“We grew as we grew” : visual methods, social change and collective learning over time

Educational research using visual methods has the power to transform the society in which we live and the communities in which we work. We must not naïvely imagine that having the desire to make change in people’s lives will mean that it will happen, as sometimes there may be surprising, unintended negative repercussions as well. Other constraints, such as structural violence and institutional racism, can also intersect with the possibility of making tangible change through educational research using visual methods. Qualitative assessment with a longitudinal approach is one approach that can reveal both the impact, and the limitations, of educational research on social change. I discuss these issues through grounded examples from an HIV educational project that used visual methodologies with a group of youths in Cape Town, South Africa over a number of years. Almost ten years later we interviewed three of the former participants about what impact the work has had on their lives. Each has travelled a different journey and been faced with different constraints that have implications for the effectiveness of such work. Where are they now, and as adults, what do they have to say about the visual methodologies, memory, and social change

What Divides? The ‘Academic–Activist Divide’ and the Equality of Intelligence

The academic–activist divide does not merely consist of a division between those working within the academy to transform society and those pursuing the same ends through direct action, community organisation, or other forms of political organisation. Rather, at base the academic-activist divide is constituted by ideas around who can think and speak, what counts as thought and speech, and through the assumption that there are supposedly ‘legitimate’ spaces from which thought and speech issue. Thinking through and beyond the academic–activist divide requires questioning the relation between thought and action and challenging their containment within a social order. In what follows, I seek to move beyond the academic-activist divide by drawing on the work of Karl Marx and Jacques Rancière. Far from an inward exercise in political or social theory, the arguments made here have immediate consequences for questions of political organisation in the present moment. &nbsp

A survey of teacher feeling in selected areas concerned with evaluation of teacher service to children

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Case Study of a Feasiblity Study: Older Adult with MCI Listens to Music via a Mobile Tablet

Paper submitted to the University of Kansas School of Nursing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Nursing Honors Program.The University of Kansas School of Nursing Bachelor of Science Nursing Honors Progra

Decolonizing Children\u27s Literature: Diversity & Representation in Six Scholarly Journals

Research on children\u27s publishing shows that children\u27s literature remains an overwhelmingly White, cisgender, heterosexual, and abled field. The same can be said about the scholarship of children\u27s literature, but little research has been done to measure representation and diversity within the discipline. Our collaborative research team (five undergraduate research assistants and one faculty member) analyzes data from six children\u27s literature journals over a 10-year period; using criteria from Lee & Low\u27s Diversity Baseline Survey and the Cooperative Children\u27s Book Center at UW-Madison, we measure how much of the published scholarship in recent children\u27s literature journals can be considered diverse. Finally, we tie our findings to a new journal in the field, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, which was founded in 2016 as a dedicated space for diverse scholars and their work. In sum, this information helps us determine whether children\u27s literature is a field that is progressing in its stated goals of increased diversity and representation

"The ground beneath me" : creative vision, youth and HIV/AIDS

HIV infection is a fast growing phenomenon amongst young people worldwide. In South Africa infection rates amongst youth are particularly high, and the need to find strategies to engage young people in issues around healthy sexuality are imperative. This research uses visual and ethnographic approaches as a method for engaged research that supports community led peer education; with young people building on their own lived experience as part of the process. Borrowing from ideas of engaged pedagogy by bell hooks, Henry A. Giroux, and Paulo Friere and "thick and deep" data collection as explored by Clifford Geertz, Joseph Tobin and Claudia Mitchell, The Ground Beneath Me attempts to understand how to engage youth in creative strategies towards social change and more concentrated peer education around HIV/AIDS. This research is also influenced by understandings of AIDS in a global context through theorists such as Cindy Patton, Catherine Campbell, Paul Treichler and Paul Farmer amongst others. Ultimately this was a qualitative, open-ended process, which looked at both the process and the final works as part of the data, and generated non-empirical results (including two video by-products and a text of youth authored writing and drawing). The findings indicated the need to include young people as change agents in creating health-enabling communities; to contextualize AIDS in terms of globalization, race, poverty, and stigma; to focus attention on gender-based violence and structural violence as risk factors; and, to keep gender issues at the forefront of youth education around HIV prevention

Kinase deoxyribozymes

Nature has developed the use of proteins and RNA as enzymes, while DNA is used for the storage and transfer of genetic information. Proteins and RNA are biopolymers that can fold into specific secondary and tertiary structures to enable catalysis. Considering the structural similarity to RNA, single-stranded DNA should also be able to form complex structures capable of catalyzing reactions. DNA catalysts have not been identified in nature, but in vitro selection has led to the identification of DNA catalysts for a variety of chemical reactions. Identification of new catalysts favors the use of DNA for multiple reasons. Amplification of functional DNA sequences is directly possible using natural polymerases, whereas amplification of RNA requires an additional reverse transcription step and amplification of proteins is not possible. The total number of possible sequences is smaller for nucleic acids (4n, where n is the number of residues) than for proteins (20n). Within this sequence space a large number of random nucleic acid sequences will fold into secondary and tertiary structures unlike proteins which require specific amino acid sequences to form complex structures. Therefore, in vitro selection experiments to identify DNA catalysts will cover a large portion of sequence space, and a large fraction of the covered space will contain structured DNA sequences with the potential to be catalytically active. The ease of synthesis and stability of DNA compared to RNA or proteins also provides an advantage for its use as a catalyst. Natural post-translational modifications (PTMs) are important in biological systems. PTMs modulate protein activity resulting in rapid changes to cellular processes. Studying the role of specific PTMs is often limited to the ability to generate site-specific post-translationally modified proteins of interest. Phosphorylation of amino acid side chains is an abundant natural PTM that is essential for cellular function. Protein kinases, which catalyze phosphorylation, are often motif specific. Engineering these natural kinases to change motif requirements is challenging and often results in decreased substrate specificity. To identify new catalysts for the site-specific phosphorylation of a desired protein the use of DNA as a catalytic biomolecule is advantageous because an initially random population of DNA sequences does not have substrate biases, and DNA is a large biopolymer with the possibility to interact specifically with the substrates. Both ribozymes and deoxyribozymes have been identified to catalyze the phosphorylation of oligonucleotides. However, previous efforts to identify kinase deoxyribozymes to catalyze the phosphorylation of amino acid side chains were unsuccessful because the -thiophosphoryl donor used was not stable in the selection conditions. As described herein, a new in vitro selection method was developed using a previously identified deoxyribozyme to separate the active deoxyribozymes from the inactive DNA sequences. This method led to the identification of the first kinase deoxyribozymes capable of phosphorylating tyrosine residues within a tethered peptide substrate using a bound 5′-triphosphorylated RNA oligonucleotide as the phosphoryl donor. Separate selection experiments were performed using 1 mM GTP as the phosphoryl donor. The identified DNA catalysts are able to phosphorylate tyrosine within a peptide substrate and require only low micromolar concentrations of GTP. Site-specific modification of proteins is often desired. Most deoxyribozymes identified to modify peptide substrates have been identified using peptide substrates containing the reactive residue flanked by alanine residues. Peptide sequences derived from natural proteins contain a variety of amino acid residues with diverse functional groups that could be a point of interaction between the peptide substrate and DNA catalyst. Selection experiments were performed with biologically derived peptide sequences to identify tyrosine kinase deoxyribozymes with the ability to phosphorylate peptides sequence-specifically. Of the three peptide substrates evaluated the use of one led to deoxyribozymes that are peptide motif-specific, the second peptide led to deoxyribozymes with partial peptide sequence-selectivity, and the third did not lead to the identification of deoxyribozymes. The identification of peptide motif-specific deoxyribozymes demonstrates that DNA catalysts can interact specifically with peptide substrates, and individual DNA enzymes can interact with the same peptide substrate in a different manner. The ability to phosphorylate substrates that are free in solution is desired. However, previously identified kinase deoxyribozymes are unable to phosphorylate untethered peptide substrates. Original efforts increased the length of the tether between the peptide substrate and DNA anchor to mimic a peptide free in solution. These selection experiments did not lead to deoxyribozymes, and further analysis of other deoxyribozymes with untethered peptide reactivity suggests the long tethers may interfere with catalysis. Further efforts have focused on the incorporation of hydrophobic modifications into the DNA catalysts to improve peptide binding. DNA aptamers containing hydrophobic modifications have improved protein binding. Increased binding affinity between the peptide substrate and DNA catalyst may enable untethered peptide reactivity. While initial efforts focused on tyrosine phosphorylation, serine phosphorylation is also abundant in nature. Serine kinase deoxyribozymes have been identified to phosphorylate serine within tightly tethered peptide substrates using 5′-triphosphorylated RNA as the phosphoryl donor. Subsequent efforts to increase the tether length or use ATP as the phosphoryl donor were unsuccessful. Efforts to improve DNA catalysts with the ability to phosphorylate serine include using biologically derived peptide sequences to increase interactions between the deoxyribozyme and peptide substrate, and incorporating catalytically participatory modifications into the DNA enzymes

The Architecture of Feminicide: The State, Inequalities, and Everyday Gender Violence in Honduras

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women in their homes and on the streets. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women, including gender-motivated murders (feminicides), the everyday acts that can result in their deaths, and impunity for these crimes. Rather than analyzing these murders as interpersonal acts or linking them to economic deprivation, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have amplified violence in the lives of Honduran women. We distinguish between the state’s acts of omission and acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures that create a fertile ground for these killings. A context of multisided violence that facilitates extreme violence in the lives of women is present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing power of civil society groups and increased political repression after the 2009 coup. We identify root causes of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. Although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences of extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in other countries in the Latin American region

Engaging with Community: How Schools Are Helping Their Students Become Informed, Responsible and Compassionate Citizens

In Tasmania, high school students sit with senior citizens and individually tutor them in computer skills. At a school in Victoria, Year 9 students studying hospitality serve a meal to community guests and provide dinner entertainment. In a small rural New South Wales primary school, the children are busy in their HOPE gardens, harvesting vegetables for charity groups who take food packages to families in need. Each of these scenarios represents a deliberate attempt to connect students with their community through service