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Current life in the US under the COVID-19 pandemic makes visible the fragility of supportive structures for academics with childcare responsibilities. Particularly academic mothers are left grappling with the impact of social and institutional shifts that took place due to the global pandemic. We, two early career multinational and Muslim MotherScholars, ask ourselves how these shifts are affecting our own entanglements of scholarship, job market navigation, motherhood, childcare responsibilities and routines, family traditions, and religious observation through feminist autoethnography. We used the concept of "liminal space" as our theoretical foundation. Data were collected through journal entries and analytic memos, and four vignettes were composed to (re)present the analysis. The vignettes display how Western dominant and nondominant spaces inform the ways in which the authors' identities are interloped, muted, contested, and thrown into tension with changing social and institutional expectations during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research has implications for higher education administrators who wish to gain a glimpse into the lived experiences and barriers of their international, Muslim, mothering employees, and for MotherScholars who live through similar complex and shifting identities to see validation and representation.

Instructional routines, like Number Talks and Notice and Wonder, engage students in doing and then talking about their mathematical thinking. Number Talk routines are short mathematical discussions where students mentally solve and share the strategies they used to make sense of the problem. In comparison, the Notice and Wonder routine asks students to reflect on a high-interest visual prompt with multiple entry points, share their noticings and wonderings, and then the teacher steers the discussion toward a mathematical question to explore further. But what happens when the Notice and Wonder routine is used in conjunction with a Number Talk? In this descriptive case study, we analyze whether and how this variation of a Number Talk provides a class of third-grade students opportunities to exercise agency. Findings from this study yielded two major themes: 1) agency is built when authority is shared during a mathematical discussion, and 2) Notice and Wonder is an instructional routine that supports sharing authority. We then discuss why this matters and next steps for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pollution of raw surface and underground water with pharmaceutical compounds has an impact on increasing the resistance of pathogenic microorganisms. Environmental challenges include investigating a novel and cost-effective therapeutic approach for the bactericidal treatment of water supplies. Ethyl acetate extracts from three marine algae (Caulerpa racemosa, Codium fragile, and Cystoseira myrica) obtained from the Red Sea (Hurghada, Egypt) were used for the green synthesis of TiO2 nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs). A highly crystalline nanoparticle structure with a stable tetragonal anatase structure was obtained; the mean concentrations were 2.43 to 6.09 × 108 NPs/mL and the average particle size was 125–131 nm. In ultrapure water, the TiO2-NPs were confirmed to be a stable solution following zeta potential analysis. UV light (λ = 350 nm) for 2 h was used to activate the TiO2-NPs before the antibacterial activity tests. The application of UV-activated TiO2-NPs for 4 h treatments demonstrated promising bactericidal activity, with a 73.08% reduction in Salmonella typhi and a 91.51% reduction in Enterobacter ludwigii. Antibiofilm activities against the reference strains Salmonella typhi NCTC 12023/ATTC and Morganella morganii ATCC25829 and the bacterial isolates Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterobacter ludwigii, and Enterococcus faecium were tested. The TiO2-NPs were nontoxic against the human normal cell line RPE1. Regarding the treatment of total and fecal coliform, in addition to fecal streptococci, in raw surface and underground water, the UV-activated TiO2-NPs prepared from the ethyl acetate extracts of Caulerpa racemosa showed high applicability. The present study offered insights into the nature and development of nontoxic and green TiO2-NP formulations for use as modern antibacterial alternatives against coliforms in aquatic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]