“I want them to feel heard. I want their voices to be agents of change”: Exploring a Community-Engaged Partnership Focused on Critical Service-Learning

This study explored the successes and informative challenges of a partnership forged between an elementary school, a university, and a nonprofit educational agency. The purpose of the partnership was to research the implementation of a yearlong critical service-learning framework in third and fifth grades. Teachers were engaged in a series of professional development sessions and workshops to learn how to enact My VOICE, a pedagogical approach that leverages student voices to develop a community-based service project that addresses a student-identified social issue. Using qualitative approaches, we systematically gathered teachers’ perspectives and recorded the apparent strengths and weaknesses of the partnership. We posit suggestions for strengthening the partnership and highlight the benefits of critical pedagogies that can be impactful for all children

The state of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities: a rapid evidence assessment

Increased digitisation of day-to-day activities was occurring prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic only accelerated the virtual shift, making web accessibility an urgent issue, especially for marginalised populations. Despite decades of work to develop, refine, and implement web accessibility standards, people with cognitive disabilities regularly experience many barriers to web accessibility. To inform ongoing work to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, a systematic review was conducted. The main question guiding this review is: what are the state-of-the-art of interventions that support web accessibility for citizens, 9 years of age and up, living with cognitive impairment? A set of 50 search strings were entered into three academic databases: SCOPUS, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Systematic screening procedures narrowed the search returns to a total of 45 included papers. A data analysis revealed themes associated with the lived experiences of people with cognitive disabilities, tools for improving web accessibility, and methodological best practices for involving people with cognitive disabilities in research. These findings have immediate implications for ongoing research and the development of meaningful solutions to the problem of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Testing a Toolkit for Restoring the Ipswich River

In April 2003, the Ipswich River was designated as the nation’s third most threatened river by a national organization, American Rivers, due to critically low flows and extended periods of no flow. Under the direction of the Ipswich River Council, a public/private working group, a surface run-off model was adapted and used by the U.S. Geological Survey to simulate the impacts of ground water and surface water withdrawals as well as land use on the river (Zarriello and Ries, 2000). A habitat study (Armstrong et. al., 2001) in combination with the model results provided the scientific basis and quantification for restoration. However, further modeling scenarios (Zarriello, 2001) indicate that due to the high degree of connectivity between the groundwater and surface water systems and the limited extent of the aquifers, restoration can only be achieved through a combination of methods including reduced water use, wastewater discharge and stormwater recharge