Cultivating Moral Imagination through Deliberative Pedagogy: Reframing Immigration Deliberation for Student Engagement Across Differences. A Response to Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents: Classroom Dynamics and Sociocultural Considerations

In “Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents,” the authors described what they determine to be an unsuccessful attempt at deliberative pedagogy on the topic of immigration in three high school classrooms that differed demographically. Specifically, the authors observed that students failed to engage with evidence, stuck with their initial viewpoints, and only listened politely to those with different views, rather than interacting across differences to reach consensus. While student positionality, as the authors suggest, is important to take into account, there may be ways to reorient deliberations on “wicked problems” such as immigration, which are by their nature prone to polarization, to increase student engagement and learning. By questioning what counts as evidence; reframing the problem of immigration to a specific and more nuanced question relating to the food system; and scaffolding student experiences to provide appropriate historical and social context, the activity may offer more engaged learning outcomes that enable students to cultivate what Swartz and McGuffey (2018) referred to as “moral imagination.

From Deliberative Democracy to Communicative Democracy in the Classroom. A Response to “Education for Deliberative Democracy”

This response to Samuelsson’s typology for assessing deliberative democracy in classroom discussions views his analysis through an equity lens. It offers Young’s model of communicative democracy as a resource and argues that incorporating that model\u27s emphasis on greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling into the typology can help to promote more equitable deliberative communication in the classroom. It offers specific tools, based on the author’s development of deliberative pedagogy in a biology classroom, that teachers can use across disciplines and educational settings to help promote more equitable deliberative communication in classroom discussions

Nanotechnology courses for general education

Interdisciplinary faculty from Physics, Biology and Electrical and Computer Engineering, (ECE) have created a sequence of three stand-alone 300-level general education lecture courses in nanotechnology with one supporting laboratory course, with the support of National Science Foundation funding through the nanotechnology Undergraduate Education initiative. These three lecture courses can be taken by non-majors as science courses for General Education credit and are tailored to support interaction between STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and non-STEM students, who will take them together. The ECE and Biology courses have each run once and course feedback and analyses are summarized here

Abortion rhetoric in American news coverage of the human cloning debate

The issue of human cloning has received intense media and political attention since the cloning of Dolly the sheep was announced in 1997. This research explores the discursive basis for support and opposition to human cloning by examining the role of abortion-related rhetoric in constructing the concept of human cloning within the American press. An in-depth content analysis of human cloning news coverage was conducted on a sample of articles collected from the mainstream press as well as advocacy publications with either a pro-science or Christian fundamentalist orientation. Statistically significant differences were found indicating an important role for abortion rhetoric in the human cloning debate. This expansion of abortion rhetoric into the domain of science policy portends a unique and growing problem for resolving bioethical debates within American politics over the future development of biomedical technologies such as human cloning

How Neanderthals Became White: the Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics*

Human evolutionary theory has a history rife with racial biases in what might be considered its distant past that can appear glaringly obvious from our current vantage point. Despite the recognition that as a social activity science is always vulnerable to such biases (and science that attempts to uncover human origin stories all the more so), commitment to the scientific method can lead us to believe that we have improved on, overcome, or otherwise escaped these tendencies in our contemporary practices, whether through scientific contrition, changing social context, or better training and composition of research teams or as a result of advances in technologies and methodologies. This article adapts the evolutionary biology concept of introgression, which refers to the hybridization and repeated bidirectional backcross exchange of information between species, as a metaphorical frame to examine science itself and to trace the ways in which historic race biases from earlier, disowned human evolution research have been retained and selected for beneath the surface of current genomic research today. It takes as its focus the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, first announced in 2006 and refined since, and the explosion of scientific research comparing that sequence to present-day human DNA from individuals around the world to illustrate the ways in which current research questions and findings in comparative evolutionary genomics draw on and dredge up earlier biases, albeit adapted to and disguised within contemporary social relations and power differentials

Five Ps (Policies, Practices, Power structures, Places; and People): A Framework to Analyze Systemic Inequalities

This chart is part of a framework to establish institutional equity and is part of the following National Science Foundation grant project: The Spaces of Empowerment for Equity and Diversity: Advancement Through Access (SEE-DATA) project at Portland State University (PSU) aims to identify, understand, and improve the workplace experiences and retention of faculty in STEM fields who have been traditionally minoritized and marginalized based on gender, race/ethnicity, and other intersectional identities (e.g., sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, national origin, immigrant status). The project will collect, analyze, and map data about faculty’s experiences at PSU to inform programs and policies that seek to foster the retention and flourishing of a faculty that more closely resembles the diverse student body at PSU. It is anticipated that the SEE-DATA project will significantly contribute to improving institutional equity.SEE-DATA will take an intersectional approach to data collection, management, analysis, visualization, and dissemination by combining qualitative, quantitative, and socio-spatial data, techniques, and mapping tools with the goal of conveying more nuanced understandings of the equity landscape and “ecosystem” for diverse faculty members than has been established to date elsewhere. The scope of the methodology that the project will develop will be applicable to STEM departments across the university and to other institutions. The project’s strengths-based self-assessment methodologies will contribute to a toolkit for capturing and visualizing the dynamic interplay between the multiple lived identities of STEM faculty as they are manifested in the institutional landscape, thus supporting ADVANCE goals for expanding intersectional equity strategies and interventions. This project addresses limits in extant sources of data (e.g., numerical counts, climate surveys) on the intersectional factors affecting academic STEM recruitment, workplace experiences, retention, and promotion. Outcomes will be expected to advance a clearer and deeper understanding of individual empowerment pathways and institutional systemic change levers in advancing faculty equity in STEM. Knowledge generated will be disseminated via avenues such as a project webpage, public seminars, and conferences geared to professional and general audiences, as well as through networks within PSU, at other colleges/universities, with professional organizations nationally, and via the ADVANCE Resource Coordination Network (ARC) and StratEGIC website. The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in policies, processes, practices, and the organizational culture and climate. ADVANCE Catalyst awards provide support for institutional equity assessments and the development of five-year faculty equity strategic plans at an academic, non-profit institution of higher education.This award reflects NSF\u27s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation\u27s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria

Nanotechnology Courses for General Education

Interdisciplinary faculty from Physics, Biology and Electrical and Computer Engineering, (ECE) have created a sequence of three stand-alone 300-level general education lecture courses in nanotechnology with one supporting laboratory course, with the support of National Science Foundation funding through the nanotechnology Undergraduate Education initiative. These three lecture courses can be taken by non-majors as science courses for General Education credit and are tailored to support interaction between STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and non-STEM students, who will take them together. The ECE and Biology courses have each run once and course feedback and analyses are summarized here

Representation Justice As a Research Agenda for Socio-Hydrology and Water Governance

We propose representation justice as a theoretical lens for socio-hydrology and water governance studies. An exploratory survey of 496 water sector employees in the United States revealed that self-identifying females felt more strongly discriminated against due to their gender and other social factors, compared to self-identifying males. Responses unveiled how macro- and microaggressions impede career pathways to leadership positions and, therefore, representation. We identify ways in which socio-hydrology can benefit from a representation justice lens by considering the following: (1) how power and politics shape the composition of the water sector and decision-making processes; (2) how available quantitative data do not account for lived experiences of individuals in the water sector; and (3) how intersectionality cannot easily be accounted for in current socio-hydrological models. We offer a representation justice research and water management agenda that goes beyond quota filling to include meaningful engagement with diverse groups, lenses, and knowledge