Children’s Stories Supporting the Development of Critical Literacy and Intercultural Understanding

This chapter examines the possibilities of applying children’s storybooks in supporting the development of critical literacy as well as intercultural understanding. Valuing and supporting children’s reading is known to provide understanding and empathy towards other human beings. The chapter focuses on theoretical notions related to promoting critical literacies through children’s storybooks, but also includes practical examples of utilizing multicultural children’s stories. The chapter introduces different strategies that parents and teachers can use to support the development of critical literacy, including critical thinking and understanding multiple perspectives. Focus is especially on young children, because they already are capable of moving beyond what is in front of them on the page. Since children’s storybooks offer possibilities for readers to question implicit assumptions about self and others, books can support readers in becoming more culturally aware and sensitive. Consequently, reading storybooks can affect children’s intercultural understanding, and the role of storybooks in children’s moral development – both shaping and changing attitudes – should be seen as transformative.Peer reviewe

The uses and abuses of power: teaching school leadership through children's literature

There are relatively few studies of how representations of teachers, schools and educational administrators in popular films and television might be, and are, used in leadership preparation. This paper seeks to add to this small body of work; it reports on an exploratory study of the representation of headteachers in contemporary children's fiction. Thirty-one texts are analysed to ascertain key themes and the major characterisations. The paper draws on children's literature scholars to argue that both the historical school story and its contemporary counterpart focus heavily on the power of the head to control the micro-world of the school. Because these fictional accounts deal with issues of power and justice more openly than many mainstream educational administration texts, this makes them particularly useful in the preparation of potential school leaders

Nonlinear oscillator model reproducing various phenomena in the dynamics of the conduction system of the heart

A dedicated nonlinear oscillator model able to reproduce the pulse shape, refractory time, and phase sensitivity of the action potential of a natural pacemaker of the heart is developed. The phase space of the oscillator contains a stable node, a hyperbolic saddle, and an unstable focus. The model reproduces several phenomena well known in cardiology, such as certain properties of the sinus rhythm and heart block. In particular, the model reproduces the decrease of heart rate variability with an increase in sympathetic activity. A sinus pause occurs in the model due to a single, well-timed, external pulse just as it occurs in the heart, for example due to a single supraventricular ectopy. Several ways by which the oscillations cease in the system are obtained (models of the asystole). The model simulates properly the way vagal activity modulates the heart rate and reproduces the vagal paradox. Two such oscillators, coupled unidirectionally and asymmetrically, allow us to reproduce the properties of heart rate variability obtained from patients with different kinds of heart block including sino-atrial blocks of different degree and a complete AV block (third degree). Finally, we demonstrate the possibility of introducing into the model a spatial dimension that creates exciting possibilities of simulating in the future the SA the AV nodes and the atrium including their true anatomical structure.J. J. Żebrowski, K. Grudziński, T. Buchner, P. Kuklik, J. Gac, G. Gielerak, P. Sanders, and R. Baranowsk

Competing risk and heterogeneity of treatment effect in clinical trials

It has been demonstrated that patients enrolled in clinical trials frequently have a large degree of variation in their baseline risk for the outcome of interest. Thus, some have suggested that clinical trial results should routinely be stratified by outcome risk using risk models, since the summary results may otherwise be misleading. However, variation in competing risk is another dimension of risk heterogeneity that may also underlie treatment effect heterogeneity. Understanding the effects of competing risk heterogeneity may be especially important for pragmatic comparative effectiveness trials, which seek to include traditionally excluded patients, such as the elderly or complex patients with multiple comorbidities. Indeed, the observed effect of an intervention is dependent on the ratio of outcome risk to competing risk, and these risks – which may or may not be correlated – may vary considerably in patients enrolled in a trial. Further, the effects of competing risk on treatment effect heterogeneity can be amplified by even a small degree of treatment related harm. Stratification of trial results along both the competing and the outcome risk dimensions may be necessary if pragmatic comparative effectiveness trials are to provide the clinically useful information their advocates intend