Transmitting Faith in the Republic:Muslim Schooling in Modern Plural France

This article explores and analyzes private Muslim schooling in France using ethnographic research performed in 2013–2014 in Lille-, Lyon-, and Paris-based Muslim schools. The article discusses the course content and the interpretations of Islam that are taught, demonstrating how French republican values are fused together with Islam to promote a specific brand of French Muslim citizenship and identity. I argue that Muslim schools should be seen as part of the process of the normalization of Muslim-based civic engagement and that they represent a particular response to France's new plurality that reinterprets the boundaries of “French” and “Muslim.”     

Teaching Against the Grain as an Act of Love: Disrupting White Eurocentric Masculinist Frameworks Within Teacher Education

What is radical love in teaching? How can radical love incite change and transformation within teacher education? What does radical love entail to prepare critically minded teachers for urban schools? In this conceptual paper, we respond to these questions through our individual and collective experiences as social justice oriented teacher educators preparing students to teach in urban schools. We engage with our womanist ways of knowing (Walker in In search of our mothers’ gardens: womanist prose, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2004) and “theory in flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa in This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, 2nd edn, Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, New York, 1983) to collaboratively reflect and analyze our conversations, reflective journaling, meetings, and other telling moments about what it means to practice radical love in teaching. More specifically, we identify three central concepts of what love as an act of resistance or teaching against the grain entails: (1) vulnerability, (2) collective support and healing, and (3) critique. Through these concepts we offer a framework from which to practice radical love in teaching and work in solidarity with others to transform oppressive systems in urban (teacher) education.     

Intellectual Disability and Developmental Risk: Promoting Intervention to Improve Child and Family Well‐Being

Initial intervention processes for children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) largely focused on direct efforts to impact core cognitive and academic deficits associated with the diagnosis. Recent research on risk processes in families of children with ID, however, has influenced new developmental system approaches to early intervention. Recent risk and resilience processes are reviewed that connect stress, family process, and the high rates of behavioral problems in children with ID that have substantial influence on child and family outcomes. These models are linked to emerging evidence‐based intervention processes that focus on strategic parent skill training and mindfulness interventions that reduce parental stress and create indirect benefits for children's behavioral competencies. A family‐focused developmental systems approach (M. J. Guralnick, 2011) is emphasized.     

Pre-service physical education teachers’ Indigenous knowledge,cultural competency and pedagogy: a service learning intervention

In this paper, we investigate the effects of a community- and school-based service learning experience (SLE) on pre-service physical education teachers’ Indigenous knowledge, cultural competency and pedagogy. Informed by the theoretical tenets of Indigenous research methodologies, experiential learning and critical reflection, we examine 55 final-year pre-service physical education teachers’ (age: 21.9 [8.3]; 10.7% low SES; 68% females) cultural learning and competency in a core unit of study with a six-week SLE. Measures of their experiences included reflective journals, multicultural teaching competency scales and focus group interviews. Findings support the design of the SLE, with statistically significant changes in pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their cultural competency (p < 0.001). Pre-service teachers were able to challenge their assumptions about Indigenous students, plan and implement student-centred and culturally relevant pedagogies. Attention is drawn to the design of this SLE and demonstrates the importance of using Indigenous community members and teachers as mentors, which has not been explored in previous SLE studies.     

STUDENTS’ AND INSTRUCTORS’ BELIEFS ABOUT EXCELLENT LECTURERS AND DISCUSSION LEADERS

To what extent do students and teachers hold similar beliefs about excellent teaching? Do differences in beliefs have practical implications (e.g., how students rate their teachers on end-of-semester evaluation forms)? In Study 1, undergraduate students (N=414) and faculty members (N=128) responded to questionnaires assessing their perceptions of an excellent discussion leader, lecturer, or instructor. Participants judged items that contributed to a Structure composite as more characteristic of excellent lecturers than excellent discussion leaders and items that contributed to a Process composite as more characteristic of excellent discussion leaders than excellent lecturers. Results for students and teachers showed several systematic differences. In Study 2,278 students and their course teachers rated the characteristics of a hypothetical excellent lecturer. In addition, students rated the effectiveness of their individual teachers. Students’ ratings of their teachers were higher when students and teachers agreed on their perceptions of characteristics of excellent lecturers.     

The relationship between instructional and assessment accommodations in an inclusive state accountability system

We investigated the kinds of instructional and assessment accommodations students with disabilities receive, and the extent to which instructional accommodations match assessment accommodations. Most students who had IEPs in specific content areas received instructional accommodations in those areas, and there were no differences by disability type. We provide data on the specific types of accommodations used. Overall, students' assessment accommodations matched their instructional accommodations, though many students received testing accommodations that had not been received in instruction. Implications are discussed for IEP teams who make decisions about instructional and assessment accommodations.     

Child emotionality and maternal responsiveness as predictors of reunion behaviors in the strange situation: links mediated and unmediated by separation distress

Children's emotionality--fear, anger, and joy--observed outside of the relationship with the mother (in standard laboratory paradigms), and within that relationship (in mother-child interactions), and mothers' responsiveness, all at 9 and 14 months, were examined as predictors of the reunion behaviors in the Strange Situation at 14 months in 112 children. Many predictors were linked to the reunion behaviors, but most of those relations were at least partially mediated by children's separation distress, which itself strongly predicted the reunion behaviors. Those relations were no longer significant when distress was controlled. Several links, however, remained significant, and they were unmediated by distress: Almost all involved measures assessed within the context of the mother-child relationship. In particular, possible markers of a suboptimal relationship (children's dampened joy and increased anger in interactions with the mother, poor maternal responsiveness) were associated with more avoidance and resistance upon reunion, even after accounting for the strong impact of distress. Studying how factors measured outside of and within early relationships influence the components of the attachment system may foster understanding of child behavior in the Strange Situation.     

A women's scientific society in the west. The late eighteenth-century assimilation of science

The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women's Society for Natural Knowledge), formally established by and for women, met regularly from 1785 to 1881 and sporadically until 1887. It challenges our stereotypes both of women and the physical sciences during the eighteenth century and of the intellectual interests open to women in the early European republics. This essay aims not simply to identify the society and its members but to describe their pursuits and consider what their story adds to the history of Western science. What does this society's existence tell us about the relationship between women and early science in general and about science and society in the Dutch setting in particular? Science and gender look rather different when observed through the activities of the immensely prosperous women of Middelburg, citizens of one of the most highly literate Western countries. The elite lives of the first-generation members of the women's society also offer us a glimpse into the early domestication of science, a process vital to its acceptance and assimilation.     

Clinico-Biochemical indexing of calcium urolithiasis on the basis of urinary citrate to calcium ratio and inhibition of mineralisation of urinary stone forming minerals by human urine

Urinary citric acid and calcium levels have been estimated in the urine of 20 normal healthy persons as well as 12 urinary stone patients. Inhibition efficiency of these urine samples towards the mineralisation of urinary stone forming minerals, viz., calcium phosphate, oxalate or carbonate, has been studied in an experimental model. Statistical correlation of the above data has been made by computing the coefficient of determination and unexplained variance. Clinico-biochemical indexing of calcium urolithiasis risk factor has been attempted in the light of the data.     

Optimal pruning for tree-structured vector quantization

Tree-structured vector quantization (VQ) is a technique designed to represent a codebook that simplifies encoding as well as vector quantizer design. Most design algorithms for tree-structured VQ used in the past are based on heuristics that successively partition the input space. Recently, Chou, Lookabaugh and Gray proposed a tree-pruning heuristic in which a given initial tree is pruned backwards according to certain optimization criterion. We define the notion of an optimal pruned tree subject to a cost constraint and study the computational complexity of finding such an optimal tree for various cost functions. Under the assumption that all trees are equally probable, we show that, on the average, the number of pruned trees in a given tree is exponential in the number of leaves. Furthermore, we prove that finding an optimal pruned tree subject to constraints such as entropy or the expected-depth is NP-hard. However, we show that when the constraint is the number of leaves, the problem can be solved in polynomial time. We develop an algorithm to find the optimal pruned tree in O(nk) time, where n is the size of the initial tree and kis the constraint size.