Race, Power, and (In)equity Within Two-way Immersion Settings

Two-way immersion schools provide a promising model for service delivery to students who are English language learners. With the goals of bilingualism, academic excellence, and cross cultural appreciation, these schools are designed to build bridges across linguistically heterogeneous student bodies. Yet while empirical evidence demonstrates that the two-way immersion model can be effective in these regards, we know little about how such schools address other dimensions of diversity, including race, ethnicity, class, and disability. This study contributes to filling this gap by critically analyzing these dimensions in the areas of recruitment and retention in two two-way immersion schools

Introduction to special issue: teacher agency and “Pedagogies of Hope” for bilingual learners (in a Brave New World)

I am in search of hope. I suspect many who read this are too. For those of us who are or who work with immigrant, bilingual, and language/culture/race minoritized youth and their teachers, the current political climate has been an intellectual, emotional and physical challenge more than usual. For this special issue, my intention was to seek out instantiations of hope that might sustain us in the continued struggle for justice in schools, especially for bilingual children. I have long found hope in classrooms, when children and teachers find spaces to assert their complex selves in the moments and spaces of school.</p

McCarthyism: an Analysis of the Leadership and Rhetorical Strategies of Agitation and Control

This study analyzes the leadership qualities of Joseph McCarthy and the rhetorical qualities of agitative and control forces in a specific social movement. The methods used are founded upon various theories outlined by sociologists, historians, and rhetoricians. This investigation is organized around the climate of the times, McCarthy's leadership development, agitative strategies, control group responses, and support and opposition groups. It was found that the movement's success was probably due to McCarthy's position of attack and offense and to the control group's failure to neither strongly confront McCarthy nor to maintain its preparedness and superiority. It is theorized that had the control group engaged earlier in strategies other than adjustment and avoidance, the movement might have been halted sooner

Should Bedroom Doors be Open or Closed while People are Sleeping?

Traditionally the New Zealand Fire Service has been giving the advice to the New Zealand public that it is safer to sleep with their bedroom doors closed. The advice given is not backed up by any technical evidence that it is the best way to position your bedroom door when asleep. Sleeping with your bedroom door closed reduces smoke migration into the bedroom. With the increased use of simple, cheap smoke alarms in many residential houses, it is important to investigate if this is the safest way to position your door when asleep. The aim of this research is to determine whether it is safer to sleep with bedroom doors open or closed in the event of a fire by performing a probabilistic risk assessment. The recommendation made by this research can be used by Fire Services to give the best advice on whether it is safer to sleep with bedroom doors open or closed. The analysis is carried out using two methods. Firstly by evaluating the expected risk to life to occupants by using FiRECAM (Fire Risk Evaluation and Cost Assessment Model), which is being developed at the National Research Council of Canada. The second method used determines the probability of failure using an event tree method. Both analyses recommend that it is safer to sleep with bedroom doors closed while sleeping. Although they agree with each other there are many issues requiring further investigation in both analyses. The results of the analyses are only comparable in a relative sense and are not yet able to be compared in absolute terms

Who Cared for the Carers? A Study of the Occupational Health of General and Mental Health Nurses 1890 to 1948

This thesis set out to explore the neglected field of nurses’ occupational health. Evidence from the three case study hospitals confirms that attitudes toward nurses’ health changed between 1888 and 1948. The health of nurses was an issue that was always taken seriously but each institution approached the problem differently and responses showed much variation over time. There were good reasons for this but the failure to adopt a coherent and consistent policy worked to the detriment of nurse health. This difficulty helps explain the ambiguous treatment of occupational health within wider histories of nursing. This can lead to the erroneous conclusion that occupational health was somehow neglected by contemporary actors, thereby facilitating the omission of the subject from historical studies concentrating on professional projects and the wider politics of nursing. This study takes a different approach showing that occupational health issues were inexorably connected to these nursing debates. Occupational health cannot be understood without reference to professional projects. This is as true in debates where occupational health was obscured as it was in cases of overt concern. The history of the occupational health of nurses is also important because it offers a new perspective on two other themes central to nursing history, particularly class and gender. This focus helps understand why attitudes towards the care of sick nurses changed over time and varied between different types of institutions. By concentrating on individual nurses’ experiences we reveal something new about the way national conversations affected ordinary nurses’ lives. Recognition that nursing presents a serious occupational health risk is a relatively recent phenomenon; it was not until the 1990s that most nurses had access to occupational health units. This study not only sheds light on why nurses’ health attracted little attention before the Second World War but also explains why this situation began to change from the 1940s.Wellcome Trus

Neuromagnetic indicators of tinnitus and tinnitus masking in patients with and without hearing loss

Tinnitus is an auditory phenomenon characterised by the perception of a sound in the absence of an external auditory stimulus. Chronic subjective tinnitus is almost certainly maintained via central mechanisms, and this is consistent with observed measures of altered spontaneous brain activity. A number of putative central auditory mechanisms for tinnitus have been proposed. The influential thalamocortical dysrhythmia model suggests that tinnitus can be attributed to the disruption of coherent oscillatory activity between thalamus and cortex following hearing loss. However, the extent to which this disruption specifically contributes to tinnitus or is simply a consequence of the hearing loss is unclear because the necessary matched controls have not been tested. Here, we rigorously test several predictions made by this model in four groups of participants (tinnitus with hearing loss, tinnitus with clinically normal hearing, no tinnitus with hearing loss and no tinnitus with clinically normal hearing). Magnetoencephalography was used to measure oscillatory brain activity within different frequency bands in a ‘resting’ state and during presentation of a masking noise. Results revealed that low-frequency activity in the delta band (1–4 Hz) was significantly higher in the ‘tinnitus with hearing loss’ group compared to the ‘no tinnitus with normal hearing’ group. A planned comparison indicated that this effect was unlikely to be driven by the hearing loss alone, but could possibly be a consequence of tinnitus and hearing loss. A further interpretative linkage to tinnitus was given by the result that the delta activity tended to reduce when tinnitus was masked. High-frequency activity in the gamma band (25–80 Hz) was not correlated with tinnitus (or hearing loss). The findings partly support the thalamocortical dysrhythmia model and suggest that slow-wave (delta band) activity may be a more reliable correlate of tinnitus than high-frequency activity

Source space estimation of oscillatory power and brain connectivity in tinnitus

Tinnitus is the perception of an internally generated sound that is postulated to emerge as a result of structural and functional changes in the brain. However, the precise pathophysiology of tinnitus remains unknown. Llinas’ thalamocortical dysrhythmia model suggests that neural deafferentation due to hearing loss causes a dysregulation of coherent activity between thalamus and auditory cortex. This leads to a pathological coupling of theta and gamma oscillatory activity in the resting state, localised to the auditory cortex where normally alpha oscillations should occur. Numerous studies also suggest that tinnitus perception relies on the interplay between auditory and non-auditory brain areas. According to the Global Brain Model, a network of global fronto—parietal—cingulate areas is important in the generation and maintenance of the conscious perception of tinnitus. Thus, the distress experienced by many individuals with tinnitus is related to the top—down influence of this global network on auditory areas. In this magnetoencephalographic study, we compare resting-state oscillatory activity of tinnitus participants and normal-hearing controls to examine effects on spectral power as well as functional and effective connectivity. The analysis is based on beamformer source projection and an atlas-based region-of-interest approach. We find increased functional connectivity within the auditory cortices in the alpha band. A significant increase is also found for the effective connectivity from a global brain network to the auditory cortices in the alpha and beta bands. We do not find evidence of effects on spectral power. Overall, our results provide only limited support for the thalamocortical dysrhythmia and Global Brain models of tinnitus

Sports injury and illness epidemiology - Great Britain Olympic Team (TeamGB) surveillance during the Sochi 2014 winter Olympic games.

Background: sports injury and illness surveillance is thefirst step in injury and illness prevention, and is importantfor the protection of both athlete health and performancein major competitions.Aim: to identify the prevalence, severity nature andcauses of athlete injuries and illnesses in the Great BritainOlympic Team (TeamGB) during the Sochi 2014 WinterOlympic Games.Methods: the observational prospective cohort studyfollowed the Great Britain Injury/Illness performanceproject surveillance methodology and obtained information on injuries and illnesses that occurred during the games between 30 January and 23 February 2014 in TeamGB athletes (n=56).Results; among the 56 TeamGB athletes, there were 27injuries and 11 illnesses during the Olympic Gamesperiod. This equated to 39% sustaining at least one injuryand 18% at least one illness, with an incidence of 48.2injuries and 19.6 illnesses per 100 athletes, respectively.Of all injuries and illnesses, 9% and 7%, respectively,resulted in time loss. The risk of sustaining an injury washighest for freestyle skiing, skeleton and snowboarding;and lowest for curling, biathlon and Alpine skiing (withno reported injuries); with the lower limb being the mostcommonly injured location. Respiratory system illnesseswere most frequently reported overall, and older femaleathletes were the ones most affected by illness.Conclusions: the risk of injury was double the risk ofillness for TeamGB athletes. Overall, the rate of time-lossissues was low. Methodological considerations areimportant when interpreting data, and preventionstrategies should focus on those issues causing thegreatest risk, in terms of prevalence and severity, toathlete health and performance

Selling and resisting English-medium schooling on Milwaukee’s multilingual Near South Side: A typology of choice schools’ marketing strategies

Extant research has emphasized the importance of information to help families of English learner-identified children to navigate school choice structures, and raised critical questions about the information that is made available through school marketing. At a time of increasing tension around school choice and the rapid expansion of certain forms of bilingual education, we argue for the importance of documenting language minoritized parents&rsquo; experiential knowledge as one means of combating choice-based exclusion. Drawing from theories of racial capitalism, language ideologies, and language policy, we analyze charter and voucher school websites and interview data from a nine-month critical bifocal ethnography on the intersections and tensions between bilingual education and school choice policy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our findings identify six marketing strategies that choice schools employed on Milwaukee&rsquo;s Near South Side, a place with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking, low-income Latinx families. We also present one working-class Mexican father&rsquo;s narrative of choosing a school for his child as an example of the ways in which parents actively resist the racializing logics embedded within choice-based, marketized school systems. The article provides policy agents with a typology to help generate additional, place-specific analyses of the marketization of language education in multilingual communities. &nbsp;</p