Art Looking within MotherScholarhood: Art Elicitation for Self-Reflections and Sense Making

This study continues the ongoing collaborative autoethnographic, arts-based scholarship of three MotherScholars (Burrow et al.). This study presents both the critical self-reflections resulting from and advocacy for the process of art elicitation (Burrow and Burrow), which is a valid and effective methodology to allow MotherScholars a vital pause for valuable personal self-interrogation and renewed clarity within their scholarship. Like our previous research, this study reaffirms that MotherScholars need space and time to reflect on the fluidity and flexibility of their personal-professional identity as it is affected by natural life changes (e.g., children leaving home for college), unexpected transitions (e.g., divorce), and trauma (e.g., global pandemics). The necessity to find malleability in the MotherScholar identity can help women in academia name what they need and recognize what they are already uniquely suited to handle

Activist 101 Activities for Pre-Service Teachers

This Teaching Note briefly describes three activities that can easily be integrated into any teacher education course

The Skits, Sketches, and Stories of MotherScholars

“MotherScholars” are those who creatively weave their maternal identities into their scholarly spaces. With this article we invite readers along a collaborative friendship study of our own participatory arts-based journey to understand, reclaim, and identify personal and professional benefits only realized once we acknowledged and embraced the blended reality of Mother Scholarhood. Our work is presented as a curation of individual skits, sketches, and short stories that were created during a collective 8-week time span in a shared virtual space. We open our story to interpretation and interaction through the lenses of our readers

Proving Our Maternal and Scholarly Worth: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Storying of MotherScholar Identity Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pivoting to remote work as female academics and to schooling our children from home as mothers in March 2020 marked a dramatic shift in how we enact our MotherScholar identities. This collaborative autoethnographic study employs a modification of interactive interviewing and photovoice to produce verbal and visual text of COVID-19 MotherScholar identity work for analysis. Thematic analysis results in themes of maternal interruptions, professional interruptions, maternal recognition, and professional recognition. Of note, our MotherScholar interactivity functioned as identity work as we sought and granted legitimacy to one another’s’ COVID-19 MotherScholar identities. Of particular concern to us is how institutions of higher education are (dis)enabling socially supportive MotherScholar interactivity during COVID-19 conditions that persist at the time of this writing and how they intend to address social support needs sustainably into the future

Pivoting Rural Community-Based Fine Arts Programs for Youth Due to a Global Pandemic

This personal experience essay features five women professors who, as engaged scholars, seek to continuously respond to the needs of their local community by volunteering their time and expertise to offer educational programs that focus on creative arts and academic assistance for K–12 students. This piece explores the opportunities and obstacles we experienced in using virtual platforms, during the 2020 global pandemic, in order to re-envision our civic responsibilities to engage communities beyond our previous place-based programs

Wnt16 Elicits a Protective Effect Against Fractures and Supports Bone Repair in Zebrafish

Bone homeostasis is a dynamic, multicellular process which is required throughout life to maintain bone integrity, prevent fracture and respond to skeletal damage. WNT16 has been linked to bone fragility and osteoporosis in human genome wide association studies, as well as the functional haematopoiesis of leukocytes in vivo. However, the mechanisms by which WNT16 promotes bone health and repair are not fully understood. We used CRISPR-Cas9 to generate mutant zebrafish lacking Wnt16 (wnt16-/-) to study its effect on bone dynamically. wnt16 mutants displayed variable tissue mineral density and were susceptible to spontaneous fractures and the accumulation of bone calluses at an early age. Fractures were induced in the lepidotrichia of the caudal fins of wnt16-/- and wild type (WT) zebrafish; this model was used to probe the mechanisms by which Wnt16 regulates skeletal and immune cell-dynamics in vivo. In WT fins, wnt16 expression increased significantly during the early stages for bone repair. Mineralization of bone during fracture repair was significantly delayed in wnt16 mutants compared to WT zebrafish. Surprisingly, we found no evidence that the recruitment of innate immune cells to fractures or soft callus formation was altered in wnt16 mutants. However, osteoblast recruitment was significantly delayed in wnt16 mutants post-fracture, coinciding with precocious activation of the canonical Wnt signalling pathway. In situ hybridization suggests that canonical Wnt-responsive cells within fractures are osteoblast progenitors, and that osteoblast differentiation during bone repair is coordinated by the dynamic expression of runx2a and wnt16. This study highlights zebrafish as an emerging model for functionally validating osteoporosis-associated genes and investigating fracture repair dynamically in vivo. Using this model, we demonstrate that Wnt16 protects against fracture and supports bone repair, likely by modulating canonical Wnt activity, via runx2a, to facilitate osteoblast differentiation and bone matrix deposition

Quarantine Mothering and Working at Home: How Institutions of Higher Education Supported (or Failed to Support) Academic Mothers

This mixed methods study explores whether and how explicit policies, implicit practices, and internal communication from university administrators about aca-demic mothers’ work lives and expectations were impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine protocols. As this was a large study focussing on university policies addressing the presence of children on campus and the ways in which their enforcement or nonenforcement affected the personal and professional lives of faculty, we used purposive sampling (Palys) and snowball sampling (Patton) to distribute a survey in academic social media groups and to professional organization listservs (Palys). Among other things, the survey asked participants to report how well they thought their university was handling the COVID-19 pandemic and invited them to participate in an in-depth interview. As a result of the survey responses, we subsequently interviewed nineteen academic mothers from a range of academic disciplines, ages, and types of institutions, until we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin). The semi-structured interview protocol included questions about the impact of COVID-19-related policies, practices, and messaging regarding children on participants’ job satisfaction, mental and physical health, as well as work-life balance. We used open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin) and the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss) to analyze the data. We then triangulated the data by comparing interview and survey findings, engaging multiple researchers in the analysis, and conducting peer debriefings (Denzin and Lincoln; Lincoln and Guba). Findings highlight institutional policies and practices that serve or fail to serve faculty in terms of supporting their professional advancement in teaching, research, and service

STEM major perceptions and persistence to teacher certification

In this qualitative research study, researchers from a rural regional university in Texas examined the perceptions of STEM teaching and persistence to STEM teacher certification in a group of STEM majors participating in a hybrid recruitment and early intense field experience. The findings from this study indicate that the hybrid recruitment and early field experience influences the desire of the STEM majors to persist to teacher certification and influences the accuracy of their perceptions regarding STEM teaching and general perceptions of teaching as a career