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  Women Superintendents in the Rural Midwest: Narratives of Challenges and Resistance

  Anne Strothman

  Women represent 76.5% of all teachers in U. S. public schools (Institute of Education Sciences, 2020). Yet, only 26.7% of superintendents leading districts are women (Tienken, 2021, p.19). Although women have made gains in leading schools in larger districts, the same trend is not evident in smaller, rural school systems, which describe the majority of school districts in the United States (AASA: The School Superintendents Association, 2017). Scholars commonly attribute this disparity to gender bias prevalent in rural cultures. Quinlan’s analyses (2013) underscored the gender inequality and sexism that women can face in rural contexts. To help address gender inequalities in educational leadership, schools, districts, and educational leaders must develop an awareness of specific structural and sociocultural barriers to the superintendency faced by women in rural contexts and take proactive steps to understand and mitigate those challenges. This study focuses on the narratives and lived experiences of women superintendents in rural school districts, and of women who aspire to the superintendency in a rural context. This qualitative study also explored the effects that COVID-19 has had on these women’s experiences as rural superintendents, an important aspect of their experience since the pandemic has disproportionally affected women in the United States (AAUW, 2020; Donovan and Labonte, 2020; Hilferty et al., 2021; Karageorge, 2020). This study can help women interested in pursuing careers as rural school district leaders to learn about those challenges and thus prepare themselves better to overcome them. Finally, this study aims to promote gender equity in rural K-12 systems to support women serving in district-level leadership roles in providing leadership models for all students, especially those who identify as female.

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  Working With An Arduino and Sensors

  Abril Robinson

  This project comes from the computer science class "Internet of Things" where we have learned about various microcontrollers. In this project, a sensor is used to collect data and to react automatically to input from an environment. Using an arduino, I can now unlock the door to my house using my phone.

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  Yorkie dependent transcriptional network promotes tumor growth

  Arushi Rai; other authors: Indrayani Waghmare, Amit Singh, Madhuri Kango-Singh

  The Hippo pathway effector, Yorkie (Yki) is a key mediator of signaling interactions and transcriptional addictions in tumor cells and presents an attractive opportunity to study transcriptional dependencies in cancer cells. The RasV12 scrib-/- tumor mosaic model, a well-established model, shows activation of oncogenic Ras in the background of impaired apical-basal polarity. Previously, we have shown that in RasV12, scrib-/- cells Wingless (Wg) act upstream of Caspases, JNK and Yki and via its canonical and non-canonical pathways to interact with Yki to regulate the development and cancer growth. Our goal is to understand further how the two evolutionarily conserved signaling pathways i.e., Hippo and Wingless crosstalk and interact with each other to regulate tumor growth using the RasV12, scrib-/- tumor model in Drosophila imaginal discs. Our data showed that the wg transcriptional reporters and wg transcript levels both are upregulated in RasV12, scrib-/- cells. In other contexts, wg is shown as a transcriptional target of Yki. Therefore, we will test for (a) the effects of Yorkie protein, the main effector molecule of the Hippo pathway, on the transcription and expression of Wg and other Wg pathway components by reporter assays, and qRT-PCR- based approaches, and (b) the effect of wg pathway components (frizzled, TCF) on the intrinsic wingless signaling and also the growth of RasV12, scrib-/- tumor (c)the effect of feedback interactions that promote tumorigenesis using genetic epistasis-, and immunohistochemistry-based approaches. Here, we present our progress on the organization of the molecular network involving Wingless and Yorkie.

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  Youth, Violence, and the Reproduction of Social Inequalities

  Caroline Hauer, Ariana Adkins, Melissa Moore

  Violence -- whether physical or rhetorical -- is a key mechanism by which social groups navigate their status and power. Groups with less power tend to experience disproportionate rates of violence. In this panel, presenters explore the social conditions in which violence emerges; how individuals are impacted and react to violence; and how violence is represented in both mainstream and social media outlets. The first paper investigates how children who experience abuse or trauma go on to enact aggressive behaviors themselves. The second paper investigates how media representations of violent crime committed by American juveniles have evolved since 1980. The third paper investigates inter-generational discourse on TikTok and how adversarial group dynamics contribute to current polarized and politicized identity-based rhetoric on the Internet. Each of these papers is based on original social science research undertaken by presenters for the sociology senior capstone. Taken together, the papers reveal the myriad ways that violence and conflicts emerge in social interactions. This panel should be of interest to folks who are interested in thinking through ways to build a more safe, peaceful, and democratic society.