Feb 14, 2024
What do children aged 11-13 in two countries think about solidarity? The SOLIDEX project is a research initiative funded through the Fulbright Romania examining how children in Romania and the United States understand the evolving contexts of solidarity.
Building upon their Fulbright experiences, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Bucharest, respectively, Catalina Ulrich Hygum and Luisa-Maria Rosu, were granted, in May 2023, a Fulbright Alumni Institutional Development Grant with a team including Dr. Leyla Safta-Zecheria from the West University of Timisoara, Dr. Marcela Slusarciuc (also a Fulbright scholar) from the University of Suceava Stefan cel Mare, Dr. Elena Ungureanu, and Madalina Coza, PhD student from the University of Bucharest.
Ulrich Hygum’s work belongs to the Sociology of Education, while Rosu is a Mathematics major and a STEM programs’ evaluator. What brought them and a consortium of four different institutional perspectives together is the way they think about how participative methods of teaching and doing research inform active citizenship. They collaborated on several papers over the last 15 years and co-advised students. They found common interests, proving once more that STEM and Humanities are not parts of a dichotomy but address common issues of our civic responsibilities.
July 20, 2023
Engineering, scientific research, and innovation constantly create a dizzying array of technical terms. Keeping up with this expanding terminology presents unique challenges to deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students who communicate using American Sign Language (ASL.) For example, Daniel Lundberg, a deaf chemistry professor at Gallaudet University, estimates that about 80% of chemistry terms have no established sign. This is an incredibly frustrating situation for students in middle school, where most students decide to pursue an interest in STEM.
In the summer of 2020, Mona Noor Jawad, then an undergraduate bioengineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, volunteered at the Grainger College of Engineering Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering summer camp. The camp is designed to provide pre-college STEM opportunities to underrepresented groups. She observed that “it was a great organization full of diverse students, but I was surprised by the lack of DHH representation among our applicants. Working with the same educator who ran the camp, I interviewed deaf educators about the challenges they faced in teaching STEM. For these students, I was told it all begins with their vocabulary.”