The experience of women from rural Australia with a preterm infant in a neonatal intensive care unit

Introduction: This study aimed to understand the experiences of women from rural areas who have had a preterm infant admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit. The study population comprised five women aged 29–36 years who birthed a premature infant of less than 32 weeks gestation within the previous 6 months at the time of recruitment. The setting was in rural areas of Australia, in the states of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. Methods: Semi-structured interviews using video-conferencing explored the experiences of the women and were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Four key themes were identified from the data: emotional trauma, social displacement, external coping resources and craving continuity of care. Social displacement further impacted the emotional trauma already experienced by women who birthed a preterm infant by temporarily relocating to the city to be near to their infant in the neonatal intensive care unit. This led to the utilisation of additional socioeconomic resources including support from extended family and rural community members. The women highly valued yet struggled to find appropriate peer support and continuity of health care for their infant within their rural community after discharge from the neonatal intensive care unit. Conclusion: Health professionals have an opportunity to explore ways to address social displacement, particularly in relation to socioeconomic support and the involvement of extended family into a family integrated care framework within the neonatal intensive care unit. The long-term effects of this on the mother– infant dyad and the lack of appropriate community support also require further examination © 2023, Rural and Remote Health.All Rights Reserved

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Teaching in the iWorld: developing a repertoire of pedagogical discourse around the usage of touch screen devices in early years classrooms

 Touch-screen devices have been enthusiastically adopted by schools across Australia and Canada. Their ease of use means that they are accessible by very young children, and these children often have free access to these devices in their home, however the devices tend to be ‘domesticated’ in the school context (O’Mara and Laidlaw, 2011). In the short period of their availability, a plethora of educational applications have been developed for these devices. This paper addresses emergent themes from our 2011-2013 Canadian/Australian project, Literacy learning in playful spaces: using multi-modal strategies to develop narrative with young learners, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Insight Development Grant). In our analysis of the discourse around the introduction of portable touch screen devices into school literacy classes (published texts, teacher interviews, classroom observations), we noted that much of the public discourse is slanted towards the idea of “teacher-proofing” the curriculum. Initially the teachers we have been working with saw the apps themselves as complete, as doing all the work and the discourse around the devices was around what apps are “best”, and “is there an app for that?” It was only with more experience and time that teachers were able to harness the range of affordances of the devices—their capacity for recording audio, video, pictures etc., and start to categorise the apps themselves. In this paper we suggest ways in which current literacy models might be used to develop a repertoire of pedagogical discourse around these devices, providing language and framings for teachers to think about how these new tools might best be used to enhance literacy teaching and learning. O’Mara, J. & Laidlaw, L. (2011). Living in the iWorld: Two literacy researchers reflect on the changing texts and literacy practices of childhood. English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10 (4): 149-159. Available: http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/view.php?article=true&id=754&p=

Canadian Identity and Curriculum Theory: An Ecological, Postmodern Perspective

In this article, we develop the thesis that curriculum studies work in Canada might be characterized in terms of some persistent and consistent theoretical commitments, ones that we suggest might have been prompted in part by the nation’s history and by popular commentaries on national identity. We draw on ecological and postmodern discourses in efforts to conceptualize and to describe a relationship between Canadian culture(s) and the development of theories of curriculum within the Canadian context. Cet article avance l’hypothèse que les études du curriculum au Canada peuvent être vues comme des engagements continus et cohérents qui ont été en partie suscités par l’histoire du pays et des idées courantes sur l’identité nationale. Les auteurs s’inspirent de discours écologiques et postmodernes en vue d’établir un lien entre les cultures canadiennes et le développement de théories du curriculum dans le contexte canadien.