Faculty Research & Creative Scholarship 2020: O-P

Through the #ForBo Initiative, readings of this play took place at TCU, University of South Carolina Aiken, and The Urban Arts Center in Dallas during Black History Month 2020. The TCU reading was featured on NBC DFW.
Description: A play inspired by the murder of Botham Jean by Officer Amber Guyger is a fictional narrative told through contemporary free verse poetry, rhythm, and percussion. It explores the issues leading to Bo’s death and how society, particularly the African-American community, grapples with the resulting trauma.
Writer/Director: Ayvaunn Penn, Adjunct Faculty,Theatre

Journal Title: Corrections: Policy, Practice, and Research
Abstract: Reentry research has primarily focused on systemic and structural issues, with relatively little attention paid to the individual differences among ex-offender participation in community-based reentry services. Researchers often assume that the limiting factor for utilization of reentry services is the capacity for these services, without taking into account individual agency. This study examines factors that contribute to whether individuals participate or forego services, using data from a North Texas nonprofit client support organization, Texas ReEntry Services. Utilizing descriptive statistics and logistic regression, the researchers examine individuals who participate in the Job Readiness Program and compare them to individuals who do not utilize this service. Initial findings suggest that only a small percentage of unemployed ex-offenders take advantage of employment training and other free services.
Author: Katie Polzer, Associate Professor, Criminal Justice

Journal Title: Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners
Abstract: Many existing assessments for deciding the potential special education needs of emergent bilingual youth are either normed on monolingual students or normed on bilingual students through monolingual data collection (Hamayan, Marler, Sánchez-López, & Damico, 2013; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015; Perkins, 2005). To address this issue, we describe a recent study using translanguaging in dynamic assessment with six middle school emergent bilingual youth. Using bilingual language sample analysis of content-based story retells, coded with the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software, we demonstrate how emergent bilingual youth are able to produce more language and content knowledge when given the freedom to translanguage. These quantitative data may improve decisions distinguishing language difference from disability and address issues of disproportionality in special education.
Author: Steve Przymus, Assistant Professor, Education

Journal Title: The Bilingual Review
Abstract: A challenge facing Zapotec teachers in intercultural bilingual schools in Oaxaca, México is a persistent colonial system of national curriculum that places greater value on Western, monolingual, epistemological knowing-about knowledge over community-based, ontological, Indigenous knowing. The biliteracy teaching methods, shared here by two native Zapotec teachers at two Zapotec bilingual schools, honor community-based xkialnana, local ontologies that work to develop student biliteracy/identity development and challenge normalized/official/colonial knowledge acceptance at schools. Amid questions of language planning and policy, translanguaging is both leveraged and critiqued in an effort to achieve decolonial teaching and to keep mensajes de los abuelitos alive.
Author: Steve Przymus, Assistant Professor, Education