Slogging and Stumbling Toward Social Justice in a Private Elementary School: The Complicated Case of St. Malachy

This case study examines St. Malachy, an urban Catholic elementary school primarily serving children traditionally marginalized by race, class, linguistic heritage, and disability. As a private school, St. Malachy serves the public good by recruiting and retaining such traditionally marginalized students. As empirical studies involving Catholic schools frequently juxtapose them with public schools, the author presents this examination from a different tack. Neither vilifying nor glorifying Catholic schooling, this study critically examines the pursuit of social justice in this school context. Data gathered through a 1-year study show that formal and informal leaders in St. Malachy adapted their governance, aggressively sought community resources, and focused their professional development to build the capacity to serve their increasingly pluralistic student population. The analysis confirms the deepening realization that striving toward social justice is a messy, contradictory, and complicated pursuit, and that schools in both public and private sectors are allies in this pursuit

Moving from the margins: The role of narrative and metaphor in health literacy

Narrative and metaphor are now recognised to be central to thought, language and communication, and consequently have relevance to discourse and action in many areas including health and wellbeing. In this paper, narrative and metaphor are examined in relation to areas relevant to health literacy. The ways in which narrative and metaphor relate to dimensions of health literacy identified by Zarcadoolas et al. (Zarcadoolas C, Pleasant A, Greer D. Advancing health literacy – a framework for understanding and action. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons Inc; 2006.); fundamental, scientific, cultural, and civic are analysed. The work aims to provide a rationale for greater incorporation of narrative and metaphor in discussions and activities related to health literacy

Characterizing In-Air Eyes-Free Typing Movements in VR

We empirically explore fundamental requirements for achieving VR in-air typing by observing the unconstrained eyes-free in-air typing of touch typists. We show that unconstrained typing movements differ substantively from previously observed constrained in-air typing movements and introduce a novel binary categorization of typing strategies: typists who use finger movements alone (FINGER) and those who combine finger movement with gross hand movement (HAND). We examine properties of finger kinematics, correlated movement of fingers, interrelation in consecutive key-strokes, and 3D distribution of key-stroke movements. We report that, compared to constrained typing, unconstrained typing generates shorter (49 mm) and faster (764 mm/s) key-strokes with a high correlation of finger movement and that the HAND strategy group exhibits more dynamic key-strokes. We discuss how these findings can inform the design of future in-air typing systems