“Seeing” Nana: Haunting Portraits and Playful Historical Thinking in the Early Childhood Education Classroom

This article explains how an educator’s haunting experience with the historical portrait, Sick Girl (Krogh, 1881), launched an inquiry about the Norwegian artist’s young sister Nana, who died from tuberculosis in 1868 (Hansen, 2014). The hermeneutic experience opened a portal into the past and through interpreting the work of art with preschool children, a picture emerged of childhood in Scandinavia during the 19th century. Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” (1993) and Gadamer’s (2004) ideas about the experience of play in interpreting the work of art, created a framework upon which to build an understanding of Nana’s ghostly visitations and messages. If traces of history can be reconstructed through visual works and artifacts what are the implications for teaching history to young children? The pedagogical strategies used by the educator to uncover the past and enliven teaching and learning point to the relevance of visual literacy and historical portraiture in early childhood education. &nbsp

Practicing Palimpsest: Layering Stories and Disrupting Dominant Western Narratives in Early Childhood Education

Interpreting and contextualizing the meanings of spoken, transcribed, visual and embodied languages, we explore how the life stories of immigrant educators evoke socio-cultural and diverse imaginaries. We incorporate the Greek practice of palimpsest - a layering of stories, voices, fragments, and traces - to understand forms of active becomings which provide possibilities for dissonance and transformation and treat the self as relational and inherently multiple. Critically reflecting on this stratum of narratives and cultural understandings, we draw on the insights of several theoreticians and scholars to consider how the language of immigration, trauma, and displacement emerge in educator’s thinking about the curriculum they are given. In transcribing stories - the participants and our own - we heard “layered voices†(Aoki, 2005) that pointed us to different understandings about the immigrant experience, the connections between the self and other and what it means for immigrant educators and students to live together in ECE settings.   Keywords: hermeneutics; early childhood education; narrative; identity; diversity; language  Â

Tuberculin status, socioeconomic differences and differences in all-cause mortality: experience from Norwegian cohorts born 1910–49

Background From 1948 to 1975, Norway had a mandatory tuberculosis (TB) screening programme with Pirquet testing, X-ray examinations and BCG vaccination. Electronic data registration in 1963–75 enabled the current study aimed at revealing (i) the relations between socioeconomic factors and tuberculosis infection and (ii) differences in later all-cause mortality according to TB infection status

"Hvem skal jeg være - her?" : en kvalitativ studie av identitetsintervjuer med unge, alenekommende flyktninger bosatt i Norge

Den foreliggende studien er en kvalitativ analyse av identitetsintervjuer med unge mennesker som har ankommet Norge som enslige, mindreårige asylsøkere. Studien tar sikte på å øke kunnskapen om identitetsdannelse, og om hvordan unge, alenekommende flyktninger forstår seg selv i det norske samfunnet: Hvordan reflekterer disse unge rundt temaer relatert til identitet? Hvordan forstår de seg selv i det norske samfunnet? Hvordan beskriver de tilhørighet til sin opprinnelige kultur og til den norske kulturen? Hvordan opprettholdes følelsen av kontinuitet i selvet, når omgivelsene blir drastisk endret? Og hvordan gjennomlever disse unge, som ufrivillig har flyktet til et annet land uten foreldre eller andre omsorgspersoner, ungdomstiden og den tilhørende identitetsutviklingsoppgaven? Analysene viste at de unge beskriver seg som tokulturelle: De føler tilhørighet både til sin opprinnelige kultur og den norske kulturen. Informantene vektla ulike aspekter for å uttrykke dette, og de beskrev også ulike prosesser av endring i kulturell tilhørighet i løpet av årene i Norge. Videre beskrev de ønsker om å bli økonomisk selvstendige, leve et normalt liv og bli værende i Norge. Mange fortalte om vanskelige livserfaringer og at de opplevde at de tidlig ble voksne og måtte klare seg selv, men at de synes de likevel har klart seg bra. De unge beskrev forståelser av seg selv som mestrende individer og som medvirkende aktører i egne liv. Informantenes beskrivelser blir knyttet til teorier om kontinuitet i selvet, akkulturasjon og resiliens. Avslutningsvis diskuteres implikasjoner av funnene. Undersøkelsen baserer seg på semistrukturerte intervjuer, utført av forfatterne selv, med 20 informanter i alderen 17-26 år. Intervjuene fant sted etter at informantene hadde fått innvilget oppholdstillatelse og etter en gjennomsnittlig botid i Norge på 5,6 år, og utforsker de unges beskrivelser av seg selv innenfor domenene skole/jobb, tilhørighet til opprinnelig kultur og tilhørighet til norsk kultur. Fenomenologiske analyser av datamaterialet ble utført ved hjelp av systematisk tekstkondensering. Studien er tilknyttet ”Ungdom, Kultur og Mestring, UngKul”-prosjektet ved Nasjonalt Folkehelseinstitutt

Does smoking reduction in midlife reduce mortality risk? Results of 2 long-term prospective cohort studies of men and women in Scotland

A long-term cohort study of working men in Israel found that smokers who reduced their cigarette consumption had lower subsequent mortality rates than those who did not. We conducted comparable analyses in 2 populations of smokers in Scotland. The Collaborative Study included 1,524 men and women aged 40–65 years in a working population who were screened twice, in 1970–1973 and 1977. The Renfrew/Paisley Study included 3,730 men and women aged 45–64 years in a general population who were screened twice, in 1972–1976 and 1977–1979. Both groups were followed up through 2010. Subjects were categorized by smoking intensity at each screening as smoking 0, 1–10, 11–20, or ≥21 cigarettes per day. At the second screening, subjects were categorized as having increased, maintained, or reduced their smoking intensity or as having quit smoking between the first and second screenings. There was no evidence of lower mortality in all reducers compared with maintainers. Multivariate adjusted hazard ratios of mortality were 0.91 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.75, 1.10) in the Collaborative Study and 1.08 (95% CI: 0.97, 1.20) in the Renfrew/Paisley Study. There was clear evidence of lower mortality among quitters in both the Collaborative Study (hazard ratio = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.56, 0.78) and the Renfrew/Paisley Study (hazard ratio = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.84). In the Collaborative Study only, we observed lower mortality similar to that of quitters among heavy smokers (≥21 cigarettes/day) who reduced their smoking intensity. These inconclusive results support the view that reducing cigarette consumption should not be promoted as a means of reducing mortality, although it may have a valuable role as a step toward smoking cessation

Body size and thyroid cancer in two million Norwegian men and women

We investigated relations between measured body mass index (BMI) and stature and thyroid cancer (3046 cases) in a large Norwegian cohort of more than two million individuals. The risk of thyroid cancer, especially of the papillary and follicular types, increased moderately with increasing BMI and height in both sexes

Smoking duration before first childbirth: an emerging risk factor for breast cancer? Results from 302,865 Norwegian women

This article is part of Eivind Bjerkaas' doctoral thesis which is available in Munin at http://hdl.handle.net/10037/6799Purpose: Recently, The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified cigarette smoking as possibly carcinogenic to the human breast. Since some new cohort studies have suggested that this risk is confined to women who started to smoke before first childbirth, we wanted to examine the association between smoking and breast cancer, with a focus on time of smoking initiation in relation to the first childbirth. Methods: We followed 302,865 Norwegian women born between 1899 and 1975, recruited from 1974 to 2003, by linkage to national registries through December 2007. We used Cox proportional hazard models to estimate hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI). Results: During more than 4.1 million person-years of follow-up, we ascertained 7,490 cases of primary invasive breast cancer. Compared with never smokers, ever smokers had a 15 % (HR = 1.15, 95 % CI 1.10–1.21) increased risk of breast cancer overall and also a significantly increased risk of breast cancer in the three most exposed categories of age at smoking initiation (parous women), number of cigarettes smoked per day, years of smoking duration and number of pack-years. Ever smokers who started to smoke more than 1 year after the first childbirth had not an increased risk (HR = 0.93, 95 % CI 0.86–1.02), while those who initiated smoking more than 10 years before their first childbirth had a 60 % (HR = 1.60, 95 % CI 1.42–1.80) increased risk of breast cancer, compared with never smokers

Nonfasting triglycerides and risk of cardiovascular death in men and women from the Norwegian Counties Study

The association between nonfasting triglycerides and cardiovascular disease (CVD) has recently been actualized. The aim of the present study was to investigate nonfasting triglycerides as a predictor of CVD mortality in men and women. A total of 86,261 participants in the Norwegian Counties Study 1974–2007, initially aged 20–50 years and free of CVD were included. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for deaths from CVD, ischemic heart disease (IHD), stroke and all causes by level of nonfasting triglycerides. Mean follow-up was 27.0 years. A total of 9,528 men died (3,620 from CVD, 2,408 IHD, 543 stroke), and totally 5,267 women died (1,296 CVD, 626 IHD, 360 stroke). After adjustment for CVD risk factors other than HDL-cholesterol, the HRs (95% CI) per 1 mmol/l increase in nonfasting triglycerides were 1.16 (1.13–1.20), 1.20 (1.14–1.27), 1.26 (1.19–1.34) and 1.09 (0.96–1.23) for all cause mortality, CVD, IHD, and stroke mortality in women. Corresponding figures in men were 1.03 (1.01–1.04), 1.03 (1.00–1.05), 1.03 (1.00–1.06) and 0.99 (0.92–1.07). In a subsample where HDL-cholesterol was measured (n = 40,144), the association between CVD mortality and triglycerides observed in women disappeared after adjustment for HDL-cholesterol. In a model including the Framingham CHD risk score the effect of triglycerides disappeared in both men and women. In conclusion, nonfasting triglycerides were associated with increased risk of CVD death for both women and men. Adjustment for major cardiovascular risk factors, however, attenuated the effect. Nonfasting triglycerides added no predictive information on CVD mortality beyond the Framingham CHD risk score in men and women