There have been significant efforts to enhance teaching quality in Rwandan secondary schools. Despite this focus, there has been little attention to understanding this construct, and especially what ...it means for students who are most affected by it. To address this gap, this study explored with students comprehensively what they valued in a 'good' teacher. Data drew upon 75 group discussions involving 419 students across 12 schools from six Rwandan districts. Through thematic analysis, findings revealed an understanding of 'good' teachers via multiple dimensions. Students highlighted the importance of teacher disposition and responsible behaviors. Teacher-student relationships were also strongly valued as was holistic learning including positive values and being influenced cognitively and affectively. These results provide important implications for teacher professional development and policies in response to the contextualized preferences.
This paper grew from the imagining that Sara Ahmed and Michel Foucault, both influential scholars in my ever-developing understanding of the world, met face-to-face one ordinary day, discussed their ...ideas, responded to each other’s queries, reflected on historical and ongoing social injustices, and shared hopeful imaginings for the future. In this imaginary account, through the form of dialogues, I compare, contrast, and examine concepts in Foucault’s and Ahmed’s works—specifically, the chapter “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, published in 1977, and the book Living a Feminist Life, published 40 years later in 2017.1 Following Ahmed, I use path, walls, and tables as both metaphors and material effects of disciplinary power to link theorizations from the two texts regarding the embodiment of discipline, through which white, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal norms persist. Further, I ask questions of Foucault’s text about the seeming invisibility of women and disabled people in its discussion of docile bodies and disciplinary power and echo other feminist scholars in arguing that it is through the perspectives and experiences of those who have been cast out of belonging and rendered invisible that we may find the means to expose the most cemented and hidden structures and techniques of domination and to imagine forms of resistance and subversions that point to a different future. For the purpose of clarity, direct quotes from Ahmed’s and Foucault’s texts are italicized within the dialogues, accompanied by in-text citations.
•Teachers play crucial roles in achieving the national policy visions envisaged.•Rwandan teachers have suggested a wide range of innovative strategies to support students learning in an unfamiliar ...MOI.•Engaging with teacher perspectives is the key to develop more context-sensitive strategies to support student learning.
In many post-colonial African countries, teaching using international languages as the medium of instruction (MOI) places particular challenges with respect to engaging students in learning. This paper explores pedagogical strategies used by Rwandan teachers in primary schools to support their students’ learning subject content when English is the MOI. Findings from 24 interviews and four focus group discussions in four 12-year Basic Education schools indicate that teachers use a rich repertoire of strategies to support students’ learning, which can be clustered into four key themes: (1) communication in an unfamiliar MOI, (2) strategies for visual demonstration (3) strategies for engaging students, and (4) commitment to supporting students with different needs. The implications of these findings are discussed.
VOICE Ki, Patricia
New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis,
06/2022, Volume:
3
Journal Article
This piece refers to a recurring dream about not being able to speak, not being able to be heard, and therefore, not being able to push back against threats of violence. I created it after having ...conversations with other Asian women about how we are constantly trying to speak out against systemic violence in organizations that claim to be anti-oppressive, and yet, are almost entirely made up of white folx at the managerial level. Our words momentarily capture attention – perhaps people are shocked at the assertiveness and articulateness of Asian women who are stereotyped as passive and politically apathetic – and we receive acknowledgement, apologies, and offers of help. But over time, we realize that not only has no meaningful change been made, but that we are now no longer invited to the table for discussions. The polite responses always drown out the calls for change, or the offers of help are conditional, requiring us to conform to a white middleclass standard of social respectability that erases our very ways of being and the agency of choice. At the same time, my conversations with friends remind me that we can still draw on each other for strengths, inspirations, and creative strategies to persist in our various spaces; to find small ways of resistance against what bell hook (1995) calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (p. 17); to continue to keep alive the dream of a less violent future.
In the area of eating disorders, few studies in the art therapy literature examine the non-clinical setting or clients' evaluation of their own art-making experiences. This qualitative study ...addresses these gaps by interviewing the participants about their experiences of art-based support groups at a non-clinical eating disorder support centre. Four major themes were identified: Control, Safety, Self-awareness, and Emotional Well-being. The findings suggest that the art-based support group can be an effective channel through which the therapeutic benefits of art can be made accessible to individuals with different levels of motivation toward recovery from an eating disorder.
Early atherosclerosis depends upon responses by immune cells resident in the intimal aortic wall. Specifically, the healthy intima is thought to be populated by vascular dendritic cells (DCs) that, ...during hypercholesterolemia, initiate atherosclerosis by being the first to accumulate cholesterol. Whether these cells remain key players in later stages of disease is unknown. Using murine lineage-tracing models and gene expression profiling, we reveal that myeloid cells present in the intima of the aortic arch are not DCs but instead specialized aortic intima resident macrophages (Mac
) that depend upon colony-stimulating factor 1 and are sustained by local proliferation. Although Mac
comprise the earliest foam cells in plaques, their proliferation during plaque progression is limited. After months of hypercholesterolemia, their presence in plaques is overtaken by recruited monocytes, which induce Mac
-defining genes. These data redefine the lineage of intimal phagocytes and suggest that proliferation is insufficient to sustain generations of macrophages during plaque progression.
The global circulation of newly emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 is a new threat to public health due to their increased transmissibility and immune evasion. Moreover, currently available vaccines and ...therapeutic antibodies were shown to be less effective against new variants, in particular, the South African (SA) variant, termed 501Y.V2 or B.1.351. To assess the efficacy of the CT-P59 monoclonal antibody against the SA variant, we sought to perform as in vitro binding and neutralization assays, and in vivo animal studies. CT-P59 neutralized B.1.1.7 variant to a similar extent as to wild type virus. CT-P59 showed reduced binding affinity against a RBD (receptor binding domain) triple mutant containing mutations defining B.1.351 (K417N/E484K/N501Y) also showed reduced potency against the SA variant in live virus and pseudovirus neutralization assay systems. However, in vivo ferret challenge studies demonstrated that a therapeutic dosage of CT-P59 was able to decrease B.1.351 viral load in the upper and lower respiratory tracts, comparable to that observed for the wild type virus. Overall, although CT-P59 showed reduced in vitro neutralizing activity against the SA variant, sufficient antiviral effect in B.1.351-infected animals was confirmed with a clinical dosage of CT-P59, suggesting that CT-P59 has therapeutic potential for COVID-19 patients infected with SA variant.
•CT-P59 significantly inhibit B.1.1.7 variant to a similar extent as to wild type virus.•CT-P59 showed reduced potency against the B.1.351 variant in in vitro studies.•Therapeutic dosage of CT-P59 showed in vivo neutralizing potency against B.1.351 in ferret challenge study.
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