Providing real-time resources in support of LGBTQ+ and HIV+ populations as information experts on the ECHO hub team: a case report

Background:Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) is a telehealth initiative that aims to reduce disparities in delivery of health care by leveraging technology and local expertise to provide guidance on specialized subjects to health care providers across the world. In 2018, a new ECHO hub convened in Indianapolis with a focus on health care for individuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) populations. This ECHO iteration was one of the first of its kind and would soon be followed by a new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) ECHO as well.Case Presentation:In a novel approach, information professionals participated in the early planning stages of the formation of these ECHO teams, which enabled the provision of real-time medical evidence and resources at the point-of-need once the teams were launched. This case study demonstrates proof of concept for including health sciences librarians and/or information professionals in the ECHO as hub team members. In this case study, the authors describe and quantify the value added to the HIV and LGBTQ+ ECHO sessions by the medical librarians, as well as provide a template for how other telehealth initiatives can collaborate with their local health information professionals.Conclusions:Librarian involvement in Project ECHO over the past three years has been enthusiastically received. The librarians have contributed hundreds of resources to ECHO participants, helped build and curate resource repositories, and expanded the embedded librarian program to an additional two ECHO iterations. ECHO hub team members report high rates of satisfaction with the performance of embedded librarians and appreciate the provision of point-of-need evidence to ECHO participants.     

Of atoms, oaks, and cannibals; or, more things that talk

While literary works are often treated as museum pieces, an alternative Romantic/ Pragmatic aesthetic emphasizes instead the rootedness of all texts in lived experience. This suggests that both literary and scientific texts may be approached as performances that weave together discursive and material elements, giving language to matter, both making, and becoming, "things that talk." Three authors are contrasted: Emerson uses natural objects as metaphors to complete his thought; Thoreau uses natural objects as mediators who enroll him to speak for them in the name of a wider ecology; Humboldt attempts to enroll nonhumans, namely cannibals, into the global civil community by asking them to speak for themselves. The resulting quandary unsettles the Cartesian boundary between human and nonhuman, subject and object; as scholars divided by this boundary, we must multiply our own relations, the better to understand the ties that bind us into the common project of building the Cosmos.     

Formalist thinking and language arts instruction: teachers’ and students’ beliefs about truth and caring in the teaching conversation

Two studies illustrate the concern that the connection between teachers’ beliefs and their instructional practices can be a troublesome one if beliefs are informed by formalist thinking related to truth and caring in the teaching conversation. Twenty-seven middle school language arts teachers and 216 8th grade students were asked what they thought would constitute appropriate responses to a middle school student’s request for feedback about his poem. In spite of their training and experience, the instructional strategies of the teachers were guided by formalist beliefs about what they believed to be sound pedagogy. As a consequence, they minimized the importance of what the student actually said in his poem. Honest criticism and instruction were minimized. Teachers interpreted caring as helping the child to feel good about his work and about himself independent of the work’s merits. In contrast, students called out for honesty and for academic instruction and interpreted caring as receiving academic help. Few expressed formalist principles, and most argued that their teachers need not surrender truth, criticism, or instruction to express care and concern. They also revealed that they could, and would, see through their teachers’ efforts at impression management. Findings are interpreted within a framework provided by S. Cavell (1969)’s criteria for reciprocal conversation.     

Fitting Action Learning to Corporate Programs

The organization is like a tapestry with several variables woven through it, making it complex and unique. Action learning can be knitted into the organizational fabric, but it must be truly intertwined rather than loosely stitched for maximal effectiveness. Prerequisites for integrating action learning include achieving core competencies on individual, team, and organizational levels. Action learning can be applied individually or collectively, and it is important that competency building begin with the individual. Organizations may apply action learning on sporadic, integrating, or learning organization levels. Organizations that commit to action learning and create an infrastructure to support it will be most effective. Several examples and exercises of action learning application are highlighted.     

Spatial localization of a goal: Beacon homing and landmark piloting by rats on a radial maze

We performed six experiments in order to examine the ability of rats to use moving beacons and landmarks as cues to the location of reward on an eight-arm radial maze. In Experiments 1–4, the cues and goals were moved before each trial, and groups in which a single beacon was placed on the rewarded arm, a single landmark indicated that reward was on the arm immediately to the left of a landmark, or two landmarks were placed on each side of the reward arm were compared. The rats rapidly learned to track the reward in the beacon condition, failed to find the reward sooner than chance expectation with a single landmark, and did only slightly better than chance with two landmarks. In Experiments 5 and 6, the rats were trained in five trials per day, with the landmark and goal locations constant over daily rewarded trials, and in two extinction trials that were inserted among the rewarded trials. The rats found the goal arm at substantially better than chance expectancy with both one and two landmarks. Our results, in agreement with data from recent swimming pool experiments (A. D. L. Roberts & Pearce, 1998), show that rats will use the relationship between moving landmarks and a goal in order to find reward.     

Inside the ‘blackboard jungle’

Abstract

The 1950s saw a wave of depictions of threatening male working-class adolescents in English novels, films and cartoons. However, these texts must be contextualised not only as part of the well-documented 1950s moral panic about youth but in relation to the popularized psychological concepts of the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ child and the increasing implementation of progressive educational ideas that artificially limited working-class pupils’ horizons. This makes this period not only another reiteration of the perennial moral panics about the rising generation that Geoffrey Pearson has documented, but an emergence of a new way of conceptualizing youth.     

Nutrition for travel

The training and competitive programmes of elite athletes incorporate travel schedules, often long journeys, across multiple time zones. In such cases, travel causes both transient fatigue and a malaise known as "jet-lag" that persists for some days. Jet-lag is due to the disturbance of the body's circadian rhythms: diurnal and performance rhythms are displaced, depending on the direction of travel and the number of time zones crossed in flight. Attention to diet and hydration is relevant during the flight and following disembarkation until adjustment to the new meridian is complete. The consequences of jet-lag on rhythms in digestion may be compounded if food preparation and hygiene are inadequate in training camps or competitive venues overseas. The irony of travel is that it often places athletes at a greater risk of failing to meet their specific nutrition goals or succumbing to illness, at a time when the demands or outcomes of performance are of greatest importance. In addition, gastrointestinal infections related to travelling are frequent among athletes. Fastidious planning and organization among the support staff is recommended before the journey to prevent any such problems arising. Equally, athletes often need special education initiatives to assist them to cope with the challenges of a new and unusual food supply, or altered access to food.