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This paper details four encounters we experienced while traveling in Cuba as part of a multiethnic delegation of US social justice advocates. The encounters were linked by a common thread of race, which made them noteworthy and uncomfortably familiar to us as Black women. Since our return to the US, we have reflected on the four encounters and concluded that, as a collective, they reinforce a lesson and highlight a fundamental challenge that is at the core of the work of all critical multicultural and social justice educators.

In this article I detail correspondences between a breach of decorum that occurred during a speech delivered by President Obama before a joint session of the United States Congress and an encounter between a teacher education student and me in a graduate-level multicultural education course. The encounter served as a powerful, albeit inadvertent, impetus to theorize the nature of persistent resistance to diversity and critical multicultural education in one teacher education unit.

BackgroundAlthough many probiotic products are currently available in yogurt or pill form in the United States (US), there is uncertainty surrounding the structure of regulation of these products. As more therapeutic probiotics are developed, changes to existing regulatory process in the United States may be required to meet the needs of patients and users in the population.ObjectiveThis study examined how patients with chronic gastrointestinal (GI) diseases view the regulation of probiotics.DesignWe conducted a multi-site qualitative study consisting of focus groups of patients with chronic gastrointestinal diseases at three tertiary hospitals: at [institutions removed for blinded review].ResultsWe conducted 22 focus groups with 136 patients with major gastrointestinal (GI) diseases between March and August 2009. Participants were not familiar with the existing regulation of probiotic products but wanted assurances of accurate labelling of strain as well as safety. Participants raised concerns that regulation of probiotics might be accompanied by greater costs, reduced access and increased involvement of pharmaceutical companies. Although participants voiced significant doubt of government regulators, they felt that products containing genetically modified probiotic strains should have oversight comparable to that of pharmaceutical drugs.Discussion and conclusionIf GI patient perspectives are indicative of public perceptions of therapeutic probiotics in the United States, consumers may expect more rigorous regulation in the future while simultaneously wanting low costs, easy access and low involvement of pharmaceutical companies. Manufacturers, translational scientists, clinicians and regulators should be sensitive to consumer attitudes when designing, testing and regulating new therapeutic probiotics.

Teacher perceptions of student abilities can affect crucial placement decisions that, in turn, affect student opportunities to learn. The author's research shows that this is particularly the case with black students who have earned high scores on math assessments but who, on the basis of teacher judgment, have not been recommended for placement in algebra in 8th grade. The author suggests a "less-is-more" approach--that is, remove teacher judgment from placement decisions and use universally available academic achievement performance data. This will increase the true identification of high-performing students, thereby increasing the opportunity to learn among students of different demographic backgrounds and reducing achievement gaps.

In just over a year, Massachusetts public colleges and universities have galvanized a statewide movement to adopt more comprehensive use of Open Educational Resources (OER). There had been prior nascent efforts to increase the utilization of OER in Massachusetts including: the launch of the Open Education Initiative at UMass Amherst, the MA #Go Open Project funded by a TAACCCT grant and the creation of a MA Community College OER Hub. These initiatives served as watershed moments in the journey to begin to make more faculty, staff, administrators and students aware of the utility of OER as a learning approach and as an effective way of reducing rapidly rising textbook costs. However, these efforts were accelerated when the statewide Student Advisory Council (SAC) presented a resolution to the state Board of Higher Education (BHE) in April 2018 asking the board to recognize OER as an approach to generate textbook costs savings for students and calling on the state Department of Higher Education (DHE) to explore and identify opportunities for implementing OER on a broader scale.

The article offers information on role of dietary protein in the development of diabetes-related kidney disease is a high protein diet safe. Topics include the kidney disease is a major complication of suboptimally managed diabetes, second only to cardiovascular disease in its contribution to the increased mortality of people with diabetes.

Internalised stigma is highly prevalent among people with mental illness. This is concerning because internalised stigma is often associated with negative consequences affecting individuals' personal, familial, social, and overall wellbeing, employment opportunities and recovery. Currently, there is no psychometrically validated instrument to measure internalised stigma among Xhosa people in their home language. Our study aimed to translate the Internalised Stigma of Mental Illness (ISMI) scale into isiXhosa. Following WHO guidelines, the ISMI scale was translated using a five-stage translation design which included (i) forward-translation, (ii) back-translation, (iii) committee approach, (iv) quantitative piloting, and (v) qualitative piloting using cognitive interviews. The ISMI isiXhosa version (ISMI-X) underwent psychometric testing to establish utility, within-scale validity, convergent, divergent, and content validity (assessed using frequency of endorsements and cognitive interviewing) with n  = 65 Xhosa people with schizophrenia. The resultant ISMI-X scale demonstrated good psychometric utility, internal consistency for the overall scale (α = .90) and most subscales (α > .70, except the Stigma Resistance subscale where α = .57), convergent validity between the ISMI Discrimination Experiences subscale and the Discrimination and Stigma (DISC) scale's Treated Unfairly subscale ( r  = .34, p  = .03) and divergent validity between the ISMI Stigma Resistance and DISC Treated Unfairly subscales ( r  = .13, p  = .49). But more importantly the study provides valuable insights into strengths and limitations of the present translation design. Specifically, validation methods such as assessing frequency of endorsements of scale items and using cognitive interviewing to establish conceptual clarity and relevance of items may be useful in small piloting sample sizes.