The role of peer inquiry communities in advancing technology integration for practitioners in adult basic education

This paper explores how peer communities, one element of a larger collaborative, inquiry-based professional development project in adult education, advance participants’ knowledge and use of technology. As the designer and facilitator of the project, the author drew from memos and field notes, in addition to interviews and written reflections with 6 of 9 total participants who were teachers and administrators in Adult Basic Education programs. Findings indicate successful technology integration entailed participants combining their own experiences with established research to create “knowledge-of-practice” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), and that knowledge generation within the peer communities reflected a horizontal trajectory

The applicability of the Grameen Bank model in South Africa

South Africa is characterised as having high unemployment rates, low GDP forecast growth rates and a high percentage of the population living in rural areas. Therefore, the research explored the ability of microfinance, using the Grameen Bank model, to increase economic development in the rural areas of South Africa. Grameen Bank is considered to be the mother of conscience driven microfinance. The Bank's approach to poverty alleviation provides the poor with direct access to micro loans in order to increase their earnings from productive self-employment activities. Among other things, the loans are characterised as being advanced to small groups without the requirement of collateral. These loans are considered to have helped to alleviate poverty and increase physical and human resources, and confirm that poverty alleviation and human resource development is possible with targeted credit (Khandker, 1996). The model has been successful in improving the livelihoods of the borrowers using various measures such as providing the ability to afford three meals a day, electricity in their homes and to educate their children. In addition, borrowers are able to grow business and create employment in their communities. Although the Grameen Bank model has been successfully applied throughout the world, it has attainted limited success in South Africa. The business model has not been able to achieve operational or financial sustainability due to high staff and regulatory costs in relation to other emerging markets compounded by the inability to utilise borrower savings. In addition, borrowers are unable to create microenterprises that effectively compete with the formal economy. Microfinance institutions could address operational inefficiency by making use of the community based lending structures already operating under the Grameen philosophy, known as stokvels, and by embracing cell phone technology. In addition, institutions that provide social upliftment should focus on the skills training required by entrepreneurs to operate more successfully and for the employee to be more employable. The Grameen Bank model is not a panacea for South African growth based poverty alleviation. However, when combined with wide reaching economic and social policies, microfinance may assist in the creation of long term economic growth and social upliftment while improving the current lives of the poor

Learning, Challenges, And Resistance: An Ethnographic Case Study on the Experiences of Job Seekers in a Public Access Computer Lab

This ethnographic case study focused on 19 job seekers in an urban public access computer lab to explore their challenges, learning, and criticality as related to digital platforms and systems

The acquisition and extinction of morphine conditioned place preference have opposite effects on the morphology of neurons in the nucleus accumbens

Drug-associated stimuli trigger craving and relapse in addiction. Murine morphine conditioned place preference (CPP) was used to model learning of opioid associations. We examined how morphine and learning interact to alter neuron morphology in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core and shell after acquisition and extinction of CPP. Conditioning with morphine dose-dependently increased place preference compared to saline. In comparison to those from saline conditioned and morphine non-conditioned controls, neurons from the NAc core of morphine conditioned mice had increased dendritic complexity, as defined by increased dendritic length, number, and Sholl intersections. This effect is due to the combination of morphine and learning, which is different from effects of morphine or conditioning alone. Morphine administration without conditioning was associated with increased spine density in the core, which was reversed by CPP acquisition. Control conditioning with saline produced no morphology changes. Morphine CPP extinction was associated with decreased dendritic complexity, reversing the increased complexity seen after acquisition. Mice that extinguished CPP had similar dendritic complexity to saline conditioned mice, in terms of dendritic count and intersections, but less dendritic complexity than non-extinguished mice that retained CPP. Since dopamine release imbues salience to stimuli that coincide with drug use, and the dopamine D1 receptor mediates CPP acquisition, we tested the effect of SKF81297 D1 receptor agonist on CPP extinction and associated accumbal neuron morphology. SKF81297 (0.8 mg/kg) injected after each extinction training session impeded extinction, and produced increased dendritic complexity compared to controls. SKF81297 may have sustained conditioned associations, disrupted consolidation of extinction, and/or disrupted the decline in dopamine levels that may occur throughout extinction sessions. We hypothesize that changes occurred in the NAc core because this region mediates how stimuli and drug effects direct motor action. Since D1 receptors oppose extinction of drug-cue-induced behavior, they play a role in reinforcing opioid addiction. Acquisition and extinction may be opposite processes in the brain, as in behavior. Extinction may include some reversal of acquisition learning as well as being new learning with its own pathway. Interventions that target D1 receptors or that selectively reduce NAc core dendritic complexity may contribute to opioid addiction treatment

Birth Right: Does a Lack of Access to Health Coverage for Fertility Treatment for Single Individuals and Same-Sex Couples Constitute Discrimination?

There are often great costs associated with receiving fertility treatments such as IVF. Those who wish to overcome infertility and conceive may turn to their health insurance providers to find coverage for such treatments. Currently, many health insurance providers’ policies require that those seeking coverage show infertility either by (1) failing to conceive after six to twelve months of unprotected sexual intercourse; or (2) failing to conceive after six to twelve months of receiving fertility treatment. Advocates argue that such policies are discriminatory because classes of people such as same-sex couples and single individuals1 who wish to conceive cannot do so without the aid of fertility treatment, and therefore are only able to receive coverage for treatment after paying for treatment out-of-pocket for twelve months. Meanwhile, heterosexual couples can show infertility by failing to conceive through sexual intercourse over a period of time without paying anything out of pocket. This Note analyzes the alleged discrimination toward same-sex couples and single individuals, discussing the current challenges of paying for infertility treatment, explaining the landscape of insurance in the United States, and examining the status of the law as it relates to protections against discrimination in health care coverage and recommended courses of action that may prevent the discrimination alleged herein from occurring in the future

The rise of nationalism, FDI and the multinational enterprise

The populist reaction renders interest groups politics a less important determinant of economic policy than ideologically driven nationalism. Risk to MNEs and FDI will increase as policy becomes less predictable and “rational” arguments have less traction. Investors and corporations must address legitimate grievances and take nationalism into account in decision-making

The Story of the Moral: On the Power of Literature to Define and Refine the Self

This study employs a hybrid research method. My religious background has led me to find a great affinity for certain literary criticism, that which sees literature as a source for moral thinking and moral decision-making. I offer a history of my transactions with texts, texts that were initially formative for me as a moral thinker, then useful for me in a variety of ways as a teacher of texts, then which I later began to appreciate in a more critical and theoretical way as I developed a deeper understanding of how those texts had influenced me and how they had – or had not – influenced my students. I borrow heavily from the theory and method of autoethnography in this study, in the sense that I will examine a variety of “internal data” from my memories of books, teachers, and classroom situations, along with “external data” including interviews, report cards, lecture notes and exam questions, and will subject my data to a number of critical lenses with the goal of what Anderson (2006) describes as a commitment to “an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (375). Using the lenses of the literary theory and criticism of Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Coles and Aharon Lichtenstein, I will analyze my experiences as a reader and teacher, and I explain how literary works I read and taught can serve as vehicles for the development of a student’s moral sensibility – and how teachers can help facilitate that development. I use my own unique vantage point, that of an Orthodox Jewish boy who initially found friends in secular texts, then found that those texts were among his great teachers of values, to offer a singular perspective on the power of these texts. These lenses, which are (to mix metaphors a bit) filtered through my unique perspective, provide an interpretation that will at first lead me to explore the field of moral education as a whole, if only because I shared many of its desired outcomes in my literature classroom. After a brief overview of this field, I use the work of Hanan Alexander, David Hansen, Carl Rogers, and others to present a more general yet nuanced account of how “spiritual awareness” and the humane fusing of reason and emotion can be fostered in students, with a flexibility and understanding that learning is a way to learn a process, not a process towards a specific set of intellectual goals. I humbly call this hybrid method a literary-auto-ethno-pedogography, as I seek to produce a critical history of my education as a reader and teacher of literature. After an inquiry into my own reading and teaching to understand my own and my students’ development as moral decision makers; I then seek to expand the depth and quantity of moral conversations and bring them to the classrooms of others. As such, my study includes ideas for how to bring about moral conversations in English classrooms, both through student writing and oral exchange, based on ideas from Sheridan Blau, Jeff Wilhelm, David Hansen, Barry Holtz, and others. I conclude with the still unanswered questions that my study has raised for me and for other researchers who share my interest in the relations between secular and religious education and the problem of teaching literature to shape character and refine a reader’s moral sensibility. I also offer some concluding suggestions about how future students and teachers might build on and expand upon my work