language programs in the post-secondary institutions; ii) analyze what is the definition of heritage language learners that better encompass the shared traits of this type of learners; iii) assess the validity, or not, of the numerous definitions of ‘success’ that lay behind the design of the Spanish Heritage Programs, and propose an improved education policy framework that better supports the holistic development of the heritage learner\u27s cultural capital (Yossa, 2005), their educators, and their ascribed community, amidst a historical paradigm shift of a declining share of Latinos who speak Spanish (Pew Research Center, 2021)
Keywords: Spanish heritage language, program administration, gen Z, cultural capital, holistic development, community-engaged pedagogy, success, critical language awareness
Pedagogical principles in action: Open Educational Resources for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language
Get PDFPedagogical principles in action: Open educational resources for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language
Keywords: Spanish as a Heritage Language, OER, textbooks, frameworks
The emergence and expansion of Open Education Resources (OER) create new opportunities for stakeholders at all levels of education; they facilitate social inclusion and access to education, an essential human right, due to low production costs and availability (UNESCO, 2019; Farrow, 2016). In addition, OER allow teachers to share and edit teaching resources and to adapt them to the specific needs of their students (COERLL, 2021). In the area of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL), recent OER publications provide instructors with an increasing variety of resources to support some of the core goals in the field: development, maintenance, and expansion of Spanish among heritage speakers (Beaudrie & Vergara Wilson, 2021; Valdés, 2001).
Current research does not account for the types of pedagogical activities present in OER nor their proximity to pedagogical principles that respond to the unique cognitive needs of heritage learners (Beaudrie & Wilson 2021; Bayram, et.al., 2017; Potowski & Lynch, 2014). This qualitative study, adapted from Cubillos 2014, describes an inventory of learning activities in four OER from U.S. universities (Cabrera, 2019; Casas, 2022; Foulis & Alex, 2022; Hernández & Hernández, 2022), and analyzes the activities according to pedagogical approaches such as multiliteracies, project-based learning, service learning, critical language awareness,and sociolinguistics, including the use of corpus, translation, and translanguaging.
Understanding how pedagogical principles are instantiated in educational materials becomes an important task as these usually shape classroom activities, interaction, and assessment (Martin Peris, 2022; Cubillos, 2014). Given the flexibility and innovation of OER, this analysis establishes which and how pedagogical principles are brought into the SHL classroom, thereby supporting best practices on curricular design and classroom practice. (272 words)
References
Bayram, Fatih & Pascual y Cabo, Diego & Prada, Josh & Rothman, Jason. (2017). Why formal linguistic approaches to heritage language acquisition should be linked to heritage language pedagogies. In Trifonas,P. & Aravossitas,T. (eds) Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_48-1
Beaudrie, S. M., & Vergara Wilson, D. (2021). Reimagining the goals of HL Pedagogy through Critical Language Awareness. In Loza, S., & Beaudrie, S.M. (Eds.). Heritage Language Teaching: Critical Language Awareness Perspectives for Research and Pedagogy (pp. 63–79). London & New York: Routledge.
Cabrera, V. (2019, October 23). Saber es poder. Español abierto. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://espanolabierto.org/saber-es-poder/
Casas, M. (2022, May 5). Spanish for Heritage Speakers. Humanities LibreTexts. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Languages
COERLL. (n.d.). Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER). COERLL. Retrieved November 24, 2022, from https://utexas.instructure.com/courses/1097558/pages/introduction-to-open-educational-resources-oer?module_item_id=7606045
Cubillos, J. (2014). Spanish textbooks in the US. Enduring traditions and emerging trends. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 1(2), 205–225.
Farrow, R. (2016). A Framework for the Ethics of Open Education. Open Praxis, 8(2), 93–109.
Foulis, E., & Alex, S. (2022, July 21). Mi idioma, mi comunidad: Español para bilingües. Mi idioma mi comunidad espaol para bilinges. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/idiomacomunidad/
Hernández, Y., & Hernández, J. E. (2022, September 30). Reflexiones sobre nuestra lengua. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://pressbooks.pub/reflexionessobrenuestralengua/
Martín Peris, E. (2022). El análisis de materiales didácticos desde la investigación. In I. Santos Gargallo & S. Pastor Cesteros, (coords.), Metodología de la investigación en la enseñanza-aprendizaje del español como segunda lengua (L2) / lengua extranjera (LE), (pp. 229-244). Madrid: Arco Libros.
UNESCO. (2019). Open educational resources: Home. Open Educational Resources. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://www.unesco.org/en/open-solutions/open-educational-resources?hub=785
Valdéz, G. (2001). Heritage languages students: Profiles and possibilities. In J. K. Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (Eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 37-77). Washington,DC: Center for Applied Linguistics
Tejiendo Raíces: Using Multimodal Projects to Connect Community, Self, and Heritage in the SHL Classroom
No full textThis presentation shares a unique approach to redesigning an SHL course using multimodal projects that integrate challenges faced by the local Latinx community, growth of self-identity, and discovery of family and cultural heritage. The final product is a community showcase to share knowledge and connect through community, identity, and family
Raising Critical Language and Cultural Awareness through the Arts: A Call for the Inclusion of Creativity in the Spanish Heritage Language Curriculum
Get PDFRaising Critical Language and Cultural Awareness through the Arts: A Call for the Inclusion of Creativity in the Spanish Heritage Language Curriculum.
Article 9th of the World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century (UNESCO), proposes critical thinking and creativity as a model of knowledge and experimentation still not explored enough in higher education. Responding to this statement, and framed within Beaudrie’s and Wilson\u27s (2022) instructional goals for teaching Spanish as heritage language (SHL), the goal of this presentation, based on the author’s previous work, is to show the benefits of incorporating the arts and creativityas an approach to raising critical language and cultural awareness in Latina/o/e students, and as means to connect them with their “Cultura y Corazón” (Manzo et al. 2020), the core of their ethnolinguistic identity. The theoretical basis for this work assumes creativity as a multidimensional meaning-making process (Glaveanu et al. 2019) that emerges not at the individual level but within social and collaborative contexts(Csikszentmihalyi, 2006; Clapp, 2016). Therefore, bringing into the SHL classroom the arts—in particular, those coming from the Spanish-speaking world (poetry, visual arts, music, popular culture)—provides students with historical background, cultural models, community connections, resources, and symbolic affordances that they can further apply and repurpose in creative assignments to contest linguistic ideologies as they give meaning to their new and critical understandings of their language practices, culture(s), communities and ethnolinguistic identity. Examples of creative activities and students’ art projects will be provided.
References Beaudrie, S., & Wilson, D. (2021). Reimagining the Goals of HL Pedagogy through Critical Language Awareness. In S.Loza & S. Beaudrie (ed.). Heritage Language Teaching Critical Language Awareness Perspectives for Research and Pedagogy. Routledge. 63-79.
Clapp, E.P. (2017). Participatory Creativity. Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom. Routledge.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). The Systems Model of Creativity. The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Springer.
Glaveanu et al. (2019). Advancing Creativity Theory and Research: A Socio-cultural Manifesto. Commentary. Journal of Creative Behavior.54, (3): 741-745. Manzo, R.D., Brazil-Cruz, L., Flores, Y.G., Rivera-Lopez, H. (2020). Cultura y Corazón: A Decolonial Methodology for Community Engaged Research. The Arizona University Press
KEYNOTE: The Significance of Spanish Heritage Varieties: Charting Contributions to Heritage Language Studies and Future Avenues for Centering Speakers in Linguistics Scholarship
No full textInvestigations of Spanish as a heritage language have yielded rich and extensive insights, incorporating diverse conceptual and analytical frameworks from structural linguistics, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of language, among other sub-disciplinary orientations. Research findings unveil robust patterns of both continuity and variation, underscoring the importance of Spanish heritage speakers’ knowledge and practices to broader understandings of language of representation and dissemination. This plenary offers an overview of my contributions to the field of Spanish Heritage Language Studies and outlines potential directions for future endeavors, aiming to center heritage varieties and their speakers not only in Linguistics scholarship but also in allied fields such as Ethnic Studies and Speech Sciences
Analyzing the Performance and Cost-Efficiency of Deploying Machine Learning Models in Cloud
No full textThis study presents the results and findings on the analysis of the performance and cost-efficiency to deploy different Machine Learning (ML) models in Cloud. It specifically examines the operational dynamics and cost-efficiency of using machine learning functions within the integrated database vs external machine learning services for model training and prediction. Focusing on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the research employs a comparative approach to assess how these deployment strategies influence the scalability, resource utilization, and overall cost implications in cloud environments. The anticipated outcomes of this investigation aim to provide insightful guidance about the performance and cost efficiency of various cloud-based ML deployment methodologies. The findings are expected to offer significant contributions to the field, guiding the optimization of ML model deployments in cloud settings, and aiding stakeholders in making informed decisions for leveraging cloud technologies in ML, and further AI (Artificial Intelligence) applications
Techno-Economic and Environmental Assessments of Produced Water Treatment for Beneficial Reuse
No full textProduced water (PW) is a bulk portion of byproduct generated during oil and gas extraction operations and can be potentially reused for various purposes. However, the treatment costs and associated environmental issues call for a multitude of factors for proper management. This research aims to evaluate the viability of technologies for treating PW in terms of their technical performance, cost-effectiveness, and environmental considerations. Technologies evaluated include well-established processes such as reverse osmosis desalination, adsorption, membrane distillation, electrodialysis, evaporation pond, and thermal vapor compression, and those that are under development (e.g., ion exchange, photocatalysis). Realistically, combining two or more processes has been applied to remove targeted PW components. A cost-effective technology with minimal pollutant discharge is preferred for PW management and that can be possible through electrochemically driven technologies. Eventually, such technologies are green technologies ensuring clean water production, energy storage, and conservation of valuable material resources from produced water