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A now influential reading of Kant's statement of innate right in the Doctrine of Right interprets it as affirming a basic right of each to freedom of choice and action. This reading treats the innate right as foundational to Kant's entire philosophy of right—all other rights are said to be derived from the innate right. I call this the ‘free choice’ reading of innate right; while it enjoys considerable intuitive appeal, it is contestable on textual and systematic grounds. I show that the free choice reading (a) conflates Kantian external freedom with liberal negative freedom and (b) that its foundationalist assumptions about innate right conflict with Kant's critical method of justification. I go on to offer an alternative interpretation of innate right as conditionally affirming subjects' capacity for legal accountability, the real possibility of which depends on that of acquired right. Far from supplying the basis of acquired right, the possibility of innate right thus depends on that of acquired right. I close with some remarks on the merits of reading Kant's innate right critically and hence, counter-intuitively.

The "postgenomic age," whose start date roughly corresponds to the turn of the millennium, is characterized not only by the rapid development of genomic technologies and commercial products but also by the widespread publication of literary works focused on genomics and its cultural implications. Defining "postgenomic literature" as literature that is both of and about the postgenomic age, this essay explores how works by nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot and novelist Richard Powers exemplify a significant trend within the genre: the thematic exploration of ethical questions in the field of literature itself. While both authors address questions of medical and scientific ethics prompted by genomic research, with special emphasis on the exploitation of vulnerable populations, these questions lead readers directly to questions of narrative responsibility: who can tell whose story to whom-and for whose benefit? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Generosity: An Enhancement, like other examples of postgenomic literature, invite readers to engage in critical reading practices that resist both textual and genetic determinism.

Grammar is a key focus of current UK national curriculum policy, at both primary and secondary school level. But grammar policy across these levels is incongruous: at primary level, policy is largely prescriptive, framing language as a system of constraints and rules, whereas at secondary level, policy is much more geared towards descriptive, functional linguistics. Using data acquired from a survey with 275 secondary English teachers and interviews with 24 secondary English teachers, I critically explore how the incongruity of primary–secondary level grammar policy is impacting upon grammar pedagogy at secondary level. Using a combination of thematic and metaphor analysis, I show how many teachers report secondary students conceptualising grammar as a list of technical terms, with little idea or experience of how to use this knowledge in applications such as critical reading or creative writing. I also show how some secondary teachers were aiming to integrate grammar into their teaching, looking to build and develop on the grammatical knowledge students have from primary level. The data show that teacher and student conceptualisations of grammar are shaped by curriculum policy, and I call for a more coherent and coordinated vision of grammar across primary and secondary level.

Author(s): de los Rios, CV | Abstract: This article examines instances of a U.S.–Mexican transnational youth honing his critical translingual literacy skills through his engagement with corridos, Mexican balladry in Spanish that often emphasizes injustice and border strife. The author relies on ethnographic classroom observations, the student's journals, and semistructured interviews to provide a glimpse into the complexities and sophistication of the bilingual youth's everyday language and literacy practices in an era of vehement anti-immigrant rhetoric. This inquiry asks, (a) What do literacy practices deeply rooted in corridos look like? (b) How does one youth read and engage with the Mexican musical genre of corridos to make sense of his social and political world? and (c) What are the environments and educational settings that supported this literacy development? Findings detail a transnational youth's corridista (balladeer) consciousness and its concomitant language and literacy practices that shape and are shaped by his participation in both his Tijuana communities of origin and his Los Angeles communities. Specifically, this study showcases a student's uses of literary devices, including allegory, to describe myriad forms of oppression and resistance found in corrido lyrics and throughout the lives of U.S.–Mexican transnational youths. Attention to literary genres that are often unsanctioned in traditional English-medium classrooms and recognizing the complex cognitive abilities of bilinguals can harvest critical insight about literacy education in and out of school. Implications from this study highlight meaningful learning contexts for transnational adolescents’ literacies and how engagement of these literacies might be (re)conceptualized through an ethnic studies and Chicanx/Latinx Studies lens.

Close reading requires students to unpack the implicit relationships within and across sentences. The authors discuss three potential barriers to comprehension embedded within text that they have seen with their own students and with the teachers they have worked with: anaphoric relationships, connectives, and appositives. The authors begin each section with a vignette that provides an example of the problem area and a definition of each, with supporting research. The authors then conclude each section with strategies for teaching anaphora, connectives, and appositives.

Close reading of poetry scaffolds readers and writers as they come to understand the form and function of poetry and transfer those skills to writing. In this teaching tip, the authors explain a way in which primary teachers can introduce close reading and move young students toward composing and presenting poetry.

An important aim of undergraduate science education is to develop student skills in reading and evaluating research papers. We have designed, developed, and implemented an on-line interactive resource entitled “Evaluating Scientific Research literature” (ESRL) aimed at students from the first 2 years of the undergraduate program. In this article, we describe the resource, then use student data collected from questionnaire surveys to evaluate the resource within 2 years of its launch. Our results add to those reported previously and indicate that ESRL can enable students to start evaluating research articles when used during their undergraduate program. We conclude maximal learning is likely to occur when the resource can be embedded in the curriculum such that students have a clearly articulated context for the resource's activities, can see their relevance in relation to assessed assignments and can be encouraged to think deeply about the activities in conversation with one another and/or with staff. © 2017 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2017.

The term close reading often conjures up an image of a teacher asking students several scripted questions that encourage them to reread and critically examine a text. The teacher then evaluates the students' responses. In this article, the authors offer another approach to close reading—one that places students' text-dependent questions front and center as they collaboratively discuss the text and construct meaning. The authors analyze transcript excerpts from small-group discussions of narrative and informational texts to demonstrate elementary students' abilities to ask and answer their own text-dependent questions as they engage in close reading.

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers’ comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers’ beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers’ comprehension of multiple texts and the processes used by readers to make sense of texts. Eighty-three students (grades 5–7) participated in this mixed-methods study. The sample consisted of monolingual students and emergent and proficient bilingual students who completed measures of expository comprehension, strategic knowledge and awareness, English-language proficiency, prior content knowledge, and epistemic beliefs. Ten bilingual students from this sample also completed a think-aloud protocol to allow for close examination of their meaning-making processes. In a multiple regression analysis, English-language proficiency was the strongest predictor of comprehension, followed by content knowledge. Strategy knowledge and awareness and epistemic beliefs were not related to multiple-text comprehension in the model. The relationship between English-language proficiency and comprehension was stronger for bilingual students than for monolingual students. Students in the think-aloud sample demonstrated emergent knowledge of processes of disciplinary reading of multiple texts, including metacognitive monitoring, theorizing authorial identity, and intertextual integration, while also displaying a tendency to defer to institutionalized authority when evaluating credibility of the texts. The findings provide directions for future research on the way young adolescents comprehend and learn from expository texts in the discipline of science.

The authors offer a new perspective on close reading that uses a range of multimodal texts to capitalize on the visual nature of contemporary society and to support literacy within the academic disciplines. Specifically, a qualitative study explored teachers' perspectives on the use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a practice borrowed from museum educators that replicates close reading processes, to support literacy learning within subject areas. The analysis revealed teachers' beliefs that VTS supported students' academic vocabulary development and accountable talk. In addition, the teachers felt that VTS created a safe environment for all students to participate, thus providing access to the curriculum. The authors argue that teachers can adapt VTS to help students meet the needs of 21st century communication modes as they analyze and create print and nonprint texts in different forms of media.

This study gathered quantitative and qualitative evidence concerning gender differences in performance by using critical reading material on the SAT® test with sports and science content. The fundamental research questions guiding the study were: If sports and science are to be included in a skills test, what kinds of material are appropriate for fair and valid assessments? Does item type matter with regard to differential item functioning (DIF)? What factors can provide explanations for the different levels of difficulty, discrimination, and DIF exhibited? Do differences in students' interest in and familiarity with the material affect their performance? From data gathered during the two phases of our research, it appears that most sports and science material of the sort used in this study should be permissible in a skills test. Particularly in the context of a long passage, in which most information needed to answer an item is provided, very little material appears to be too “specialized.” From participants' statements during cognitive interviews, it seems that interest in and/or familiarity with a subject has little impact on performance—despite previous research to the contrary. On the basis of our observations, we recommend the following: (a) use more than one type of statistic to evaluate differential item functioning; (b) consider the amount of context provided with an item rather than just the particular content of an item; and (c) when possible, use data rather than assumptions about gender bias to make decisions about test content that may generate differential item functioning.

While much has been written over the last two decades about social policy continuity and change, the literature is often fragmentary and imprecise, with little material exploring it in a systematic and rigorous manner. The objective of this article is to provide a critical reading of the recent literature, discussing concepts and issues such as paradigm shift, path dependence, punctuated equilibrium, ideational analysis and cumulative change (including conversion, layering and policy drift). It examines the degree and type of change, and explanations for change: the ‘how much, what type and why of change’. The article concludes with an overview of the contributions of this special issue of Social Policy & Administration devoted to the issues of policy continuity and change.

Publié dans BioEssays, 2020, 42(10), 2000134; International audience; Reading, writing, publishing, and publicly presenting scientific works are vital for a young researcher's profile building and career development. Generally, the traditional educational curricula do not offer training possibilities to learn and practice how to prepare, write, and present scientific works. These are rather a part of lab meeting activities in research groups. The lack of such training is more critical in some developing countries because this adds to the rare opportunities to discuss and become involved in the exchanges on state of the art scientific literature. Here the authors relate their experience in introducing a weekly 1-day lab meeting in the framework of two previously organized 3-month courses on "Bioinformatics and Genome Analyses". The main activities which are developed during these lab meetings include scientific literature follow up as well as preparing and presenting oral and written scientific reviews. These activities prove to be useful for a student's self-confidence building, for enhancing their active participation during the lectures and practical sessions, as well as for the positive impact on running the whole course program. Incorporation of such lab meeting activities in the course program significantly improves the capacity building of the participants, their analytical and critical reading of scientific literature, as well as communication skills. In this work it is shown how to proceed with the different steps involved in the implementation of lab meeting activities, and to recommend their regular institution in similar courses. Lab meetings are at the heart of scientific life because they provide an exceptional environment for developing skills in team work, networking, exchange on research advances and for enhancing self-confidence and career-building by offering young researchers opportunities to learn how to 1) prepare and present personal research findings ; 2) select and discuss challenging papers ; 3) develop and hone analytical skills; 4) practice communication skills. We adapted this concept by incorporating a weekly 1-day lab meeting in the organization of two 3-month "Bioinformat-ics and Genome Analyses" courses [1] that we organized at the Institut Pasteur Tu-nis, Tunisia. The course was intended for about twenty selected young Ph.D. students and researchers with backgrounds in Biology , Mathematics, Statistics or Computer Science. It was focused on topics related to bioinformatics, comparative genomics, metagenomics, genome variant analyses and programming in a Unix environment. In order to foster the participants' involvement in the lab meeting activities, each participant had to prepare a synthetic review based on some selected bib-liographic resources. This "bibliographic project" constituted a significant component of the course outcome, and had to be formally presented at the end of the course. For that purpose, a large number of quality published papers encompassing most of the course topics were specifically collected and passed to the participants. These documents helped the participants to follow the course program and to select adequate papers for their respective projects. Central activities during lab meetings included work toward preparation of the different projects, follow-up of recent scientific literature, critical reading of papers, review preparation, and presentation, as well as idea-sharing through discussion. Figure 1 shows the steps that we followed in the development of activities. Four main operational objectives constituted the backbone of the procedure implementing these activities 1) Training on reading scientific literature; 2) Preparation of oral presentation and synthetic reviews; 3) Organizing and leading lab meetings; 4) Final review presentation and evaluation. In the following we develop the content of these activities and introduce their implementation in the context of the course program.

This research examines the characteristics of reader understandings that vary from those stated in the text. Eighty-seven fourth graders orally read complex academic literary and scientific texts, followed by probed retellings. Retold ideas not directly supported by, or reflective of, the texts were identified. These differing understandings served as a foundation for the development of a taxonomy that classified them by type: conflation, conceptual knowledge, text/rhetorical structure, lexical knowledge, cause/effect, extension, association and misremembering. Approximately 60% of the differing understandings across the texts were conflations and extensions. However, particular texts did reflect particular types of differing understandings. In general, differing understandings were found to be reflective of the very active nature of the comprehension process. These meanings serve as a challenge to the current emphasis on close reading and the generation of text-based meanings because the natural consequence of such activity are differing understandings.

This article presents qualitative findings from a study that examined the types of criteria that middle school students use to evaluate the quality of online information and sources for a Web-based research assignment. Open-constructed responses from four critical evaluation items were compiled from diverse seventh graders in a representative, two-state, stratified random sample (n = 773). Content analysis revealed that many students used a range of unacceptable or superficial criteria to determine the author of a website and whether that author is an expert, to state the author's point of view, and to provide reasoned evidence about the overall reliability of a website. Criteria and evidence patterns that students used for each of the critical evaluation tasks are shared, as well as implications for instruction.

This article is intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI) and provides initial guidance on becoming and being sustainable. We organize and integrate the diverse body of empirical literature relating to SOI and, in doing so, develop a synthesized conceptual framework onto which SOI practices and processes can be mapped. SOI involves making intentional changes to an organization’s philosophy and values, as well as to its products, processes or practices to serve the specific purpose of creating and realising social and environmental value in addition to economic returns. A critical reading of previous literature relating to environmental management and sustainability reveals how little attention has been paid to SOI and what exists is only partial. In a review of 100 scholarly articles and 27 grey sources drawn from the period of the three Earth Summits (1992, 2002 and 2012), we address four specific deficiencies that have given rise to these limitations: the meaning of SOI, how it has been conceptualised, its treatment as a dichotomous phenomenon and a general failure to reflect more contemporary practices. We adopt a framework synthesis approach involving first constructing an initial architecture of the landscape grounded in previous studies which is subsequently iteratively tested, shaped, refined and reinforced into a model of SOI with data drawn from included studies: so advancing theoretical development in the field of SOI.

Building on the work of John Hattie, Richard Kent, and Tom Newkirk, a think tank collaborative in New York City's high schools works to raise the level of students’ close reading, argumentation, and agency across the curriculum by teaching students to analyze athletic competitions, to compose sports arguments, and to transfer and apply these skills to academic subjects. The study also investigates the kind of feedback and the kind of vision statements that athletic coaches give and considers how to adapt these for academic classes. This study recommends several specific structures for closer collaboration between athletic coaches and academic teachers to increase students’ engagement with higher order analytic skills, to develop shared language for these skills, and to create more opportunities for explicit transfer and higher student achievement.

Integrating English language learners into the academic mainstream is a critically important goal. For students who are learning content in their second or third language as well as negotiating the university's social context, integrating into the mainstream academic environment can be challenging. Instructors at a public university intensive English program (IEP) addressed these problems by developing a common reading project and creating a learning community composed of U.S. native-English-speaking freshman in a critical reading class and intermediate- and advanced-level IEP students in integrated skills courses. Communities of practice, inquiry, and creativity were built through the process of coplanning and coteaching and through methods and activities implemented in the classroom. Through collaboration on a common reading and theme, Night by Elie Wiesel, and genocide, the instructors built a supportive learning environment that was mutually beneficial to both groups. In this article, the instructors discuss the nature of the learning community, present theories related to cross-cultural learning communities, and explain how intercultural communities support the distinctive goals of a liberal arts education. Then they describe the process of developing curriculum for the common reading project and share findings from student questionnaires evaluating the project.

College instructors often teach scientific thinking by asking students to review and analyze a primary research article. The main purpose of this study was to explore how classroom response systems (CRS) could help impact the quality of written analysis papers submitted for this assignment by students taking 100-level biology courses at a medium-sized suburban, two-year college in the northeastern United States. Students in all participating course sections received written instructions on five key elements of critical analysis (CA) to include in scientific study analysis papers. Classroom instruction on recognizing these key elements in primary research papers was provided either via CRS or via an instructor-facilitated classroom discussion enhanced by the same PowerPoint presentation. A rubric, designed specifically for this assignment, was validated prior to its use in this study. Fifty students participated in the study, and those who received the CRS intervention achieved significantly higher CA scores for identifying implications of study findings, while the group that received only written instructions achieved significantly higher CA scores for discussing the credibility of the references used by the authors in planning the critiqued study. The implications of this study are discussed along with ideas for future research.

The Humanities and Public Life. By Peter Brooks (ed.) with Hilary Jewett. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2014. 172 pp. $18.00 paper.The Humanities and Public Life is the ambitious beginning of a much-needed conversation on the practice of ethical reading, and the contributions of this practice to public life and law. The impetus for the book, Peter Brooks explains, was the unfathomable misreading at work in the "Torture Memos" issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in August of 2002. Indeed, one needs only look at the distortive and bad-faith interpretations of the Convention Against Torture and accompanying provisions of the U.S. Legal Code to be reminded of the critical role of reflexive, contextualized, and critical reading to legal practice (Cole 2009).To this end, Brooks has curated a collection of essays that reflect on the humanities' contribution to disciplined and interpretive acts of reading. The structure of the book reflects the organization of the spring 2012 symposium at Princeton from which it emerged. The symposium, like the book, consisted of three sections: "Is there an ethics of reading?," "The ethics of reading and the professions," and "The humanities and human rights." An essay by Judith Butler sets the conversation in motion, as she explores the humanities' contribution to public life, and the issue of why the humanities should be defended against assessments of its value that take its instrumentality or "impact" as key metrics (p. 12).Central to Butler's argument, and to the reflections that follow, is the humanities' role in facilitating ethical reading. For legal scholars like Patricia Williams, this ethics takes the form of sensitivity toward individuals who may be objectified or transformed by readings of them (p. 78). For scholars in the humanities including Butler and Charles Larmore, ethical reading demands "critical judgment" on the part of readers (p. 30) as well as consideration of an author's intentions (p. 52). And contributors in high-level administrative positions including Ralph Hexter and Michael Roth emphasize a practice of reading attentive to the students and faculty for whom they read (pp. 83, 95).The book's thematic division into sections that examine spaces of literary analysis, professionalization, and human rights discourse as sites for ethical reflection offers a useful, organizing framework. But a more rewarding reading takes each section as enactments of ethical reading on the part of its contributors, who thoughtfully engage with each other's writing while making their own practices of reading explicit. Indeed, during these moments, The Humanities and Public Life is at its best.Two examples of ethical reading highlight the relevance of this book for interdisciplinary legal scholars. First, Williams' reflection on three photographs taken in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti shows the ability of captions to not only transform what we see but also transform our ability to see justly. To illustrate this point, she discusses an image of the silhouette of a young woman with outstretched arms and upturned hands. At first glance, Williams' law students interpreted this picture as an act of supplication that elicited a compassionate response. But when Williams attached the caption "Looter" to the photograph, students perceived the woman differently. The subject of the image became a figure of criminality and greed (pp. 75-78). This exercise offers a powerful window into the interpretive possibilities that inhabit textual, visual-and, indeed, living scenes. …

In this article we discuss the differences between close reading in the primary grades and upper elementary grades. We focus on text selection, initial reading. repeated reading, annotation, text-based discussions, and responding to texts.

The following observations and comments on the WCC's new mission statement, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL), result from a critical reading of the document from the perspective of a missiological faculty functioning under the auspices of the Catholic Church, namely that of the Faculty of Missiology of the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome. These observations and comments have as their backdrop the faculty's own chosen orientation in the field of missiological formation and reflection, and are expressive of both the faculty's genuine appreciation of the overall intent behind the above document and its concerns regarding some of its theological and pastoral choices. The Missiological Faculty of the Pontifical Urbaniana University is keenly aware of operating in an area of study and teaching that occupies the very outposts of Christian theological reflection and praxes. Faced with ever-shifting frontiers of various kinds--geographical, cultural, religious, socio-economic, and cognitive--missiology is called upon to a constant stir-reflection and reappraisal of its principles and aims. The academic program currently set up by the faculty takes into due consideration this feature of missiology, and it may be added that the current program is indeed the result of an on-going reflection on and around the nature and meaning of Christian mission done at the faculty level. One of the recent attempts in this direction was a four-day internal seminar hosted by the Faculty in May 2011, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its elevation to a full-fledged faculty from the pre-existing "Scientific Institute of Mission" attached to Urbaniana University. The seminar, which saw the participation of all its professors and students, dwelt on the faculty's own understanding of the theology of mission, mission's ways and contexts, and missionary praxes as reflected in the academic contributions of its professors and the doctoral researches of its alumni, both past and present. (1) My mentioning of the faculty's own efforts towards a renewed understanding of the Christian mission and its attendant pastoral praxes is not only to say how much it understands and appreciates as timely and necessary the WCC's new statement on mission, but also to underscore how much there is in fact in common between our respective perspectives on mission. That the changing landscapes do demand a renewed understanding of mission along with a renewed definition of its agents and its practices is an overall conviction that we share in full with the new mission document of the WCC. Obviously, our common ground with the document is not confined to this bare conviction, but it actually extends to a host of ideas and proposals contained therein, We do appreciate the structure and the content of the document, just as we do its efforts to clearly articulate and address the real problems facing the Christian mission today. We in the missiological faculty consider as particularly noteworthy the introductory and concluding sections ([section] 1-10; [section] 102-111) of TTL. (2) By way of introducing the theme, the document offers a broad but, at the same time, a theologically and biblically grounded definition of mission that in many respects coincides with our own definition of the same. Recognizing fully the interconfessional nature of this document, we still find the understanding of mission in terms of an overflowing of the trinitarian love and the understanding of mission's connection to creation and to fullness of life (requiring our steadfast commitment towards their promotion and defense) as articulated by the document as close to our own perspectives, We share as well the centrality accorded to the Holy Spirit in the mission, and the idea of a holistic salvation that the document seeks to emphasize. Equally acceptable from our point of view is the document's attempt to envision a mission from the vantage point of a "World Christianity" in which notions such as centre and periphery, evangelizer and evangelized have by and large lost their traditional meaning. …

The article argues that ‘renewal’ and ‘crisis’ are inadequate descriptors of the current state of the American and Canadian labour movements. Many of the structural and strategic shifts that have remade labour unions in North America over the past two decades — including new organizing strategies, bargaining outcomes and political strategies — speak rather to a contradictory reconstitution of organized labour along neoliberal lines and the impasse of the renewal project. If there is a crisis in the labour movement, it is a crisis in the nature of trade unions as working-class organizations. The article builds this argument through, in turn, a historical overview, a critical reading of the labour renewal literature and a discussion of current trade union practice.

Literary criticism is increasingly interested in prayer as a cultural and literary mode. This article proposes a theoretical framework for reading prayer as a performance, as an act governed by community conventions with effects in the social world. Drawing upon groundbreaking work by Marcel Mauss and Hans Georg Gadamer, and citing critical reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, The Tempest and Hamlet, I show how prayer can be read as an act defined by real and imagined audiences while retaining individual self expression.

As teachers and leaders move forward in implementing the Common Core State Standards within classrooms across 46 states, it is essential to consider the question of what knowledge is included in the English Language Arts Standards, and what knowledge is not present. The authors of the Common Core delineate an increasingly complex body of knowledge across K-5 to support their vision of developing engaged and critical readers. However, missing in this document are the cognitive and comprehension strategies that expert readers use to construct meaning of text. In this article, we review the extensive body of research supporting explicit comprehension strategy instruction, and then illustrate the limited alignment between this knowledge base and the concepts articulated within the Common Core. Implications for instruction and planning are discussed in conclusion.

The volume of medical literature grows exponentially. Yet we are faced with the necessity to make clinical decisions based on the availability and quality of scientific information. The general strength (reliability, robustness) of any interpretation that guides us in clinical decision making is dependent on how information was obtained. All information and medical studies and, consequently, all conclusions are not created equal. It is incumbent upon us to be able to assess the quality of the information that guides us in the care of our patients. Being able to assess medical literature critically requires use of critical reading and critical thinking skills. To achieve these skills, to be able to analyze medical literature critically, takes a combination of education and practice, practice, and more practice.