You Cannot Be What You Cannot See : The Lived Experiences of Women Teaching Digital Literacy in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Germany

This timely paper provides empirical evidence on the lived experiences of ten women from eight nationalities in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Germany, who voluntarily taught girls and women digital skills in 2020. I situated this multi-case feminist study within the digital skills gender divide phenomenon. I collected qualitative data through surveys and interviews with the teachers, remote observations of their digital skills lessons, and analysis of programme documents, including curricula. In this paper, I discuss two research questions: (1) “What motivated the women to teach digital literacy?” and (2) “Why do the teachers think the digital skills gender divide exists?” The hybrid approach to data coding and thematic analysis indicated that the teachers were motivated to teach digital literacy to support their students’ self-development and use digital skills in their daily lives. The teachers at the school in Germany were also motivated by advancing their social capital and societal integration, as six of the eight women teaching in Germany were migrants. The teachers from Bosnia & Herzegovina were motivated by overcoming the systemic gender inequality that the digital skills gender divide encapsulates. The teachers also identified various personal, community, and societal causes of the digital skills gender divide. On the micro-level, they noted that girls engage in risk avoidance behaviour from a young age, limiting their digital skills development. On the meso-level, women lack exposure to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) within their families and communities. On the macro-level, the teachers in Bosnia & Herzegovina highlighted that girls living in urban areas could access ICT more often than those living in rural areas. This paper offers resolutions to the digital skills gender divide, concluded from the teachers’ evidence, such as educational opportunities, gender diversity hiring in technical roles in the ICT sector, and policy development to underpin solutions and incentivise compliance. This paper is my contribution to centralising in the scholarship the lived experiences and perspectives of diverse women who are at the forefront of the digital skills gender divide

The Bard Sequence Program: An Equitable Approach to Virtual Learning

Earning as few as twelve college credits from a genuine college program in high school is a consistent predictor of student success and graduation from college. Unfortunately, many students either do not have access to dual enrollment or the access they do have is limited to canned lectures, asynchronous busy work, and predatory degree mill programs. This is disproportionately so for students from historically marginalized communities. The Bard Sequence is expanding virtually to fill this major nationwide gap in dual enrollment opportunities. The equity-based Writing and Thinking pedagogy at the heart of the Bard Sequence ensures that more students than ever before have access to life-changing educational opportunities in high school

Maximally and non-maximally fast escaping points of transcendental entire functions

We partition the fast escaping set of a transcendental entire function into two subsets, the maximally fast escaping set and the non-maximally fast escaping set. These sets are shown to have strong dynamical properties. We show that the ntersection of the Julia set with the non-maximally fast escaping set is never empty. The proof uses a new covering result for annuli, which is of wider interest. It was shown by Rippon and Stallard that the fast escaping set has no bounded components. In contrast, by studying a function considered by Hardy, we give an example of a transcendental entire function for which the maximally and non-maximally fast escaping sets each have uncountably many singleton components

A framework for three-dimensional navigation research

We have argued that the neurocognitive representation of large-scale, navigable three-dimensional space is anisotropic, having different properties in vertical versus horizontal dimensions. Three broad categories organize the experimental and theoretical issues raised by the commentators: (1) frames of reference, (2) comparative cognition, and (3) the role of experience. These categories contain the core of a research program to show how three-dimensional space is represented and used by humans and other animal

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

The study of spatial cognition has provided considerable insight into how animals (including humans) navigate on the horizontal plane. However, the real world is three-dimensional, having a complex topography including both horizontal and vertical features, which presents additional challenges for representation and navigation. The present article reviews the emerging behavioral and neurobiological literature on spatial cognition in non-horizontal environments. We suggest that three-dimensional spaces are represented in a quasi-planar fashion, with space in the plane of locomotion being computed separately and represented differently from space in the orthogonal axis-a representational structure we have termed "bicoded.” We argue that the mammalian spatial representation in surface-travelling animals comprises a mosaic of these locally planar fragments, rather than a fully integrated volumetric map. More generally, this may be true even for species that can move freely in all three dimensions, such as birds and fish. We outline the evidence supporting this view, together with the adaptive advantages of such a schem

Protocol for an HTA report: Does therapeutic writing help people with long-term conditions? Systematic review, realist synthesis and economic modelling

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/Introduction: Long-term medical conditions (LTCs) cause reduced health-related quality of life and considerable health service expenditure. Writing therapy has potential to improve physical and mental health in people with LTCs, but its effectiveness is not established. This project aims to establish the clinical and cost-effectiveness of therapeutic writing in LTCs by systematic review and economic evaluation, and to evaluate context and mechanisms by which it might work, through realist synthesis. Methods: Included are any comparative study of therapeutic writing compared with no writing, waiting list, attention control or placebo writing in patients with any diagnosed LTCs that report at least one of the following: relevant clinical outcomes; quality of life; health service use; psychological, behavioural or social functioning; adherence or adverse events. Searches will be conducted in the main medical databases including MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, The Cochrane Library and Science Citation Index. For the realist review, further purposive and iterative searches through snowballing techniques will be undertaken. Inclusions, data extraction and quality assessment will be in duplicate with disagreements resolved through discussion. Quality assessment will include using Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) criteria. Data synthesis will be narrative and tabular with meta-analysis where appropriate. De novo economic modelling will be attempted in one clinical area if sufficient evidence is available and performed according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) reference case.National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment (NIHR HTA) Programm

Lesbian women choosing motherhood: the journey to conception

Increasingly, lesbian women are choosing to have children in the context of a same-sex relationship, and their journey to conception and on to motherhood involves a range of decisions that are unique to lesbian couples. While creating a de novo family is burdened with decisions, choosing to be parents was a deliberate and conscious decision made by lesbian women participating in our study. The findings presented in this article focus on choosing which partner would be pregnant, donor decisions, as well as methods of conception used by lesbian women participating in a qualitative study that examined the experiences of lesbian mothers in Australia. This article is not intended to be interpretive, but rather a description of the processes engaged by participants

Derivatives of meromorphic functions of finite order

A result is proved concerning meromorphic functions of finite order in the plane such that all but finitely many zeros of the second derivative are zeros of the first derivative