Tripartite preparedness and response during the COVID-19 pandemic: a First Nations’ perspective

First Nations and other Indigenous populations experience higher rates of infection and more severe outcomes associated with disease and illness than is observed in the general Canadian population (Lee et al., 2023; Pickering et al., 2023; World Health Organization, 2009). Health inequities are rooted in and further complicated by factors such as the Indigenous social determinants of health (ISDoH) (Reading & Wien, 2009), that reflect issues including but not limited to inadequate or insufficient housing, lack of a potable water supply, poor access to healthcare services, and difficulty with the transport of goods and services that are attributable to geographic remoteness and lack of federal/provincial action. The compounded effects of the ISDoH on First Nations peoples resulted in higher rates of morbidity and more severe outcomes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic than was observed in the broader Canadian population (Fleury & Chatwood, 2022; Clark et al., 2021). This qualitative research sought to understand the ways in which 4 First Nations in Northwestern Ontario were both supported and underserved by federal and provincial governments, and the ways that autonomous mitigation efforts were organized and implemented by each community. [...

Variation Within the “New Latino Diaspora”: A Decade of Changes Across the United States in the Equitable Participation of Latina/os in Higher Education

This study problematizes the common discourse that rapid and widespread Latina/o demographic growth in the United States is a driving force in realizing higher education equity gains. Using equity indices for students, faculty, and administrative leaders at the state level, we present a portrait of changes in Latina/o participation in higher education over the last decade and propose a classification scheme for understanding variation across states at the intersection of changes in both demographics and equitable participation. En este estudio se problematiza el discurso común del veloz y extendido crecimiento demográfico latino en los Estados Unidos como promotor de mayor equidad en la educación terciaria. A través de índices de equidad al nivel estatal de estudiantes, profesores y funcionarios administrativos, se presenta un retrato de los cambios en la participación de latina/os en la educación terciaria en la última década y se propone una clasificación esquemática de estados que facilita la comprensión de variantes que surgen de la confluencia entre cambios demográficos y participación equitativa

Charting the Design of Community College Student Success Courses: Uncovering Their Espoused and Enacted Curricula

Community colleges increasingly turn to various types of student success courses for their potential as high-impact practices to foster college completion. Despite commonly held assumptions of what characterizes these interventions, upon close inspection there is an unscrutinized, circular confounding of their goals and means which limits the ability of educators to design, deliver, and assess them adequately. In this mixed methods study of 45 community college student success programs across the United States, we show how a sociocultural perspective helps to clarify the espoused versus enacted curriculum of student success courses and to explain the problematic tendency to continuously expand their curricular scope. Additionally, findings reveal the latent salience that instructors place on developing self-awareness and a college-going identity, notions rarely invoked as justification for student success courses to the same degree as instrumentalist notions of skills, navigation, and career planning valued by the traditional completion agenda discourse

Best Laid Plans: How Community College Student Success Courses Work

Objective: Beyond understanding whether first-year student success interventions in community colleges are effective—for which there is mixed evidence in the literature—this study’s purpose was to uncover how they work to realize observed outcomes, including at times unanticipated undesirable outcomes. Method: This qualitative multiple case study used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to unpack interactions and tensions among programmatic-level features and individual-level experiences and actions. We conducted classroom observation, document analysis, and interviews with instructors and students in four student success courses across diverse contexts. Results: Regardless of particular designs and course emphases, we found in all cases a blurring of activity elements, wherein learning tools and learning goals were often coterminous, or instructors effectively took on the role of learning tools themselves, in the form of object lessons and mediators, for instance. Courses had a distinctive character as rehearsal for college that simultaneously created a welcoming peer environment but an uncertain learning and assessment environment. Contributions: Because of their nature as metacourses—college courses about college-going—success courses’ means and ends ultimately may be functionally inseparable, thus helping to explain their continual evolution and contested roles. Whereas such courses are typically justified as means to teach college skills, we found this utilitarian rationale to be insufficient to describe the experiential dimensions of social learning that participants reported. Instead, we found these courses reveal how college-going is an emergent social literacy, one that a single course is insufficient to fully realize

New Working Group: Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice in the Context of University Mathematics Content and Methods Courses

There are three goals for this new working group: 1) To create a community of mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) who are (or are interested in) collaboratively teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ) in their university content and/or methods classes. 2) To collaboratively select/develop/modify TMfSJ tasks and implement those in mathematics content/methods classes. 3) To research the implementation of TMfSJ tasks in content and methods classes

A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin similar to 100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants

Surgical site infection after gastrointestinal surgery in high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: a prospective, international, multicentre cohort study

Background: Surgical site infection (SSI) is one of the most common infections associated with health care, but its importance as a global health priority is not fully understood. We quantified the burden of SSI after gastrointestinal surgery in countries in all parts of the world. Methods: This international, prospective, multicentre cohort study included consecutive patients undergoing elective or emergency gastrointestinal resection within 2-week time periods at any health-care facility in any country. Countries with participating centres were stratified into high-income, middle-income, and low-income groups according to the UN's Human Development Index (HDI). Data variables from the GlobalSurg 1 study and other studies that have been found to affect the likelihood of SSI were entered into risk adjustment models. The primary outcome measure was the 30-day SSI incidence (defined by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria for superficial and deep incisional SSI). Relationships with explanatory variables were examined using Bayesian multilevel logistic regression models. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02662231. Findings: Between Jan 4, 2016, and July 31, 2016, 13 265 records were submitted for analysis. 12 539 patients from 343 hospitals in 66 countries were included. 7339 (58·5%) patient were from high-HDI countries (193 hospitals in 30 countries), 3918 (31·2%) patients were from middle-HDI countries (82 hospitals in 18 countries), and 1282 (10·2%) patients were from low-HDI countries (68 hospitals in 18 countries). In total, 1538 (12·3%) patients had SSI within 30 days of surgery. The incidence of SSI varied between countries with high (691 [9·4%] of 7339 patients), middle (549 [14·0%] of 3918 patients), and low (298 [23·2%] of 1282) HDI (p < 0·001). The highest SSI incidence in each HDI group was after dirty surgery (102 [17·8%] of 574 patients in high-HDI countries; 74 [31·4%] of 236 patients in middle-HDI countries; 72 [39·8%] of 181 patients in low-HDI countries). Following risk factor adjustment, patients in low-HDI countries were at greatest risk of SSI (adjusted odds ratio 1·60, 95% credible interval 1·05–2·37; p=0·030). 132 (21·6%) of 610 patients with an SSI and a microbiology culture result had an infection that was resistant to the prophylactic antibiotic used. Resistant infections were detected in 49 (16·6%) of 295 patients in high-HDI countries, in 37 (19·8%) of 187 patients in middle-HDI countries, and in 46 (35·9%) of 128 patients in low-HDI countries (p < 0·001). Interpretation: Countries with a low HDI carry a disproportionately greater burden of SSI than countries with a middle or high HDI and might have higher rates of antibiotic resistance. In view of WHO recommendations on SSI prevention that highlight the absence of high-quality interventional research, urgent, pragmatic, randomised trials based in LMICs are needed to assess measures aiming to reduce this preventable complication