Education has been at the forefront of many issues in Arizona over the past several years with concerns over lack of funding sparking the Red for Ed movement. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to education including a lack of visibility for how Arizona schools are performing at a legislative district level. While there are sources of information released at a school district level, many of these are limited and can become obscure to legislators when such school districts lie on the boundary between 2 different legislative districts. Moreover, much of this information is in the form of raw spreadsheets and is often fragmented between government websites and educational organizations. As such, a visualization dashboard that clearly identifies schools and their relative performance within each legislative district would be an extremely valuable tool to legislative bodies and the Arizona public. Although this dashboard and research are rough drafts of a larger concept, they would ideally increase transparency regarding public information about these districts and allow legislators to utilize the dashboard as a tool for greater understanding and more effective policymaking.

This 15-week long course is designed to introduce students, specifically in Arizona, to basic sustainability and conservation principles in the context of local reptile wildlife. Throughout the course, the students work on identifying the problem, creating visions for the desired future, and finally developing a strategy to help with reptile species survival in the valley. Research shows that animals in the classroom have led to improved academic success for students. Thus, through creating this course I was able to combine conservation and sustainability curriculum with real-life animals whose survival is directly being affected in the valley. My hope is that this course will help students identify a newfound passion and call to action to protect native wildlife. The more awareness and actionable knowledge which can be brought to students in Arizona about challenges to species survival the more likely we are to see a change in the future and a stronger sense of urgency for protecting wildlife. In order to accomplish these goals, the curriculum was developed to begin with basic concepts of species needs such as food and shelter and basic principles of sustainability. As the course progresses the students analyze current challenges reptile wildlife faces, like urban sprawl, and explore options to address these challenges. The course concludes with a pilot pitch where students present their solution projects to the school.

An exploration of how architecture can react to American hyper-consumption of clothing products. With the goal to raise public awareness and create systemic, sustainable change in the fashion industry, this project synthesizes each part of manufacturing, including production, consumption, and post consumption, into one local campus. By bringing manufacturing back into the daily rhythms of an urban context and combining a prototypical mix of fashion related programs, ethically minded consumers are formed.

Machine learning is a rapidly growing field, with no doubt in part due to its countless applications to other fields, including pedagogy and the creation of computer-aided tutoring systems. To extend the functionality of FACT, an automated teaching assistant, we want to predict, using metadata produced by student activity, whether a student is capable of fixing their own mistakes. Logs were collected from previous FACT trials with middle school math teachers and students. The data was converted to time series sequences for deep learning, and ordinary features were extracted for statistical machine learning. Ultimately, deep learning models attained an accuracy of 60%, while tree-based methods attained an accuracy of 65%, showing that some correlation, although small, exists between how a student fixes their mistakes and whether their correction is correct.

Geology and its tangential studies, collectively known and referred to in this thesis as geosciences, have been paramount to the transformation and advancement of society, fundamentally changing the way we view, interact and live with the surrounding natural and built environment. It is important to recognize the value and importance of this interdisciplinary scientific field while reconciling its ties to imperial and colonizing extractive systems which have led to harmful and invasive endeavors. This intersection among geosciences, (environmental) justice studies, and decolonization is intended to promote inclusive pedagogical models through just and equitable methodologies and frameworks as to prevent further injustices and promote recognition and healing of old wounds. By utilizing decolonial frameworks and highlighting the voices of peoples from colonized and exploited landscapes, this annotated syllabus tackles the issues previously described while proposing solutions involving place-based education and the recentering of land within geoscience pedagogical models. (abstract)

Located directly south of Pima County, Arizona, there is a culturally rich community known as Santa Cruz County, Arizona. Santa Cruz County is a smaller community being home to an estimated 47,000 people. Santa Cruz County has a rich history given its proximity to the United States-Mexico border. One example of this rich history can be found at the Tumacacori National Historical Park (NHP) with the attractive and unique ruins. The Tumacacori NHP was once an active Spanish mission that oversaw the religious expansion and communal resources. While the Tumacacori NHP no longer operates in this manner, it does serve an important role in providing visitors with a diverse and immersive look into the history of the region and the Tumacacori mission. While the Tumacacori NHP is meant to be a place for all people to visit, most visitors are not from the local community. The reason for this stems from a lack of educational and engagement opportunities between the Tumacacori NHP and the community youth, mainly due to community members being unaware of the park’s existence or the programs that are offered. This project analyzes and uncovers this disconnect as well as the barriers between the Tumacacori NHP and the Santa Cruz County youth through a research study and the use of children’s literature.