Digital Commons @ Texas A&M University-San Antonio
Not a member yet
3365 research outputs found
Sort by
Preparing Students with Intellectual Disability for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Careers
No full textResearch indicates that outcomes for individuals with intellectual disability in post-secondary education (PSE), employment, and independent living lag in comparison to the general population. Students with disabilities, particularly those with intellectual disability, are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers and face barriers in accessing STEM courses and career opportunities. Furthermore, students with intellectual disability are disproportionately affected by the impact of unemployment and underemployment and overall quality of life. Providing students with intellectual disability with opportunities for STEM instruction and access to STEM careers could help them with employment in the field. Therefore, the call exists for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to strengthen employment pathways for individuals with intellectual disability to find and maintain competitive employment, including STEM careers. This paper discusses potential barriers for individuals with intellectual disability in their pursuit of a career in STEM and offers recommendations for addressing the identified issues
Embracing Borderlands Identity: The Significance of Latina Graduate Student Discourse in Academia
Get PDFLatina students will share personal narratives, academic insights, and research experiences, to dissect how their identities influence their perspectives, research questions, and approaches to scholarship. This dialogue will contribute to deeper understanding of how students can approach the richness of Latinx experiences to challenge and reshape existing academic paradigms
Yosoy. Language education through culture: A project for Spanish-English bilingual children and families.
Get PDFAbout one-third, 17.9 million, of the nation’s Latina/o/e population is younger than 18 (Krogstad & Gonzalez-Barrera 2018), being the majority bilingual (Krogstad & Gonzalez-Barrera, 2015), with no access to quality bilingual education to address their strengths and needs (García 2014). Questions about this group’s future capabilities to speak Spanish are central to current theoretical and pedagogical inquiries, efforts, and research. The linguistic dynamism between Spanish and other languages that characterizes this group also raises essential questions about the intergenerational continuity of Spanish and its meaning for young Latina/o/e identities (Valdés 2015).
Many families experience interactions in Spanish with sentimientos encontrados (Valdés 2015, 266; Showstack & García-Mateus 2022): on the one hand, Latina/o/e children and parents identify Spanish with their heritage pride, identity, social justice, solidarity and recognize its economic value for the marketplace; on the other, they have internalized negative ideological messages that undermined their use of the language, generating feelings of linguistic insecurity.
From a developmental point of view, intergenerational connections in the family language are critical components of children’s well-being (Parra 2023). At the same time, these connections are also essential for maintaining and expanding the family linguistic repertoires in Spanish (Fishman 1991). However, many families (and schools) struggle to find proper resources to engage with children in meaningful Spanish interactions that also allow for literacy development in the language.
In this presentation, we introduce the project “Yosoy: Language education through culture” which aims to form an intergenerational community of practice in Spanish through engaging Latina/o/e adults and children of all ages with creative cultural and academic content, activities to develop Spanish literacy skills, and exploration of the community. The project is based on a theoretical understanding of languages as social practices and bilingualism as a dynamic use and deployment of all the resources from children and parents\u27 linguistic repertoires (García &Wei 2014). The project hopes to strengthen children\u27s ethnolinguistic identity and family and community ties.
References:
Fishman, J. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
García, O. (2014). U.S. Spanish and Education: Global and Local Intersections Review of Research in Education. 38, pp. 58-80.
García, O., & Li Wei. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism & education. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Krogstad, J.M & Gonzalez-Barrera, A. (2015). A majority of English-speaking Hispanics in the U.S. are bilingual. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/03/24/a-majority-of-english-speaking-hispanics-in-the-u-s-are-bilingual/
Patten, E. (2016). The Nation’s Latino Population Is Defined by Its Youth. Nearly half of U.S.-born Latinos are younger than 18. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2016/04/20/the-nations-latino-population-is-defined-by-its-youth/
Showstack, R., & García-Mateus, S. (2022). Latinx Parents Raising Bilingual Children. An Exploration of the Monolingual Norm and Translanguaging in Family Language Practices. In A. Sánchez-Muñoz & J. Retis, Communicative Spaces in Bilingual Contexts. Discourses, Synergies and Counterflows in Spanish and English. New York: Routledge.
Parra Velasco, M.L. (2023). The home–school connection, the development of Spanish repertoires, and the school adaptation process in Latino children: a dynamic ecological understanding. Journal of World Languages. https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2022-0052
Valdés, G. (2015). Latin@s and the intergenerational continuity of Spanish: The challenges of curricularizing language. International Multilingual Research Journal 9(4). 253–273
Teaching SHL in secondary schools: An antiracist, decolonial and culturally responsive curriculum proposal
Get PDFAbstract
The purpose of this workshop is to contribute to the body of research and scholarship around best instructional practices for Spanish heritage language learners in secondary schools by presenting how SFL teachers can help students recognize and validate their transcultural identity by means of a transdisciplinary, antiracist, critical and culturally responsive curriculum.
Proposal (worskhop)
When I came to teach to the US in 2006 my students were immigrant Latino students from all Latin American countries. Although they all shared the same language and culture in a general sense, they had different ways of expressing, celebrating, and experiencing that language and culture. As Latina, a mother, and a teacher, I was committed to creating learning experiences that would contribute to develop a sense of community and belonging, validate their transcultural identity and foster their success. That is why I became the lead teacher for the Spanish Heritage Language teachers. Together, we designed and implemented three levels of the Spanish for Heritage Speakers (SHS) Program. This is an inclusive, transdisciplinary, translanguaging and critical and culturally responsive curriculum by which students develop and validate their new transcultural identity.
As the leader of the SHL teachers, I coordinated our monthly meetings, conducted staff development workshops, prepared curriculum, and pacing guides and other materials for teachers, communicated weekly with them, to develop opportunities for change in our students. After six years of teaching and coordinating the SHS program, I explored how students had changed their perception of themselves, their motivation for learning, improved their language skills and altered their plans for pursuing a college degree. The data revealed that through the SHS program, the students develop a value support system that helps them challenge racism, sexism, and social injustice from peers, family, and community members.
The purpose of this workshop is to present and share this innovating and unique program which has been recognized as a student-centered exemplary program by ACTFL The Language Educator magazine in its March/April 2015 volume. It has also endured to this day since its implementation in 2007 despite budgetary cuts and changes in administration.
Learning Objectives
The participants will:
distinguish the components of each level of the program
identify the scope and sequence of the program
identify assessment strategies, materials, and resources
Spanish rhotic production and dialectal variation in Mexican Heritage Speakers
Get PDFSpanish has two phonemic rhotics, the tap /ɾ/ and trill /r/, but these phonemic sounds present dialectal variation. Previous work has looked at variation and dialectal rhotics amongst monolingual speakers of Spanish, finding that, depending on their dialect, monolinguals can produce aspirated, assibilated, and fricated rhotics as well as lateralized and deleted rhotics (Bradley et al., 1999). Only one study has analyzed Heritage speakers’ rhotic variation and found that, Heritage speakers are able to produce dialectal rhotics such as the Mexican assibilated rhotic (Cummings Ruiz et al., 2020). In the current study, I build upon previous literature to further explore Heritage speakers\u27 production of dialectal rhotics, focusing on what contexts favor them, while examining whether they maintain the tap/trill contrast.
This study looks at the rhotic production of 6 Heritage Spanish speakers that were born and currently reside in Southern California. Each speaker completed a short interview, the bilingual language profile questionnaire, a picture description task, and a narration task. From the picture description and narration tasks, rhotic productions were extracted and segmented using Praat. Based on acoustic cues identified in the waveform and spectrogram, rhotic productions were classified as either tap, trill, approximant tap, approximant trill, fricated tap, fricated trill, assibilated, lateralization or deletion.
A descriptive analysis was conducted to understand the role that syllable, word and utterance positions play in rhotic production for Heritage speakers. The results suggest that Heritage speakers maintain the tap and trill contrast, however their productions tend to have different degrees of weakening and frication. Heritage speakers also produce dialectal rhotics, more precisely assibilated ones, but at lower rates than studies looking at monolingual speakers.
References
Bradley, T. G., Authier, J., Bullock, B., & Reed, L. (1999). Assibilation in Ecuadorian Spanish. In Formal Perspectives on Romance Linguistics. Selected Papers from the 28th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company (pp. 57-71).
Cummings Ruiz, L. D., & Montrul, S. (2020). Assessing Rhotic Production by Bilingual Spanish Speakers. Languages, 5(4), 51
“Sé que lo que yo hago de veras hace un impacto,” reflexiones de hablantes de herencia en una clase de aprendizaje-servicio en español.
No full textEsta presentación se centra en las reflexiones de hablantes de herencia del español durante una clase de aprendizaje-servicio en una universidad del medio oeste de los E.E.U.U., en la cual tenían que completar al menos quince horas de voluntariado en una organización que apoya a la comunidad hispanoparlante del condado
¿Presentes? Whose (Hi)stories are told in a national exhibition.
No full textThis study analyzes opinions and reflections by a group of advanced heritage learners of Spanish after visiting the exhibition ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States, the first of its type at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and which is promoted as the “first-ever exhibition” of the future National Museum of the American Latino. Throughout the exhibition and after it, students are encouraged and directed to observe, analyze, and reflect on aspects such as the choice of artifacts in display, the place and order in which they are in the gallery, the messages conveyed by labels in Spanish vs English, and other ones. After the visit, student write a reflective essay addressing on their experience and observations and prepare an oral presentation on the importance of an artifact of their choice. A preliminary activity conducted in the fall of 2022 reveals that while appreciating the effort of this canonical institution students to include a diversity of voices and experiences, students feel that some communities lack representation in the exhibition despite the promise of its name. As well, in their reflections, students show a deep awareness of the role of language in the formation, and (auto)perception of cultural and ethnic identity, and even challenge misconceptions regarding bilingualism and language contact in the United States
Analyzing the Usability, Performance, and Cost-Efficiency of Deploying ML Models on Various Cloud Computing Platforms
Get PDFWith the enhanced computing capabilities and accessibility to cloud resources, major cloud computing providers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure offer Machine Learning (ML) and AI services. Their primary purpose is to provide efficiency, scalability, and adaptability in modern software development and IT operations while reducing overall costs and operational complexity. However, prospective customers of the services often question which ML-AI service will best suit their organizational and business needs. This study compares and analyzes the usability, performance, and cost-efficiency of deploying Machine Learning (ML) models across three cloud platforms: GCP, AWS, and Azure. Specifically, it examines BigQuery ML and Vertex AI in Google Cloud, Redshift and SageMaker in AWS, and Azure Machine Learning. Using MIMIC-IV datasets of hospitalized patients, regression models were deployed on each platform to predict mortality and disease progression. The analysis results revealed that Google’s BigQuery ML offers good usability with excellent documentation and a moderate learning curve, making it suitable for SQL-savvy users and large-scale data analytics tasks. Google’s Vertex AI, while more flexible, incurs relatively higher costs. AWS SageMaker’s costs are unpredictable due to its parallel training processes, while Azure ML, though requiring complex authorization settings, is accessible for novices. These findings provide valuable insights for selecting an appropriate AI-ML service for deploying similar ML models, providing the strengths and limitations of each platform, aiding in informed decision-making for cloud-based ML deployments
The World on Women’s Shoulders: A Quantitative Analysis of the Relationship Between Gender and the Environment
No full textThe importance of environmental issues has become increasingly apparent in public policy and political discussions. However, little attention has focused on how gender impacts attitudes towards the environment. Using 3 data sets from the General Social Survey, I conducted a quantitative data analysis to determine how gender influences environmental concerns. Two variables, environmental concern, and pro-environmental views were conceptualized to evaluate the impact of gender. My study revealed that women tend to hold stronger pro-environmental views and exhibit greater concern for environmental issues than men, even after accounting for other sociodemographic factors. My research also found that higher levels of pro-environmental views are associated with increased concern for environmental issues, with gender playing a significant role in this relationship. This study adds to environmental sociology and ecological feminist literature, highlighting gender\u27s impact on environmental views. It aligns with previous literature, consistently finding modest gender differences
Agent-Based Modeling to Assess Optimal Conditions for Reducing Air Transmission
No full textSARS-CoV-2 is a virus that is spread through aerosol transmission, meaning the viral particles can stay suspended in the air when in an aerosol. To study how viral particles disperse through aerosol we used the bacteriophage Phi6 as a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2. We released the aerosolized bacteriophage into the air using a nebulizer and placed plates containing a host organism at different distances and durations of exposure that the phage would kill when encountering. This allowed us to calculate rates of transmission, which were then used to create an agent-based model in NetLogo. This model can be used to analyze how the virus spreads and make inferences about how safe different settings would be. If we can experimentally determine to what extent airflow and air change rates in a room affect aerosol transmission, we can optimize HVAC settings to decrease transmission