Search results for: Danny Fraser

Authors: Owen Cegielski, Kristi Maida, Danny Morales, Sylvia L. Mendez

Abstract:

This study explores the challenges and threats US secondary educators experience in incorporating culturally relevant education (CRE) practices in their classrooms. CRE is a social justice pedagogical practice used to connect student’s cultural references to academic skills and content, to promote critical reflection, to facilitate cultural competence, and to critique discourses of power and oppression. Empirical evidence on CRE demonstrates positive student educational outcomes in terms of achievement, engagement, and motivation. Additionally, due to the direct focus on uplifting diverse cultures through the curriculum, students experience greater feelings of belonging, increased interest in the subject matter, and stronger racial/ethnic identities. When these teaching practices are in place, educators develop deeper relationships with their students and appreciate the multitude of gifts they (and their families) bring to the classroom environment. Yet, educators regularly report being unprepared to incorporate CRE in their daily teaching practice and identify substantive gaps in their knowledge and skills in this area. Often, they were not exposed to CRE in their educator preparation program, nor do they receive adequate support through school- or district-wide professional development programming. Through a descriptive phenomenological research design, 20 interviews were conducted with a diverse set of secondary school educators to explore the challenges and threats they experience in incorporating CRE practices in their classrooms. The guiding research question for this study is: What are the challenges and threats US secondary educators face when seeking to incorporate CRE practices in their classrooms? Interviews were grounded by the theory of challenge and threat states, which highlights the ways in which challenges and threats are appraised and how resources factor into emotional valence and perception, as well as the potential to meet the task at hand. Descriptive phenomenological data analysis strategies were utilized to develop an essential structure of the educators’ views of challenges and threats in regard to incorporating CRE practices in their secondary classrooms. The attitude of the phenomenological reduction method was adopted, and the data were analyzed through five steps: sense of the whole, meaning units, transformation, structure, and essential structure. The essential structure that emerged was while secondary educators display genuine interest in learning how to successfully incorporate CRE practices, they perceive it to be a challenge (and not a threat) due to lack of exposure which diminishes educator capacity, comfort, and confidence in employing CRE practices. These findings reveal the value of attending to emotional valence and perception of CRE in promoting this social justice pedagogical practice. Findings also reveal the importance of appropriately resourcing educators with CRE support to ensure they develop and utilize this practice.

Keywords: culturally relevant education, descriptive phenomenology, social justice practice, US secondary education

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Authors: Tristan R. Fraser, Christopher D. Steadman, Christopher J. Boos

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Myopericarditis is an inflammation syndrome characterised by clinical diagnostic criteria for pericarditis, such as chest pain, combined with evidence of myocardial involvement, such as elevation of biomarkers of myocardial damage, e.g., troponins. It can rarely be a complication of therapeutics used for dysregulated immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), for example, mesalazine. The infrequency of mesalazine-induced myopericarditis adds to the challenge in its recognition. Rapid diagnosis and the early introduction of treatment are crucial. This case report follows a 24-year-old professional footballer with a past medical history of ulcerative colitis, recently started on mesalazine for disease control. Three weeks after mesalazine was initiated, he was admitted with fever, shortness of breath, and chest pain worse whilst supine and on deep inspiration, as well as elevated venous blood cardiac troponin T level (cTnT, 288ng/L; normal: <13ng/L). Myocarditis was confirmed on initial inpatient cardiac MRI, revealing the presence of florid myocarditis with preserved left ventricular systolic function and an ejection fraction of 67%. This was a longitudinal case study following the progress of a single individual with myopericarditis over four acute hospital admissions over nine weeks, with admissions ranging from two to five days. Parameters examined included clinical signs and symptoms, serum troponin, transthoracic echocardiogram, and cardiac MRI. Serial measurements of cardiac function, including cardiac MRI and transthoracic echocardiogram, showed progressive deterioration of cardiac function whilst mesalazine was continued. Prior to cessation of mesalazine, transthoracic echocardiography revealed a small global pericardial effusion of < 1cm and worsening left ventricular systolic function with an ejection fraction of 45%. After recognition of mesalazine as a potential cause and consequent cessation of the drug, symptoms resolved, with cardiac MRI performed as an outpatient showing resolution of myocardial oedema. The patient plans to make a return to competitive sport. Patients suffering from myopericarditis are advised to refrain from competitive sport for at least six months in order to reduce the risk of cardiac remodelling and sudden cardiac death. Additional considerations must be taken in individuals for whom competitive sport is an essential component of their livelihood, such as professional athletes. Myopericarditis is an uncommon, however potentially serious medical condition with a wide variety of aetiologies, including viral, autoimmune, and drug-related causes. Management is mainly supportive and relies on prompt recognition and removal of the aetiological process. Mesalazine-induced myopericarditis is a rare condition; as such increasing awareness of mesalazine as a precipitant of myopericarditis is vital for optimising the management of these patients.

Keywords: myopericarditis, mesalazine, inflammatory bowel disease, professional athlete

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Authors: Ben Morrow, Patrick O'Hara, Natalie Ban, Tunai Marques, Molly Fraser, Christopher Bone

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Relative to commercial fisheries, recreational fisheries are often poorly understood and pose various challenges for monitoring frameworks. In British Columbia (BC), Canada, Pacific salmon are heavily targeted by recreational fishers while also being a key source of nutrient flow and crucial prey for a variety of marine and terrestrial fauna, including endangered Southern Resident killer whales (Orcinus orca). Although commercial fisheries were historically responsible for the majority of salmon retention, recreational fishing now comprises both greater effort and retention. The current monitoring scheme for recreational salmon fisheries involves aerial-roving creel surveys. However, this method has been identified as costly and having low predictive power as it is often limited to sampling fragments of fluid and temporally dynamic fisheries. This study used imagery from two shore-based autonomous cameras in a highly active recreational fishery around Sooke, BC, and evaluated their efficacy in supplementing existing aerial-roving surveys for monitoring a recreational salmon fishery. This study involved continuous monitoring and high temporal resolution (over one million images analyzed in a single fishing season), using a deep learning-based vessel detection algorithm and a custom image annotation tool to efficiently thin datasets. This allowed for the quantification of peak-season effort from a busy harbour, species-specific retention estimates, high levels of detected fishing events at a nearby popular fishing location, as well as the proportion of the fishery management area represented by cameras. Then, this study demonstrated how it could substantially enhance the temporal resolution of a fishery through diel activity pattern analyses, scaled monthly to visualize clusters of activity. This work also highlighted considerable off-season fishing detection, currently unaccounted for in the existing monitoring framework. These results demonstrate several distinct applications of autonomous cameras for providing enhanced detail currently unavailable in the current monitoring framework, each of which has important considerations for the managerial allocation of resources. Further, the approach and methodology can benefit other studies that apply shore-based camera monitoring, supplement aerial-roving creel surveys to improve fine-scale temporal understanding, inform the optimal timing of creel surveys, and improve the predictive power of recreational stock assessments to preserve important and endangered fish species.

Keywords: cameras, monitoring, recreational fishing, stock assessment

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Authors: Akiko Ohta, Masahiro Minami, Yusra Qadir, Jennifer York

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The Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) is a home instruction program for mothers of children 3 to 5 years old. Using role-play as a method of teaching, the participating mothers work with their home visitors and learn how to deliver the HIPPY curriculum to their children. Applying HIPPY, Reviving Hope and Home for High-risk Refugee Mothers Program (RHH) was created to provide more personalized peer support and to respond to ongoing settlement challenges for isolated and vulnerable Government Assisted Refugee (GAR) mothers. GARs often have greater needs and vulnerabilities than other refugee groups. While the support is available, they often face various challenges and barriers in starting their new lives in Canada, such as inadequate housing, low first-language literacy levels, low competency in English or French, and social isolation. The pilot project was operated by Mothers Matter Centre (MMC) from January 2019 to March 2021 in partnership with the Immigrant Services Society of BC (ISSofBC). The formative evaluation was conducted by a research team at Simon Fraser University. In order to provide more suitable support for GAR mothers, RHH intended to offer more flexibility in HIPPY delivery, supported by a home visitor, to meet the need of refugee mothers facing various conditions and challenges; to have a pool of financial resources to be used for the RHH families when necessitated during the program period; to have another designated staff member, called a community navigator, assigned to facilitate the support system for the RHH families in their settlement; to have a portable device available for each RHH mother to navigate settlement support resources; and to provide other variations of the HIPPY curriculum as an option for the RHH mothers, including a curriculum targeting pre-HIPPY age children. Reflections on each program component was collected from RHH mothers and staff members of MMC and ISSofBC, including frontline workers and management staff, through individual interviews and focus group discussions. Each of the RHH program components was analyzed and evaluated by applying Moore’s four domains framework to identify key information and generate new knowledge (data). To capture RHH mothers’ program experience more in depth based on their own reflections, the photovoice method was used. Some photos taken by the mothers will be shared to illustrate their RHH experience as part of their life stories. Over the period of the program, this evaluation observed how RHH mothers became more confident in various domains, such as communicating with others, taking public transportations alone, and teaching their own child(ren). One of the major factors behind the success was their home visitors’ flexibility and creativity to create a more meaningful and tailored approach for each mother, depending on her background and personal situation. The role of the community navigator was tested out and improved during the program period. The community navigators took the key role to assess the needs of the RHH families and connect them with community resources. Both the home visitors and community navigators were immigrant mothers themselves and owing to their dedicated care for the RHH mothers; they were able to gain trust and work closely and efficiently with RHH mothers.

Keywords: refugee mothers, settlement support, program evaluation, Canada

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Authors: Rocio Murad, Marcela Sanchez, Mariana Calderon Jaramillo, Danny Rivera, Angela Cifuentes, Daniela Roldán, Juan Carlos Rivillas

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Women and girls have specific health needs, but during health pandemics such as COVID19 they are less likely to have access to quality essential health information, commodities and services, or insurance coverage for routine and catastrophic health expenses, especially in rural and marginalized communities. This is compounded by multiple or intersecting inequalities, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, and sexual orientation, among others. Despite concerted collective action, there is a lack of information on the situation of women, adolescents and youth, including gender inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. Much more needs to be done to amplify the lived realities of women and adolescents in global and national advocacy and policy responses. The COVID 19 pandemic reflects the need for systematic advocacy policies based on the lived experiences of women and adolescents, underpinned by human rights. This research is part of the initiative of Profamilia Association (Solidarity Study), and its objective is twofold: i) to analyze the behavioral changes and immediate expectations of Colombians during the stage of relaxation of the confinement measures decreed by the national government; and ii) to identify the needs, experiences and resilient practices of adolescents and young women during the COVID-19 crisis in Colombia. Descriptive analysis of data collected by Profamilia through the Solidaridad study, an exploratory cross-sectional descriptive study that used subnational level data from a nonprobabilistic sample survey conducted to 1735 adults, between September 01 and 11, 2020. Interviews were conducted with key stakeholders about their experiences during COVID19, under three key axes: i) main challenges for adolescents and young women; ii) examples of what has worked well in responding to the challenge; and iii) how/what services are/should be provided during COVID-19 (and beyond) to address the challenge. Interviewees were selected based on prior mapping of social groups of interest. In total, 23 adolescents and young women participated in the interviews. The results show that people adopted behavioral changes such as wearing masks, avoiding people with symptoms, and reducing mobility, but there was also a doubling of concerns for many reasons, from effects on mental health, sexual health, and unattended reproductive health to the burden of care and working at home. The favorable perception that people had at the beginning of the quarantine about the response and actions of the national and local government to control Covid-19 decreased over the course of the quarantine. The challenges and needs of adolescents and young women were highlighted during the most restrictive measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in disruptions to daily activities, education and work, as well as restrictions to mobility and social interaction. Concerns raised by participants included: impact on mental health and wellbeing due to disruption of daily life; limitations in access to formal and informal education; food insecurity; migration; loss of livelihoods; lack of access to health information and services; limitations to sexual and reproductive health and rights; insecurity problems; and problems in communication and treatment among household members.

Keywords: COVID-19, changes in behavior, adolescents, women

Procedia PDF Downloads 75