Language and Indigenous Health in Latin America: Case study of Mexico

Health disparities among indigenous and non-indigenous peoples serve as a poignant indication of pervasive social injustices that have yet to be adequately addressed. With the potential to produce broad economic and social benefits, the development of quality indigenous health systems warrants further analysis and practical strategies to improve current policies. Using the case of Mexico, home to the second-largest population of indigenous language speakers in the Americas, this paper examines the important—and often misunderstood—role of language in health care. From a historical perspective, Mexico’s policies and indigenous health initiatives indicate a movement toward progress, yet they seemingly fail to take into account the critical role of language—not only as a means of receiving health information—but as a means of communicating complex feelings and emotions and connecting with cultural conceptions of health. By understanding the important relationship between health and language, as well as the potential for language to serve as a resource and a protective factor for health, greater attention may be given to the development of participatory, culturally relevant, holistic care. To this end, this paper suggests that the field of language planning, with a long history of examining the multifaceted goals, approaches, and strategies to language policy and planning, could provide a significant contribution and help reduce existing disparities in indigenous health systems

Interview of Brother Miguel A. Campos, F.S.C.

Brother Miguel Campos was a joy to interview. I received a lot of great material from Brother Joseph Grabenstein in the Archives, and one article had the reaction of one woman who met him. She commented on his smile most of all. He greeted me right away with a big smile, and he smiled frequently throughout the interview. We were both feeling under the weather; I unfortunately did not know beforehand that he has Parkinson\u27s Disease. But he kept smiling and opened his memory to me. We began with talking about his childhood in Cuba and when he entered the Christian Brothers, and continued with all the impressive things he\u27s done for the Brothers. He never turned down a question, and when we left our first session, he encouraged me to ask more personal questions

How do trial teams plan for retention during the design stage of the trial? : A scoping review protocol

Funding This research forms part of a doctoral research project supported by the Health Research Board Trial Methodology Research Network (HRB-TMRN) PhD scholarship awarded to EM. The funder had no role in the design, data collection, and analysis or preparation of the protocol.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

How Much is Learning Measurement Worth? Assessment Costs in Low-Income Countries

Timely and credible data on student learning has become a global issue in the ongoing effort to improve educational outcomes. With the potential to serve as a powerful diagnostic tool to gauge the overall health and well-being of an educational system, educational assessments have received increasing attention among specialists and the media. Though the stakes are high, relatively little is known about the cost-benefit ratio of various assessments compared to other educational expenditures. This paper presents an overview of four major types of assessments — national, regional, international and hybrid — and the costs that each has incurred within 13 distinct contexts, especially in low-income countries. The findings highlight broad variation in the total cost of assessment and the cost-per-learner. This underscores the importance of implementation strategies that appropriately consider scale, timeliness, and cost-efficiency as critical considerations for any assessment

Learning First: A Research Agenda for Improving Learning in Low-Income Countries

In 2011, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution spearheaded the development of a common policy agenda on global education entitled A Global Compact on Learning: Taking Action on Education in Developing Countries. The report recommended a call to action for a diverse group of international stakeholders to come together to work toward achieving quality education for all. As a part of this larger policy agenda, CUE works with various scholars and organizations to address the many issues within the scope of the Global Compact on Learning

Exile and Linguistic Encounter : Early Modern English Convents in the Low Countries and France

The history of religious migration and experience of exile in the early modern period has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Neglected within this scholarship, however, is sustained discussion of linguistic encounter within these, often fraught, transcultural and transnational interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring the linguistic experiences of religious exiles in English convents founded in the Low Countries. Most women within English communities in exile were linguistically challenged; focusing on the creative ways these women subsequently negotiated language barriers sheds new light on female language acquisition and encounter during this period

Bridging Systems, Building a Coalition, and Centering Students: A Collaborative Multi-Campus Approach to Orientation in the Time of COVID-19

This manuscript tells the story of how a multi-campus, public, Research I institution in the Mid-Atlantic pivoted from in-person orientation to a Virtual Orientation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We share how our university came together to offer a Virtual Orientation for twenty undergraduate campuses and 17,000 students in less than 100 days, review lessons learned, and offer insight into how planning for future orientation programs will be influenced because of this unusual year

Event segmentation and biological motion perception in watching dance

We used a combination of behavioral, computational vision and fMRI methods to examine human brain activity while viewing a 386 s video of a solo Bharatanatyam dance. A computational analysis provided us with a Motion Index (MI) quantifying the silhouette motion of the dancer throughout the dance. A behavioral analysis using 30 naïve observers provided us with the time points where observers were most likely to report event boundaries where one movement segment ended and another began. These behavioral and computational data were used to interpret the brain activity of a different set of 11 naïve observers who viewed the dance video while brain activity was measured using fMRI. Results showed that the Motion Index related to brain activity in a single cluster in the right Inferior Temporal Gyrus (ITG) in the vicinity of the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA). Perception of event boundaries in the video was related to the BA44 region of right Inferior Frontal Gyrus as well as extensive clusters of bilateral activity in the Inferior Occipital Gyrus which extended in the right hemisphere towards the posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS)