West Virginia\u27s Wetlands

Wetlands, transitional areas between terrestrial and aquatic systems where the water table is usually at or near the surface or the land is covered by shallow water, covered an estimated 221 million acres of the conterminous 48 states in colonial days. Over 53 percent of those wetlands have since been lost to development. Wetlands have a long history of being drained or filled due to the expansion of the human population and the need for agricultural land as well as the negative connotations associated with wetlands such as mosquitoes. West Virginia is estimated to have 102,000 acres of wetlands, which is less than 1% of the total area. This estimate is 24 percent less than the 134,000 acres present in the late 1700s. Because of their rareness, wetland conservation is of great importance in the Mountain State

Community languages, the arts and transformative pedagogy

Consistent with the goal to pass on heritage to the next generation, teachers of community languages always build a strong cultural focus into their teaching. This often includes an arts dimension, such as work around festivals and traditional tales. This article, based on qualitative research in four London schools in 2009-10, explores different ways of incorporating an arts focus into community language teaching and the importance such work has for the children’s learning and confidence

Listening to Parents\u27 Voices: Cross Cultural Perceptions of Learning to Read and to Write

Traditionally, educators have been generous in dispensing advice to parents about how they can help their children learn to read and write when they enter school (e.g.,Mergentime, 1963; Vukelich, 1984). However, researchers in emergent literacy (Clay, 1966) have found that many young children enter school already possessing considerable literacy knowledge. Consequently, there is a burgeoning interest in working with parents to understand the important roles they play in their school aged children\u27s literacy development

How Parents Perceptions of Literacy Acquisition Relate To Their Children\u27s Emerging Literacy Knowledge

There is increasing recognition that literacy learning is a sociocultural phenomenon and that the ways in which the learning is mediated, the meanings which are ascribed to literacy, and the literacy activities in which members of a cultural group engage are determined by the beliefs and values held by the participants (Clay, 1993). For example, in her work with three different cultural groups in the southeastern United States, Heath (1983) documented qualitative differences between the early literacy experiences of working class children and their middle class counterparts. Tracking the children\u27s literacy development in school, she found that the middle class children whose early literacy experiences approximated the experiences which they subsequently encountered in school were successful; working class children whose preschool literacy experiences were not congruent with those at school experienced difficulty and failure and consequently dropped out of school

Ecohydrological separation in wet, low energy northern environments? A preliminary assessment using different soil water extraction techniques

Funded by European Research Council ERC. Grant Number: project GA 335910 VEWA ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The constructive comments and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers greatly improved an earlier version of this manuscript. Jon Dick, Jason Lesselsand Jane Bang Poulsen are thanked for assistance with data collection; Audrey Innes for sample preparation and assistance with the cryogenic extraction of water samples; Paula Craib for glassware design; Colleagues in Prof. J. Anderson’s lab for day-to-day assistance incryogenic extraction; Todd Dawson and Nathalie Schultz for providing information on extraction techniques and the analysis of vegetation water; Hedda Weitz for help with the centrifugation of soil samples;and Iain Malcolm and colleagues at the Marine Scotland Freshwater Lab for providing meteorological data. We thank Jason Newton and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) Mass Spectrometry Facility Laboratory in East Kilbride for theisotopic analyses of the xylem water samples. The European Research Council ERC (project GA 335910VEWA) is thanked for funding.Peer reviewedPostprin

Representing and Promoting Family Literacy on the World Wide Web: A Critical Analysis

The purpose of this study was to examine critically how family literacy is promoted and represented through the images and written texts on Web sites developed by providers of family literacy programs. Naturalistic research over the last 20 years or so demonstrates that the family is a rich site for supporting children’s literacy development across socioeconomic and cultural contexts. This research suggests that families engage children in a wide array of literacy activities in their daily experience. Furthermore, many significant others in addition to parents play important roles in children’s literacy development. In this study we examined a representative sample of family literacy Web sites from across Canada. Findings suggest that literacy tends to be narrowly defined; responsibility for children’s literacy is usually ascribed to mothers; and troubling assumptions about families as being deficient still persist.Cette étude avait comme objectif d’étudier de façon critique la promotion et la représentation de la littératie familiale par les images et les textes écrits dans les sites Web qu’ont développés les fournisseurs de programmes d’alphabétisation familiale. La recherche naturaliste des vingt dernières années démontre que la famille constitue un milieu propice pour le développement de la littératie enfantine pour tous les contextes socioéconomiques et culturels. Ces résultats permettent de conclure que les familles font participer leurs enfants à toute une gamme d’activités littéraires au quotidien. De plus, plusieurs autres personnes clés jouent un rôle important dans l’alphabétisation des enfants. Lors de cette étude, nous nous sommes penchés sur un échantillon représentatif de sites Web canadiens portant sur la littératie familiale. Nous avons constaté que l’on a tendance à accorder une définition étroite à l’alphabétisation, à assigner à la mère la responsabilité de l’alphabétisation des enfants, et à entretenir des hypothèses troublantes selon lesquelles la performance des familles est insatisfaisante