Back to Africa: Tracing Dyslexia Genes in East Africa

A sample of Swahili-speaking probands with reading difficulties was identified from a large representative sample of 1,500 school children in the rural areas of Tanzania. Families of these probands (n = 88) were invited to participate in the study. The proband and his/her siblings received a battery of reading-related tasks and performance on these tasks was recorded and treated as phenotypic data. Molecular-genetic analyses were carried out with 47 highly polymorphic markers spanning three previously identified regions of interest harboring susceptibility loci for reading difficulties: 2p, 6p, and 15q (DYX1–DYX3). The analyses revealed the involvement of these regions in the development of reading difficulties in Swahili. The linkage signals are especially pronounced for time (compared with error) indicators of reading difficulties. These findings are easily interpretable because in transparent languages such as Swahili deficits in reading are more related to the rate/speed of reading and reading-related processes than to the number of errors made. In short, the study incrementally advances the field by adding an understudied language and an understudied population to the variety of languages and populations in the field of molecular-genetic studies of reading difficulties.     

Dis-placing place-making: how African-American and immigrant youth realize their rights to the city

ABSTRACT

Notions of place-making assume that individuals and groups of people have legitimate ‘rights to the city.’ This paper unsettles these notions to incorporate the politically and legally tenuous relationships African-American and Immigrant youth have to their cities. We describe a community-based digital STEAM curriculum called Mobile City Science that invited youth to engage in place-making efforts using mobile and location-aware technologies. The design study relied on a contradiction that is fundamental to youth place-making in an era of white nationalism: for African-American and Immigrant youth to engage power structures in community development processes, they had to engage in a series of dis-placements that removed them from embodied experiences and in-location perceptions of their communities. Self-censoring, witnessing, historicizing, and re-veiwing were all examples of dis-placements youth enacted to speak truth to power with digital and mobile tools.     

Abilities and affordances: factors influencing successful child–tablet communication

Using Luhmann’s communication theory and affordance theories, we develop a framework to examine how kindergarten-grade 2 students interact with tablet computers. We assessed whether cognitive ability and device configuration influence how successfully children use tablet computers. We found that children’s limited ability to direct their cognitive resources affects child–tablet communication (i.e., sending and receiving information to and from the device). While it may appear that children simply know how to use this technology, they are actually engaged in a systematic assessment of the device governed by their level of attentional maturity. Interestingly, tablet computers designed for adults result in a higher frequency of successful communication but prolonged communication was most likely to take place on child-focused tablet computers. It seems that communication success and user engagement are independent.     

The regulation of teaching as symbolic politics: rituals of order,blame and redemption

This article explores the school inspection as a political ritual for the management of tensions between competition and equality inherent in neo-liberal educational regulatory regimes. At the centre of the article is a case study of how teachers in an allegedly failing working-class English primary school coped with issues of social class, educational success-and-failure and an Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection and related accountability measures. National educational policy – relative performance data and inspection – generated a crisis within the school, and intervened in teacher discourse about the role of social class in pupil attainment. Whereas previous scholarship on OFSTED and inspections has emphasised their harmful effects on teachers and teaching practice, the current article broadens the focus from regulatory to political issues, from specific schools to the stability of the educational order more generally. Based on this case study, situated within a broader analysis of shifting discourses about social class and education in English educational policy, I argue that (1) the current regulatory regime makes ‘failure’ inevitable, thereby posing a symbolic problem for policy-makers and politicians; (2) by identifying failure and allocating blame, the inspection ritual fulfils an important symbolic function; which (3) serves to buttress the legitimacy of the neo-liberal educational order.