In the Right Place at the Right Time: Rules of Control and Woman’s Place in Ontario Schools, 1940–1980

In a recent life-history interview study of two generations of male and female principals in Toronto elementary and secondary schools from 1940–1980, respondents repeatedly said that they had moved into their administrative role because they were in the right place at the right time. I use Clegg’s (1981) configuration of organizational rules of control to question why so few women became principals in the Toronto Board during that period. The analysis illustrates how, despite pressures for change, the overall “place” afforded to most men and women in this educational organization remained unchanged. I consider how we might work within present-day organizations to alter systemic forms of control and to interrupt such persistent hegemonic patterns — which limit both men and women — in school culture. Dans l’étude récente menée à l’aide d’entrevues sur les récits de vie de deux générations de directeurs et de directrices d’école au primaire et au secondaire à Toronto de 1940 à 1980, les répondants ont affirmé à maintes reprises qu’ils se sont vu confier leur rôle administratif parce qu’ils avaient été au bon moment au bon endroit. L’auteure utilise la configuration qu’a donnée Clegg (1981) des règles de contrôle organisationnelles pour analyser pourquoi un nombre aussi restreint de femmes sont devenues directrices d’école à la Commission scolaire de Toronto au cours de cette période. L’étude illustre comment, en dépit des pressions en faveur d’un changement, la “place” globale accordée à la plupart des hommes et des femmes dans cette structure organisationnelle est demeurée la même. L’auteure suggère des moyens à mettre en oeuvre au sein des structures actuelles pour modifier des formes systémiques de contrôle et mettre fin à des modèles d’hégémonie aussi persistants — qui limitent autant les hommes que les femmes — dans la culture de l’école.

WOMEN AND SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL ROTATION/SUCCESSION: A STUDY OF THE BELIEFS OF DECISION MAKERS IN FOUR PROVINCES

Our study investigated patterns of female participation as secondary principals that have varied across contexts and changed slowly. Researchers interviewed decision makers from a purposive sample of 10 urban and rural school districts in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, gathering data from structured telephone interviews, policy documents, and statistical information. The needs of a system took precedence over those of individuals. Many participants denied that gender influenced their rotation/succession practices; however, they identified differences by gender in leadership style and aspirations. Complex rules of control affected the participation of women as secondary principals. Gender clearly affects the participation of women as secondary school principals.Key words: gender, leadership, schools Les auteurs analysent les modes de participation de directrices d’école secondaire, lesquels varient d’un contexte à l’autre et changent lentement. Ils ont interviewé des décideuses provenant d’un échantillon choisi à dessein de dix arrondissements scolaires urbains et ruraux en Ontario, en Nouvelle‐Écosse, en Saskatchewan et en Colombie‐Britannique. Les données furent colligées au moyen d’entrevues téléphoniques structurées, le tout complété par l’analyse de documents de politiques et de renseignements statistiques. Leurs conclusions semblent indiquer que les besoins du système l’emportent sur les besoins de la personne. Un grand nombre des répondantes contestaient l’idée que le fait d’être un homme ou une femme exerce une influence sur les méthodes de rotation/succession ; elles notaient par contre des différences selon les sexes pour ce qui est du style de leadership, des orientations et des aspirations. Des règles complexes de contrôle affectent la participation des femmes à titre de directrices d’école secondaire. Le sexe affecte clairement la participation des femmes en tant que directrices d’école secondaire. Mots clés : genre, leadership, écoles

Ontario School Teachers: A Gendered View of the 1930s

This particular article arises out of a longitudinal empirical study on teacher socialization with specific regard to relations of gender, ethnicity, and race. It focuses on a number of observations about Ontario teachers in the 1930s:1. The overall percentage of men in teaching rose, but much more so in rural areas than in the cities. 2. Salaries of teachers dropped considerably during this time. 3. There was a significant change in teacher certification procedures, within which gender played a large role. Salaries were also affected by these certification changes.4. Average ages of teachers increased significantly during this decade. 5. In general, teachers had more years of teaching experience than their colleagues did in the previous decade. However, there were significant gender differences in these figures. 6. Both formal and informal policies against the employment of married women as teachers were enforced. This article details these observations, and then discusses what significance they may have had, in the context of overall 'gender relations' among teachers in Ontario. A number of relevant sources for the 1930s were examined: annual reports of the Ontario Department of Education; annual reports, minutes, and handbooks of the Toronto Board of Education; and contemporary newspapers. In addition, reprinted transcripts of two groups of interviews have been drawn on—six men and women who taught (and later became principals) in Toronto in the 1930s, and a number of women teachers from the 1930s who were inter viewed for a 1980s study on women's experiences during the Depression

Detection of flow direction in high-flying insect and songbird migrants

Goal-oriented migrants travelling through the sea or air must cope with the effect of cross-flows during their journeys if they are to reach their destination 1, 2 and 3. In order to counteract flow-induced drift from their preferred course, migrants must detect the mean flow direction, and integrate this information with output from their internal compass, to compensate for the deflection. Animals can potentially sense flow direction by two nonexclusive mechanisms: either indirectly, by visually assessing the effect of the current on their movement direction relative to the ground; or directly, via intrinsic properties of the current [4]. Here, we report the first evidence that nocturnal compass-guided insect migrants use a turbulence-mediated mechanism for directly assessing the wind direction hundreds of metres above the ground. By comparison, we find that nocturnally-migrating songbirds do not use turbulence to detect the flow; instead they rely on visual assessment of wind-induced drift to indirectly infer the flow direction

Adaptive strategies in nocturnally migrating insects and songbirds: contrasting responses to wind.

1. Animals that use flight as their mode of transportation must cope with the fact that their migration and orientation performance is strongly affected by the flow of the medium they are moving in, i.e. by the winds. Different strategies can be used to mitigate the negative effects and benefit from the positive effects of a moving flow. The strategies an animal can use will be constrained by the relationship between the speed of the flow and the speed of the animal’s own propulsion in relation to the surrounding air. 2. Here we analyse entomological and ornithological radar data from north-western Europe to investigate how two different nocturnal migrant taxa, the noctuid moth Autographa gamma and songbirds, deal with wind by analysing variation in resulting flight directions in relation to the wind-dependent angle between the animal’s heading and track direction. 3. Our results, from fixed locations along the migratory journey, reveal different global strategies used by moths and songbirds during their migratory journeys. As expected, nocturnally migrating moths experienced a greater degree of wind drift than nocturnally migrating songbirds, but both groups were more affected by wind in autumn than in spring. 4. The songbirds’ strategies involve elements of both drift and compensation, providing some benefits from wind in combination with destination and time control. In contrast, moths expose themselves to a significantly higher degree of drift in order to obtain strong wind assistance, surpassing the songbirds in mean ground speed, at the cost of a comparatively lower spatiotemporal migratory precision. 5. Moths and songbirds show contrasting but adaptive responses to migrating through a moving flow, which are fine-tuned to the respective flight capabilities of each group in relation to the wind currents they travel within

Evaluation of Clinical and Immunological Markers for predicting Virological Failure in a HIV/AIDS treatment cohort in Busia, Kenya

In resource-limited settings where viral load (VL) monitoring is scarce or unavailable, clinicians must use immunological and clinical criteria to define HIV virological treatment failure. This study examined the performance of World Health Organization (WHO) clinical and immunological failure criteria in predicting virological failure in HIV patients receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART)

Axo-glial interactions between midbrain dopamine neurons and oligodendrocyte lineage cells in the anterior corpus callosum

Oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) receive synaptic innervation from glutamatergic and GABAergic axons and can be dynamically regulated by neural activity, resulting in activity-dependent changes in patterns of axon myelination. However, it remains unclear to what extent other types of neurons may innervate OPCs. Here, we provide evidence implicating midbrain dopamine neurons in the innervation of oligodendrocyte lineage cells in the anterior corpus callosum and nearby white matter tracts of male and female adult mice. Dopaminergic axon terminals were identified in the corpus callosum of DAT-Cre mice after injection of an eYFP reporter virus into the midbrain. Furthermore, fast-scan cyclic voltammetry revealed monoaminergic transients in the anterior corpus callosum, consistent with the anatomical findings. Using RNAscope, we further demonstrate that ~ 40% of Olig2 + /Pdfgra + cells and ~ 20% of Olig2 + /Pdgfra- cells in the anterior corpus callosum express Drd1 and Drd2 transcripts. These results suggest that oligodendrocyte lineage cells may respond to dopamine released from midbrain dopamine axons, which could affect myelination. Together, this work broadens our understanding of neuron-glia interactions with important implications for myelin plasticity by identifying midbrain dopamine axons as a potential regulator of corpus callosal oligodendrocyte lineage cells

VISCED – Final Country/Region Reports

This is a description of the process and outcomes of creation of over 110 country reports specially contracted by VISCE

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis