Education Department

This study examines how 1.5- and second-generation Muslim undergraduates in the United States make meaning of higher education amid the competing demands of displacement, racialized belonging, neoliberal aspiration, and Islamic ethical commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews with 20 Muslim students, I use an arrivant framework to analyze how the conditions of migration, empire, and racial capitalism shape students’ relationships to education. The findings reveal that arrivant Muslim students do not simply absorb or resist neoliberal educational logics but rework them through familial narratives of displacement, gendered constructions of cultural authenticity, and moral reasoning rooted in Islamic traditions. Students invoke American exceptionalist discourses of opportunity while contending with anti-Muslim racism, surveillance, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating educational aspiration as a cultural trait of immigrant families, this study theorizes it as a structural condition of arrivant subjectivity, produced by imperial histories and sustained by racial capitalism.

This essay articulates an innovative counterstory-based methodology of decolonialde linking which disrupts the very epistemic foundations of sociological disciplinary boundaries and ways of thinking about the production and distribution of knowledges. As non-white co-authors, we have opted to follow to adopt an expansive conception of decolonial/border-thinking gnosis and delinking as a way to embrace all knowledges, particularly those which do not conform to disciplinary modes of exposition and rationalist systematicity within the epistemic conceptions of knowledge. Using two disabled counterstories as gnosis illustrations, our essay shows how their enactment transgresses established norms for addressing and engaging with traditional, discipline-bound epistemological concerns. As such, we aim to open theoretical and methodological avenues for decolonial and non-Eurocentric spheres of imagination. More specifically, since the worlds of mathematics and mathematics education are so dominated by rationalist and neurotypical epistemologies grounded on the Cartesian duality of matter vs. ideas, both of our illustrative counterstories will deal with aspects that disrupt such epistemological paradigms through intersectional cripistemologies.

Abstract: How do teachers develop and use political knowledge to create equitable and inclusive conditions for and with disabled students, particularly disabled students of color? In this essay, we build on concepts of political teacher knowledge in mathematics education, critical inclusive mathematics education and disability studies to explore teacher knowledges that support disabled students’ mathematical learning. We focus on four aspects of political knowledge for teaching mathematics: (1) knowledge as relational and unfolding over time, (2) understanding and negotiating the political contexts in which we teach mathematics, (3) deconstructing deficit discourses about marginalized students, and (4) learning to creatively resist the systems for and with our students. To develop our theoretical analysis, we use a counterstory of a middle school Latino student named Luis and his Latina mathematics teacher, Ms. Marquez. Our aim is to open up discussions in mathematics teacher educational research about the politics at play in teaching inclusive mathematics.

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students’ performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and population considered. In the first study, an assessment of words that can be expected to appear with at least moderate frequency at particular levels of text was administered to students in grades 2 through 12. The second study considered the responses of fourth- and fifth-grade students, including English learners, to words that teachers had identified as challenging for those grade levels. The effects of the same set of word features on students’ vocabulary knowledge were examined in both studies: predicted appearances of a word and its immediate morphological family members, number of letters and syllables, dispersion across content areas, polysemy, part of speech, age of acquisition, and concreteness. The data consisted of the proportion of students who answered an item correctly. In the first study, frequency of a word’s appearance in written English and age of acquisition predicted students’ performances. In the second study, age of acquisition was again critical but so too were word length, number of syllables, and concreteness. Word location (which was confounded by word frequency) also proved to be a predictor of performance. Findings are discussed in relation to how they can inform curriculum, instruction, and research.

U2AF1 is one of the most recurrently mutated splicing factors in lung adenocarcinoma and has been shown to cause transcriptome-wide pre-mRNA splicing alterations; however, the full-length altered mRNA isoforms associated with the mutation are largely unknown. To better understand the impact U2AF1 has on full-length isoform fate and function, we conducted high-throughput long-read cDNA sequencing from isogenic human bronchial epithelial cells with and without a U2AF1 S34F mutation. We identified 49,366 multi-exon transcript isoforms, more than half of which did not match GENCODE or short-read-assembled isoforms. We found 198 transcript isoforms with significant expression and usage changes relative to WT, only 68% of which were assembled by short reads. Expression of isoforms from immune-related genes is largely down-regulated in mutant cells and without observed splicing changes. Finally, we reveal that isoforms likely targeted by nonsense-mediated decay are down-regulated in U2AF1 S34F cells, suggesting that isoform changes may alter the translational output of those affected genes. Altogether, our work provides a resource of full-length isoforms associated with U2AF1 S34F in lung cells.

Disabled students have historically been dehumanized in education, generally, and in research and practice related to school mathematics (K–12), particularly. Typically, they are only offered access to low-rigor school mathematics emphasizing rote procedures and narrow skills, often segregated physically and socially from their nondisabled peers. Educators are crucial to the humanization of disabled students via anti-ableist and antiracist work toward systemic transformation. The purpose of this review is to take stock of the current knowledge base of educator and disability research concerning school mathematics, recommending directions for humanizing future research and practice. Through a humanizing mathematics education lens, we analyze 61 articles involving educators, disabilities, and school mathematics published during the decade between 2007 and 2016. Results of our analysis point to not only the continued perpetuation of dehumanizing approaches and positioning but also substantial shifts toward humanization in mathematics education for disabled students. Over half of the studies reflected humanizing shifts. Yet, overwhelmingly, studies continue to avoid meaningful intersectional considerations of race and disability.