From the Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrations to increasing popularity around climate-activist-turned-household-names like Greta Thunberg, a resurgence of environmental advocacy has taken the 21st century by storm. The environmental justice movement, a term first coined in the 1980s, was born from the idea that mainstream environmentalism does not examine environmental policy in the intersection of socioeconomic status and race. This literature review explores the history and impacts of environmental racism and the evolution of the environmental movement. It finds that not only have the burdens of environmental degradation been disproportionately distributed across different communities, but that analyses of the ecological impacts of imperialism have created a singular discourse that is paradigmatic of colonial ideologies. It parallels the colonial vision of conservation in North America with the treatment of its Indigenous populations and explores nature as something portrayed as the antithesis of culture. Finally, further examination of the changes from the Trump to Biden administrations is warranted by the construction of a new framework for examining environmental policies, with an emphasis on social equity. The intended outcome of this paper is to create a set of criteria for existing and future environmental legislation.

The 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) helps govern human-environment interactions in the United States with public and agency processes. As a result, the 1972 MMPA has accumulated praise and critiques concerning its provisions and implementation. Previous research explored the impacts of the 1972 MMPA, but these publications do not provide a comprehensive assessment based on human-environment interactions and government structures in the Pacific Northwest to determine possible “best practices” for environmental law. The study observes the 1972 MMPA concerning its goals and cultural, environmental, and international implications to determine the 1972 MMPA’s effectiveness and opportunities for improvement in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “West Coast Region.” Through this research, I analyzed literary information and interviews with people from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous communities to gather a holistic review of the 1972 MMPA as well as reveal pathways for enhancing environmental law in the United States. Available scholarly and media-based literature surrounding the 1972 MMPA suggest accomplishments encompassing the increased abundance of marine species over time, while mitigations for secondary impacts may be lacking. To appropriately address current concerns and perspectives of the 1972 MMPA, the United States public, agencies, and government bodies may collaborate to refine marine mammal securities. Revised implementation of the 1972 MMPA could inform future environmental policies and actions in the United States. Incorporating suggestions and relevant modifications in the 1972 MMPA may provide further effective partnerships in the “West Coast Region” with diverse stakeholder representations and marine conservation between governments and collectives. Consequently, the 1972 MMPA can serve as a case study for current and future environmental law in the United States and the international community.

Teaching techniques that involve high structure active learning have grown in popularity due to their usefulness in establishing an efficient and equitable learning environment. During this transition, a lot of work has been done to understand the equity impacts of high-stakes testing, particularly moderated through test anxiety and similar forces. Less work has focused on low-stakes points -- course points offered for good faith effort, completion, or participation. Are students as concerned with earning low-stakes points as they are with high-stakes points? The COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid shift to digital learning have provided a natural experiment with regard to course point allocation. Many professors have been forced to make unexpected changes to course organization, including the decision about what assignments to grade for thoughtfulness (low-stakes) and which assignments to grade for accuracy (high-stakes). This project attempts to address demographic and general trends in low-stake performance in a large introductory STEM course before and after the transition to online learning. Through qualitative and quantitative data analysis, we identified characteristics of students who are likely to forgo low-stakes course points in a large, high structure, introductory STEM course. Ultimately, the goal of the project is to recenter the discussion in education research regarding highly structured courses and serve as a reminder that critical low-stakes course points are as critical for student success as are high-stakes course points.

Code-switching (CS) refers to a multilingual speaker’s alternation between two or more languages in a single context of communicative discourse. It is important to study how children code-switch during narrative production because though there is existing research on code-switching and its prevalence in conversational settings where one may be inclined to code-switch based on conversational needs or factors, there is limited evidence on its prevalence during narrative tasks. Importantly, there is also minimal research on how the occurrence of code-switching may differ with language proficiency. In this study we will answer, (1) In what instances do children enrolled in immersion programs code-switch from Mandarin to English during narrative production? And (2) how are these instances affected by grade level and level of exposure? We hypothesize that as bilingual students progress through the immersion program, prevalence of code-switching during narrative production will decrease as proficiency in Mandarin increases. Thus we expect the number of instances of code switching to decrease as participants’ proficiency scores and their grade level (i.e. 1st, 2nd grade) increases. Participants involved were school-aged (1st-6th grade) children enrolled in a Mandarin-English (ME) immersion program in Oakland, California. Children completed a story-telling task, presented by a native speaker of the language being tested. Mandarin narratives were based on the wordless picture book “Frog Goes to Dinner”. Speech samples were collected and recorded over Zoom and then transcribed on CLAN software. Instances in which individuals of each grade level code-switch during a narrative task were coded from transcripts. We present data on the prevalence of code-switching in a controlled environment. Data collection is complete and analysis is in progress. Code-switching may be indicative of level of proficiency in narrative story telling in a second language (L2) for bilingual students.