Community-engaged research (CEnR) is a complex, collaborative process that presents many challenges and requires investment of time and commitment by both community and university research partners.
All parties in community-academic partnerships have a vested interest prevention program success. Markers of success that reflect community's experiences of programmatic prevention success are not always measurable, but critically speak to community-defined needs.
The Apophthegmata Patrum tells the story of a man who, wishing to join a monastery, reenacts Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac by proceeding to throw his son in the Nile River on the command of the monastic father. Like Isaac, the boy is spared. This account of extreme familial renunciation in the service of the ascetic life is not the only account of a child killing or attempted killing in monastic literature. Nor does the biblical prefigurement of ascetic renunciation exhaust these narratives' significance. This essay examines accounts of child killings in Egyptian monastic culture through the lens of various textual and visual sources: the Greek Apophthegmata Patrum, paintings of the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter and the averted sacrifice of Isaac at the monasteries of Saint Antony on the Red Sea and Saint Catherine at Sinai, and exegesis of the same biblical narratives in the writings of the Egyptian monk Shenoute and other ascetic authors. What we will see is that powerful moments or rituals of transition and transformation accompany these stories. Thus the textual and visual representations of these killings or attempted killings are theologically, politically, and even socially generative. They reaffirm priestly authority and theological orthodoxy in the monasteries at the same time as they invite male monks to identify with both male and female exemplars. As these paintings and texts reveal, child sacrifice in monastic culture represented not merely an ascetic injunction to abandon family, but, perhaps more radically, an ascetic reproduction of monastic community and genealogy.
Advanced literacy is a prerequisite to adult success in the twenty-first century, By advanced literacy we do not mean simply the ability to decode words or read a text, as necessary as these elementary skills are, Instead we mean the ability to use reading to gain access to the world of knowledge, to synthesize information from different sources, to evaluate arguments, and to learn totally new subjects, These higher-level skills are now essential to young Americans who wish to explore fields as disparate as history, science, and mathematics; to succeed in postsecondary education, whether vocational or academic; to earn a decent living in the knowledge-based globalized labor market; and to participate in a democracy facing complex problems, The literacy challenge confronting children, their families, and schools in the United States has two parts. The first is the universal need to better prepare students for twenty-first-century literacy demands. The second is the specific need to reduce the disparities in literacy outcomes between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from more privileged homes. This issue of the Future of Children explores the literacy of America's children and how to improve it. We begin this introductory essay by reviewing briefly why literacy is so important in today's world and why the concept of literacy needs to be broadened to include a set of competencies that go well beyond the ability to recognize words and decode text. We end with a summary of the other articles in the issue and briefly consider what steps policy makers might take to respond to the urgent needs we cite. The Growing Demand for Strong Literacy Skills The "literacy problem" we address here is not that literacy has declined among recent generations of children. It is that today's economy and the complex political and social challenges facing the nation demand more advanced skills than ever before. The average reading skill of non-Hispanic white children from recent cohorts is remarkably similar to that of comparable children born in the 1960s, and the average reading achievement of recent cohorts of black children and Hispanic children is considerably higher than that of comparable cohorts born several decades ago. These points are illustrated in figure 1, which presents trends from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the average reading levels of American thirteen-year-olds in the major race and ethnicity groups, [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Although the literacy of American children has not changed appreciably over the past forty years, the American labor market has changed dramatically. The change in the nation's occupational structure is illustrated in figure 2, which displays the shares of workers employed in large occupational groups, arrayed from lowest wage on the left to highest wage on the right. The big declines between 1979 and 2009 in the share of workers employed in particular occupations took place in blue-collar jobs (for example, assembly line work) and administrative support (for example, filing). These jobs require workers who can read, but historically they have not demanded advanced literacy skills. Jobs have declined in these occupations because they can be and have been taken over by computer-guided machines or by workers in lower-wage countries. (1) During those same three decades the demand for workers in higher-paid occupations, for example, in technical and professional fields, was growing. These jobs typically require postsecondary education or training, leaving workers with inadequate literacy skills competing for the growing number of low-paying service jobs. Americans also need strong literacy skills to participate constructively in a pluralistic democracy facing complex domestic and global challenges, including a large national debt, global warming, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There is no shortage of information about these challenges. …
Jean Little was one of the first children’s authors to deal extensively with issues of disability. Her views towards disability were affected by her own experience of visual impairment, but also by her family’s missionary work abroad and their commitment to social justice at home. While disability historians have often stressed the development of the “social model” of disability as being key to the creation of a disability rights movement, this paper suggests that disabled activism also had much to do with Canada’s emerging self-definition as a place that stressed the importance of good citizenship, equality and inclusion.
To describe the prevalence, distribution and risk factors for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection among homeless adults using eight Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) clinics nationally.
Up until the 1980s, dance in Ireland existed as an important human activity, engaged in for various reasons: socialization, entertainment, competition, performance, tourism, ceremonial occasions, and so on. It was not, however, researched and examined on a par with other fields of study within the social sciences. From the 1980s on, however, the academic study of dance within the context of culture increasingly gained ground in the West, due to the influence of a number of anthropologists in the United States interested in human movement studies. 1 Academicians also began to note the work of ethnochoreologists in Europe who, since the 1960s, had been involved in field research and studies of dance in their respective cultures. 2 Dance and the role that it played—together with the meaning that it embodied within diverse societies around the world— gradually became a significant field of research and study. Scholars within mul tidisciplinary fields of study—including anthropology, ethnochoreology, eth nomusicology, dance ethnology, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, cultural geography and feminist scholarship—argued for the significance of dance and the body as a way of illuminating and understanding issues relating to human
This paper presents a generalized framework for segmenting closed-contour anatomical and pathological features using graph theory and dynamic programming (GTDP). More specifically, the GTDP method previously developed for quantifying retinal and corneal layer thicknesses is extended to segment objects such as cells and cysts. The presented technique relies on a transform that maps closed-contour features in the Cartesian domain into lines in the quasi-polar domain. The features of interest are then segmented as layers via GTDP. Application of this method to segment closed-contour features in several ophthalmic image types is shown. Quantitative validation experiments for retinal pigmented epithelium cell segmentation in confocal fluorescence microscopy images attests to the accuracy of the presented technique.