Sanitizing the Struggle: Barack Obama,Selma, and Civil Rights Memory

In this article, I examine Barack Obama’s use of collective memory during his 2007 campaign speech in Selma, Alabama. Specifically, I argue that Obama appeals to collective memory to challenge the Black community’s relationship to the past. He reframed the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in a manner favorable to his political aspirations. While this frame was politically expedient, it weakened Black political agency. It robbed the Black community of crucial rhetorical resources used to challenge structural inequalities in society. This article offers insight into the complex relationship between metaphor and collective memory. Specifically, I interrogate the role of metaphor as a crucial site where public memory is formed, disrupted, and rearticulated. Furthermore, I consider the implications of his use of memory for the future of the Black freedom struggle.     

Teaching for Scientific Literacy? An Examination of Instructional Practices in Secondary Schools in Barbados

This study examined the extent to which the instructional practices of science teachers in Barbados are congruent with best practices for teaching for scientific literacy. Additionally, through observation of practice, it sought to determine the teachers’ demonstrated role in the classroom, their demonstration of learning through discourse, learning goals and the nature of classroom activities. Five hundred nineteen students from 12 of the 23 secondary schools on the island and 15 teachers across 8 schools participated in the study. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire, an observational schedule and field notes. It was found that while problem-solving and questioning were mainly used in the classroom, the use of experiments was among the least popular teaching strategies. Additionally, results showed that teachers’ display of the knowledge of the characteristics of scientific literacy was unsatisfactory. Generally, the findings indicate a gap between teaching for scientific literacy as expressed in the literature and current instructional practices in secondary science classrooms in Barbados.     

What parents say about children’s inequality of opportunities: a study in Mauritius

Longitudinal studies showing the beneficial impact of early childhood education on later academic achievement have contributed to persuading policy-makers and academia that early childhood is the best time to address inequalities. However, the voice of parents is often absent from these debates. We investigated the perspectives of parents on children’s inequalities of opportunities and on the role of education and early childhood care in equalising life chances. The study specifically explored the views of 26 parents in the sub-Saharan African country of Mauritius through focus group discussions. Findings of the study suggested that parents tend to adhere to the discourse of parental responsibility as a key factor in children’s inequalities. Yet they also showed that parents have potential to criticise and deconstruct this narrative, as they experience structural circumstances, such as poverty or discrimination, shaping their life opportunities and those of their children.     

Designing a Bridging Discourse: Re-Mediation of a Mathematical Learning Disability

Students with disabilities present a unique instructional design challenge. These students often have qualitatively different ways of processing information, meaning that standard instructional approaches may not be effective. In this study I present a case study of a student with a mathematical learning disability for whom standard instruction on fractions had been ineffective. With regard to theory, I draw on Lev Vygotsky’s framing of disability and then use Anna Sfard’s conceptualization of mathematics as a discourse to design a fraction re-mediation that provided a bridge from the student’s discourse to the canonical mathematics discourse. This bridging discourse was used in 5 videotaped re-mediation sessions with the case study student. A fine-grained analysis of the re-mediation sessions traced the ways in which the student’s discourse shifted over time, which enabled her to solve problems she had previously been unable to solve. This study provides a proof of concept for reconceptualizing remediation and illustrates the potential utility of a bridging discourse to help students who have a history of failure gain access to the canonical mathematics discourse and content.     

Teacher Perceptions of School Consultant Social Influence Strategies: Replication and Expansion

The goals were to (a) replicate the findings of previous research with regard to the Consultee/Teacher Version of the Interpersonal Power Inventory (IPI), and (b) advance the literature by examining IPI scores about a current consultation relationship. Sample 1 included 99 elementary school teachers (44.4% Hispanic) who completed the IPI. Results replicated Erchul et al. Sample 2 (N = 37; 45.9% Hispanic) represented a subset of Sample 1 who participated in a consultation project and completed the IPI about influence in their current consultation relationship. The results advance the literature by offering evidence for convergent and predictive validity of the IPI soft power bases. Teachers who reported being influenced by soft power strategies experienced greater change in their behaviors and their students’ behaviors than those who reported being not influenced by such strategies. Implications for research and practice in school consultation are discussed.     

How Can Brain Research Inform Academic Learning and Instruction?

This paper explores the potential of neuroscience for improving educational practice by describing the perspective of educational psychology as a linking science; providing historical context showing educational psychology’s 100-year search for an educationally relevant neuroscience; offering a conceptual framework for the connections among neuroscience, cognitive science, educational psychology, and educational practice; and laying out a research agenda for the emerging field of educational neuroscience.     

Knowledge sharing in a multi-cultural setting: a case study

Organizational culture has been shown to influence the success of knowledge management practices. Hofstede's theory specifies that organizational culture is not independent of national culture. A case study of an international subsidiary was conducted to explore the extent to which knowledge sharing is dependent on national culture. Results indicate that language differences can create knowledge blocks, and cross-cultural differences can explain the direction of knowledge flows.     

Identification of analytic signals

This paper is devoted to the identification of analytic signals and to find a solution to the following problem. Given a realization of an analytic signal, it is necessary to find the analytic function by which the signal is described. The proposed approach to this problem is based on relatively simple relationships existing between many analytic signals and their respective derivatives. These relationships are closely related to the properties of the dynamic systems which generate the signals under investigation. Simple identification procedures are described and tested by means of computer simulation.     

Making the Pap smear into the "right tool" for the job

Despite being a rather recalcitrant tool, the "Pap smear" is today the major cancer screening technology in the world. This paper examines how and why hetrogeneous actors chose to advocate the Pap smear as a screen for cervical cancer in the late 1940's, and to tinker both in and far beyond the diagnostic laboratory for over 50 years to make the Pap smear "fit" as a screening and clinical technology. Tinkerings included gendering the division of labour, attempting to automate reading of smears, juggling costs, exploring alternative screening technologies, pushing for regulation of laboratories, and settling for locally-negotiated orders of clinical accuracy instead of global standardization, still elusive today.     

Overexpression of Aldose Reductase Render Mouse Hepatocytes More Sensitive to Acetaminophen Induced Oxidative Stress and Cell Death

Acetaminophen (APAP) a commonly used drug for decrease the fever and pain but is capable to induced hepatotoxicity at over dose. This study was carried out to investigate the effect of APAP on the expression of anti-apoptotic and antioxidative defense genes, and whether aldose reductase over-expressing plasmid capable to protect against APAP-induced oxidative stress and cell death. APAP treatment induced oxidative stress and hepatotoxicity, and significantly increased aldose reductase mRNA and protein expression in mouse hepatocyte (AML-12). Unexpectedly, AML-12 cells over-expressing aldose reductase augmented APAP-induced reduction in cell viability, reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, glutathione (GSH) depletion and glutathione S-transferase A2 expression. Moreover, over-expression of aldose reductase potentiated APAP induced reduction on proliferating cell nuclear antigen, B cell lymphoma-extra large (bcl-x_L), catalase, glutathione peroxidase-1 (GPx-1) and abolished APAP-induced B-cell lymphoma 2 (bcl-2) inductions. Further, over-expression of aldose reductase significantly abolished AMP activated protein kinase (AMPK) activity in APAP-treated cells and induced p53 expression. This results demonstrate that APAP induced toxicity in AML-12, increased aldose reductase expression, and over-expression of aldose reductase render this cell more susceptible to APAP induced oxidative stress and cell death, this probably due to inhibition AMPK or bcl-2 activity, or may due to competition between aldose reductase and glutathione reductase for NADPH.