Abstracts
When you student teach, your supervisor rates your lessons, but who helps you make sense of what you learned? In Pennsylvania, student teachers are evaluated with the PDE-430, a state framework that rates observable teaching across four domains. The conversation after an observed lesson, however, often has no set structure. This study asked whether a structured debriefing protocol, the Reflective Approach to Teaching Practicum Debriefing (RATPD), could reveal what student teachers learn that ratings miss. The RATPD uses four questions: What did you learn from the lesson? How did it change your beliefs about teaching? What did you learn about yourself as a teacher? What will you change? This is the first use of the RATPD in a U.S. teacher preparation program. Ten student teachers from elementary, secondary, and special education placements completed interviews built around these questions, and their responses were analyzed for common themes. Participants described learning about caring relationships, behavior management, and differentiation. Their beliefs about teaching changed, deepened, or surfaced for the first time, and they described growing patience, confidence, and organization. All ten said they would revise their philosophy-of-education statements, and some began asking themselves the four questions after every lesson. The findings suggest that structured reflection works best alongside formal evaluation, and that any future teacher can use these four questions to learn more from every lesson they teach.
Whether working in education, counseling, social services, or another field that serves children and families, those entering these fields need more than knowledge and technical skills; they also need the ability to build meaningful relationships with families. Research consistently demonstrates the importance of strong family partnerships in supporting children's learning, development, well-being, and success. Current research also emphasizes that effective partnerships are built on trust, respect, communication, and recognition of families as important sources of knowledge about their children. This presentation introduces students to research-based strategies for developing and maintaining positive relationships with families. Participants will explore how to establish trust, communicate effectively, listen to and learn from families, recognize family strengths, navigate difficult conversations, and create partnerships that are culturally responsive and inclusive. The session will challenge the traditional view of family engagement as simply getting families involved and instead consider what it means to genuinely work with families. Students will leave with practical strategies they can use in future professional settings and a deeper understanding of how strong relationships can make a meaningful difference in children's lives.
On February 3rd, 2023, as a freight train owned by Norfolk Southern Rail Service drove east toward western Pennsylvania, an overheated bearing on one of its hopper cars failed, causing a derailment in the midst of a small Ohio town. Bearing: Voices of East Palestine is a projected multimedia documentary book exploring the town of East Palestine, and its surroundings, in the aftermath of this event. A collage of voices, places, and faces, Bearing combines original documentary poems by Bob Craven and photographs by Adam Bernard to depict the people and places that survive in our uncertain present. During today’s presentation, Assistant Professor of English Dr. Robert Craven will read selections from the ongoing project, including poems based on direct observation, public research, and personal interviews with residents of the spill zone, while sharing East Palestine photographs by Adam Bernard.
Focusing on the theme of justice, I will be reading poems from my most recent books of poetry: Empty the River & Nightstand.
The Acipenseriformes (paddlefishes and sturgeons) is a small but fascinating order of fishes that have satisfied the palate, inspired the imagination, and provoked the curiosity of humans for ages. These two early-evolved families of fishes provide a comparative window into the biology of other vertebrates - including reptiles and mammals. Collaborative studies with Westminster undergraduates aim to understand and compare aspects of the biology of the paddlefish and several species of sturgeons. This talk will describe how specimens of these fish are obtained and present some ongoing work examining specific digestive structures in these species. Ultimately, we seek to better understand how structure relates to function in the context of evolutionary relationships and differences in how these species live. Students ought to come away from this talk with appreciation for these remarkable (and in some cases, imperiled) fishes and a greater familiarity with scientific approaches to addressing questions.
Histone mRNA is a unique amongst mRNA molecules in animals due to a highly conserved element known as the 3’ stem-loop. This element replaces the vastly more common poly(A) tail. This unique structure and its binding partner, the Stem-Loop Binding Protein (SLBP), combine to regulate the expression of histone mRNA, a key event for maintaining the proper stability of DNA in cells. Being able to rapidly degrade histone mRNA is an especially key event, as over-expression of the mRNA leads to DNA packaging instability, which has catastrophic events during cell division. Dr. Lackey’s research focuses specifically on an important step in the early stages of histone mRNA degradation called uridylation; a small modification to the 3’ end of the RNA molecules that takes place shortly before degradation begins. Dr. Lackey and his students use a combination of biophysical lab techniques and computational simulations to better understand the way that this small modification affects the stability of both the stem-loop itself and the stem-loop/SLBP complex during the degradation of histone mRNA.
As K – 12 educators, goals should not simply be to communicate with families, but to build relationships that encourage collaboration, trust, and shared responsibility for student success. This book chapter presentation will guide pre-service teachers on how to make families of their students feel valued, heard, and included in decision making for their student. Focusing on how communication with families fosters the understanding teachers are on the families’ team to build the best experience for the student.
There is one standard question that old people ask young history majors: “so, what are you going to do with that, teach?” One good answer would be: “I am going to build skills.” Usually we mean verbal reasoning skills of the kind used in government law or company policy. There are, however, chances to practice an even broader range of skills while learning about the past. Love history but you have decided to work toward marketing and sales? Promote a nonprofit museum! Want to be in charge of managing information for an organization? Practice by helping our library! One of my projects here at Westminster is to connect students with these kinds of opportunities in Public History classes. When people ask: “but what is Public History?” I usually answer: “everything except writing essays.” The same kind of research into contextual information and careful crafting of communication that it takes to write an essay can go into an exhibit. This presentation will go into some of the possibilities for studying the wider world from the comfort of our own campus library.
This presentation explores the way in which George Lucas’s American Graffiti, his commercially successful predecessor to Star Wars, expresses a uniquely American fantasy – blue collar nostalgia. From the eighteenth through mid-to-late twentieth century, nostalgic prose and poetry frequently drew upon pastoral and rural imagery, often framing industrial and mechanical development as a threat to what literary critic Henry Nash Smith labeled “virgin land.” Lucas’ work, however, expresses a radical shift in that nostalgic tradition. In American Graffiti the old frontier of the wilderness has already been replaced by Fordism, the new(er) American frontier, which is already lamented as lost.
Contemporary Spanish author Javier Cercas has been active for more than three decades, writing novels, works of nonfiction, and regular columns and essays in a number of important periodicals in both his native country and abroad. In 2019, he began a project in a genre that he had yet to explore: the police procedural, a murder mystery in a style that has become extremely popular in almost every literary culture in the world. The project begins with the novel Terra Alta (published in English in 2022 as Even the Darkest Night), and continues through two subsequent novels—Independencia in 2021 (Prey for the Shadow, 2023) and El castillo de Barbazul in 2022 (Fortress of Evil, 2025). These books follow the law enforcement career and personal life of Melchor Marín, a fictional character whose story intersects in important and revealing ways with real events and people in Cercas’s Spain. This presentation outlines the early stages of research into narrative structure and technique utilized by Cercas in Terra Alta: as a crime novel, as part of the larger evolution of Spanish fiction, and as part of the author's overall work with Spanish history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans) is part of our oral microbiota. However, it contributes significantly to dental caries (formation of cavities) because of its ability to synthesize a protective layer around itself, called a biofilm, and it can metabolize sucrose into acids that demineralize our tooth enamel. A modified peptide fragment called SspB has been shown to be an effective competitive inhibitor of S. mutans. Additionally, green tea contains a variety of chemical compounds that appear to downregulate the function or expression of proteins required for biofilm formation. The goal of this project was to assess the effectiveness of biofilm inhibition using the peptide fragment SspB and green tea extract, and to determine if these treatments kill S. mutans or simply inhibit biofilm production. The prediction is that both treatments would decrease biofilm levels, but one might be more effective than the other.
Textbook authorship is often viewed through the lens of named authors, but much of today's educational content is developed by ghostwriters working behind the scenes. This presentation provides an insider's perspective on creating textbooks and digital learning materials for educational publishers, highlighting the collaboration, instructional design, and content development skills needed to translate complex concepts into engaging learning experiences. Attendees will gain insight into a unique form of academic work that extends the impact of teaching beyond the classroom and reaches learners on a global scale.
Being a "professor" involves more than being a teacher. Good professors also contribute to the bank of human knowledge and serve our institutions by helping to solve administrative problems. By taking a job at a liberal arts college, however, Westminster faculty members have chosen a professional academic identity in which the most important thing we do is teach undergraduate students. For the last dozen years, I have devoted my scholarly research to finding ways to improve how my colleagues and I teach my discipline of global politics. My identities as a scholar and an administrator are interwoven with my identity as a teacher, and being a scholar of pedagogy brings them all together. Because its goal is student learning, and because each student comes to learning with different experiences, understandings, and intellectual gifts, good teaching is both an art and a science. This presentation lays out some of what I have learned about how teaching at a liberal arts college can live up to the potential of students.
When massive stars are born, their powerful stellar winds and high-energy radiation not only heat and ionize the surrounding medium but also accelerate it outward. While this process is theoretically well-constrained, it has often been challenging to observe expansion of star-forming regions. In this work we analyze the expansion signatures of 35 star-forming regions mapped in [C II] 158 μm emission by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. The [C II] emission primarily traces photodissociation regions (PDRs) at the transition between ionized and neutral gas, which serves as a proxy for the outer boundary of star-forming regions. Of the 35 H II regions, 12 (∼34%) exhibit clear expansion in position─velocity diagrams, making them expansion candidates, with an average expansion velocity of ∼12.2 km/s. The remaining 23 regions show no clear expansion signatures, though they may still be expanding below detection limits. We find that in most cases stellar winds drive the expansion, and we estimate stellar ages for each expanding region. The estimated dynamical ages are 10─100 times shorter than the ionizing star lifetimes; we hypothesize on possible causes for this discrepancy.
In this presentation, we will discuss some ways that information can spread through a graph. A graph is a mathematical model that can represent networks like social media, road and city designs, and much more. We will discuss applications of the research to epidemiology, marketing, and the judicial system. In addition, we will highlight how mathematical research is done and the results of Westminster student projects that have recently been published in academic journals.
The Little Ice Age was a period of severe hemispheric cooling that took place between 1400-1700 CE. Unlike our own period of climate change, the early modern people who lived through the Little Ice Age had no concept of global climate and environmental change. So how did they understand the severe climate change they lived through? By reading primary sources from the period, I show that most people who live through severe climate change do not notice warmer or colder weather, but they do notice bizarre and extreme changes in the natural world and in the social order around them. The people of the early modern period experienced climate change as an episode of intense global weirding, in which the world as they knew it gradually became more and more unrecognizably strange.
The Seneca Valley High School Center for Biotechnology is a dedicated STEM research space and training program for high school students. Initiated as an opportunity for gifted students, the center began as a partnership between SV Biology teacher Tom Lavelle and Dr. Resendes at Westminster College, who identified equipment needs and offered technique training sessions for students. Over the past 8 years the space and program have grown, now working with partners from Westminster College, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Duquesne University, Penn State University, United States Geological Survey, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Pittsburgh Zoo. The center has reached nearly 100 students, through research investigations into conservation genetics, biofilm producing bacteria, synthetic biology, fluorescent microscope mitochondria detection, environmental detection of microbes and genetic edits in produce. Most of the students contribute projects to local and regional science fairs and some earn research internships with local institutions. As the early participants went off to college, we began to see the lasting benefits of this experience on their transition into undergraduate research. Notably, the alumni communicate that their experience in the lab opened opportunities for earning research positions early in their post-secondary education. This presentation will cover the initial results of a student and alumni experience survey attempting to quantify and describe the impact of the Center and its programs on the participants during and after high school.
Over the last forty years, the popularity of the true crime genre has exploded in the literary and entertainment industries. This growing popularity is associated with the publication of books in the 1980s, such as Helter Skelter, In Cold Blood, Zodiac, and Fatal Vision. Murley (2008) suggests that “true crime is a way of making sense of the senseless, but it has also become a worldview, an outlook, and a perspective on contemporary American life, one that is suspicious and cynical, narrowly focused on the worst kinds of crimes, and preoccupied with safety, order, and justice” (p. 2). Beyond the basic entertainment value of true crime, some scholars and criminal justice practitioners warn of the ‘CSI effect’, or the potential for jury members to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants in the absence of scientific evidence (Roane and colleagues 2005; Shelton 2008), essentially connecting their entertainment preferences with changes in their behavior. The popularity of true crime combined with the potential negative psychological, social, and practical consequences of its popularity have inspired this study investigating the motivations for individuals to consume true crime material. The current Q Methodology study includes analysis from 28 participants, ranging in age from 18-92 years old. Preliminary findings, using PQMethod, suggest that three distinct subjective viewpoints drive true crime consumption. This project has the potential to contextualize our understanding of what motivates individuals to rapidly consume true crime material.
How do historians tell other people's stories? How do they balance seeking to understand the past with honoring the dignity of individuals whose stories become evidence? This presentation will address how one historian has recently wrestled with questions like these. The research explores the lives and activism of abolitionist Angelina Grimké, temperance leader Frances Willard, journalist and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells, civil rights activist and priest Pauli Murray, Catholic pacifist and philanthropist Dorothy Day, and conservative political icon Phyllis Schlafly.
Chemistry is the study of the properties of molecules, including how they react with each other to change into new chemical compounds. All of these properties in turn depend on how the electrons in a molecule are arranged — what bonds are present, how they break and re-form in a reaction, and how they respond to outside influences from heat, light, or collisions with other molecules. These electrons are incredibly small and almost incomprehensibly light, meaning they obey the rules of a physical theory called quantum mechanics and act like waves of matter, rather than a baseball with a definite shape and location. In this presentation, the speaker will showcase some of his scientific experiences as a quantum chemist: where he teaches computers how to do the quantum mechanics necessary to predict & understand molecular behavior and properties of interest.
Samarium–cobalt magnets are prized for their strength and thermal stability, but their manufacture and retirement generate a concentrated scrap stream rich in cobalt, iron, and other metals. This presentation asks whether that waste can be redirected rather than merely refined: could scrap-derived transition metals be leached and incorporated into zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) to create tunable, heterogeneous catalytic sites for the aerobic oxidation of cyclohexane to KA oil, the ketone–alcohol intermediate underpinning nylon production? The talk outlines the proposed pathway—characterize, leach, build, test, analyze—along with necessary controls, performance and circularity metrics, and a candid look at the environmental trade-offs such a route must justify.
The Westminster Bee Company is a student-run enterprise with the mission to provide sustainable, natural, and local honey and bee products from Westminster College's Apiary. The venture and customer purchases support students, a hands-on education, and the environment. Through BA/ENV 270 Environmental Entrepreneurship, students are provided unique experiential learning opportunities that help them develop transferrable skills while forwarding the mission of the WBC. In this presentation, students from all majors can learn how to get involved with the WBC, collaborating with their peers in the development of new products, business plans, marketing strategies, and events, all while cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset.
Before social media, before texting apps, before email, before the invention of the computer, and even before the invention of gummed envelopes, if you wanted to send a message or letter to someone, you did it by using a technique which we now call Letterlocking. Letterlocking is “the ingenious process of securing a letter, using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it becomes its own envelope.” Through studying these locked and unlocked letters from the past, much can be learned not only about different time periods in history but also the circumstances of the senders (and even the recipients) of the letters and their particular situations depending on the types of substrates and material used and the amount of security embedded into the locking technique. We have found enlightening information about notable figures in history, such as Jane Austen, Mary Queen of Scots, John Donne, and many more. Letterlocking techniques used in the past can be used by anyone wanting to return to the lost art of letter writing and providing recipients with a more personal type of communication, our own hand writing, sealed in our own hand made “envelope.”