Journeying into darkness: spatializing Latinx students’ literacy narratives in the in-between

This study utilized a narrative inquiry model to explore the narratives-in-construction of seven Latinx students’ lived experiences in a ninth-grade social studies class. Layered and parallel narratives constructed around critical incidents and as told by the student participants, their teacher, and the researcher were used to examine the co-constitutive nature of spaces related to literacy and history teaching and learning. Data were collected over the course of the semester-long course and included class observations, artifact collection, and critical incident think-aloud protocol interviews conducted with students three times a week. An adapted positioning analysis framework was used to examine narratives at three levels, moving from the level of participant talk to that of broader sociocultural discourses. Four storylines emerged from the data that illustrated (a) the ways in which the teacher’s instruction informed student decision-making about learning; (b) how the teacher’s positioning of students determined legitimization of that decision; (c) students’ agentive actions in response to the teacher’s positioning; and (d) the conceptualizations of personhood that emerged. These storylines were then deconstructed using a spatial framework to examine the ways in which the Latinx students’ learning spaces were expanded or constricted. Observed shifts in the borders and boundaries of spaces informed implications drawn for teaching and learning

Committing to Anti-Bias Anti-Racist Teaching: From Activity to Habits of Mind

With the need to prepare teacher candidates to work with an increasingly diverse student body in U.S. schools, a multi-institutional collaborative self-study group was formed to examine ways in which teacher educators could expand beyond practice-based literacy preparation to support candidates’ understanding and implementation of critical pedagogies. The self-study served as a catalyst for interrogating the identities the teacher educators brought to their practice and began a journey that transformed a focus on critical literacies into a commitment to action for change through anti-bias anti-racist work. This paper draws from group dialogue and reflective journals to examine specific practices implemented with teacher candidates to transform their practice by considering critical literacies, asset- and deficit-based language, and the identity work of teachers and students. Insights of the self-study suggest that attention to critical pedagogies must go beyond instructional activity to consider the habits of mind essential for cultivation to support a commitment to action for anti-bias anti-racist education. The paper concludes by examining these core habits of mind and their impact on the trajectory of the group’s work toward leveraging language and literacy for activism and justice in teacher education contexts

Losing control under ketamine:suppressed cortico-hippocampal drive following acute ketamine in rats

Systemic doses of the psychotomimetic ketamine alter the spectral characteristics of hippocampal and prefrontal cortical network activity. Using dynamic causal modeling (DCM) of cross-spectral densities, we quantify the putative synaptic mechanisms underlying ketamine effects in terms of changes in directed, effective connectivity between dorsal hippocampus and medial prefrontal (dCA1-mPFC) cortex of freely moving rats. We parameterize dose-dependent changes in spectral signatures of dCA1-mPFC local field potential recordings, using neural mass models of glutamatergic and GABAergic circuits. Optimizing DCMs of theta and gamma frequency range responses, model comparisons suggest that both enhanced gamma and depressed theta power result from a reduction in top-down connectivity from mPFC to the hippocampus, mediated by postsynaptic NMDA receptors (NMDARs). This is accompanied by an alteration in the bottom-up pathway from dCA1 to mPFC, which exhibits a distinct asymmetry: here, feed-forward drive at AMPA receptors increases in the presence of decreased NMDAR-mediated inputs. Setting these findings in the context of predictive coding suggests that NMDAR antagonism by ketamine in recurrent hierarchical networks may result in the failure of top-down connections from higher cortical regions to signal predictions to lower regions in the hierarchy, which consequently fail to respond consistently to errors. Given that NMDAR dysfunction has a central role in pathophysiological theories of schizophrenia and that theta and gamma rhythm abnormalities are evident in schizophrenic patients, the approach followed here may furnish a framework for the study of aberrant hierarchical message passing (of prediction errors) in schizophrenia—and the false perceptual inferences that ensue