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Objectives: To assess knowledge, pregnancy attitudes and contraceptive practices in relation to the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil. Methods: We interviewed 526 women 18 to 49 years old in primary health services in a Northeastern capital of Brazil, in 2016. They provided information about their knowledge of Zika transmission and health consequences, their receipt of counseling related to sexual and perinatal transmission of Zika, their pregnancy intentions and reassessment of contraceptive options in the context of the Zika virus outbreak. Results: Awareness about Zika congenital syndrome was high, but knowledge about sexual transmission was low. Few women had changed pregnancy intentions or contraceptive practices in response to Zika. Pregnant women were more likely to access counseling about family planning, condom use and pregnancy postponement due to Zika virus than non-pregnant women, which may suggest that health system responses followed pregnancy occurrence. Conclusions: We observed missed opportunities for prevention of perinatal transmission of Zika virus through behavioral change, including effective contraception to prevent pregnancy and condoms to prevent perinatal transmission, as a complement to vector control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a case study of four adolescents' reading practices on computer screens, illustrating their rich literacy engagements with online texts and their relation to students' lives. The article discusses educators' pedagogical challenges in teaching reading in a highly technological context. Using an ethnographic approach, the study illustrates how adolescents' comprehension of digital texts emerges through the interactivity and composition of moving image and text characteristic of websites. A close examination of these adolescents' reading practices shows how digital texts challenge present day educators to re-examine their perceptions of literacy, particularly with regard to the ways reading instruction is implemented in classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anne Burke and Shelley Stagg Peterson argue that "picture books offer a medium for teaching visual and critical literacy across the curriculum." To support this idea, they describe a multidisciplinary unit on World War II that pushes high school students to utilize visual and print literacies to analyze, comprehend, and relate to public events and private struggles from history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]