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PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to investigate, the neuroprotective effects of a new Gramine derivative named: ITH12657, in a model of retinal excitotoxicity induced by intravitreal injection of NMDA. METHODS: Adult Sprague Dawley rats received an intravitreal injection of 100 mM NMDA in their left eye and were treated daily with subcutaneous injections of ITH12657 or vehicle. The best dose-response, therapeutic window study, and optimal treatment duration of ITH12657 were studied. Based on the best survival of Brn3a + RGCs obtained from the above-mentioned studies, the protective effects of ITH12657 were studied in vivo (retinal thickness and full-field Electroretinography), and ex vivo by quantifying the surviving population of Brn3a + RGCs, αRGCs and their subtypes α-ONsRGCs, α-ONtRGCs, and α-OFFRGCs. RESULTS: Administration of 10 mg/kg ITH12657, starting 12 h before NMDA injection and dispensed for 3 days, resulted in the best significant protection of Brn3a + RGCs against NMDA-induced excitotoxicity. In vivo, ITH12657-treated rats showed significant preservation of retinal thickness and functional protection against NMDA-induced retinal excitotoxicity. Ex vivo results showed that ITH12657 afforded a significant protection against NMDA-induced excitotoxicity for the populations of Brn3a + RGC, αRGC, and αONs-RGC, but not for the population of αOFF-RGC, while the population of α-ONtRGC was fully resistant to NMDA-induced excitotoxicity. CONCLUSION: Subcutaneous administration of ITH12657 at 10 mg/kg, initiated 12 h before NMDA-induced retinal injury and continued for 3 days, resulted in the best protection of Brn3a + RGCs, αRGC, and αONs-RGC against excitotoxicity-induced RGC death. The population of αOFF-RGCs was extremely sensitive while α-ONtRGCs were fully resistant to NMDA-induced excitotoxicity. more...

Despite growing Indigenous Latine/x immigrant populations, Indigenous Latine/x parents' and families' diverse forms of involvement across schools and communities continue to be absent from greater discourses in education. This article explores an Indigenous Quechua and Mexican family's perspectives on multilingualism, culture, learning, and community engagement through danza azteca, a traditional Mesoamerican dance practice. This study asks, according to the focal family, what are some of the motivations for and lessons learned through their participation in danza azteca? Drawing on ethnographic research in California, the findings highlight how danza azteca was a way for the family to participate spiritually and civically in their communities across modes and languages, teach and learn about racial in/justice, and foster greater spaces for humanity. The article ends with a discussion and implications for research. more...

Projects have become an essential instrument for the success of universities. In a context of globalization and increasing complexity, they must sharpen their resourcefulness to face these challenges and adapt to this changing environment. To reach these objectives, they undertake a series of activities of a unique, concrete and temporary nature, not always technical but managerial ones. If universities work with people on projects in the production, transmission and dissemination of knowledge, then they link with society to solve its problems. For this reason, teaching and research staff (TRS) should promote a range of professional project management (PM) competences in different areas for the proper management of the projects in which they take part. Through a Delphi technique, a panel of twenty-four accredited teaching experts who are carrying out significant research and holding directive roles, measured the importance of acquiring and/or improving professional PM competences by their TRS. Consensus and stability reached after two rounds of consultation confirmed there are a series of crucial competences for the practice of relevant teaching and pioneer research. Results obtained are the basis for a gap plan that allows the TRS to participate in and/or lead university projects with greater self-confidence and personal motivation. more...

In an era of rapid climate change and expansion of desertification, the extremely harsh conditions of drylands are a true challenge for microbial life. Under drought conditions, where most life forms cannot survive, rocks represent the main refuge for life. Indeed, the endolithic habitat provides thermal buffering, physical stability, and protection against incident ultraviolet (UV) radiation and solar radiation and, to some extent, ensures water retention to microorganisms. The study of these highly specialized extreme-tolerant and extremophiles may provide tools for understanding microbial interactions and processes that allow them to keep their metabolic machinery active under conditions of dryness and oligotrophy that are typically incompatible with active life, up to the dry limits for life. Despite lithobiontic communities being studied all over the world, a comprehensive understanding of their ecology, evolution, and adaptation is still nascent. Herein, we survey the fungal component of these microbial ecosystems. We first provide an overview of the main defined groups (i.e., lichen-forming fungi, black fungi, and yeasts) of the most known and studied Antarctic endolithic communities that are almost the only life forms ensuring ecosystem functionality in the ice-free areas of the continent. For each group, we discuss their main traits and their diversity. Then, we focus on the fungal taxonomy and ecology of other worldwide endolithic communities. Finally, we highlight the utmost importance of a global rock survey in order to have a comprehensive view of the diversity, distribution, and functionality of these fungi in drylands, to obtain tools in desert area management, and as early alarm systems to climate change. more...

The study examines the impact, added value and relevance of accreditation as a way of assuring quality at an institution of higher learning in the field of architecture. The qualitative impact of accreditation was examined through a survey presented to students, teachers and employers. A quantitative assessment was carried out by reviewing academic indicators, such as pass rate or weighted average per year, before and after the accreditation processes. The study examined a private institution of higher education in Peru; however, the methodology and results may be relevant to future studies of schools in developing countries with similar characteristics. more...

U.S. Latinx youth from immigrant backgrounds bring to schools their transnational literacies, complex lived experiences of marginalization and resistance, and politicized translanguaging practices that are seldom recognized in classrooms. This article examines U.S. Latinx bilingual youth who participated in a podcast project within a Chicanx/Latinx Studies high school course that mobilized their bilingualism for literacy instruction. This ethnographic classroom study explores a curricular unit that allowed young people to use new media technologies to tell important stories of themselves and their social worlds at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States. Through translanguaging and translingual frames, I demonstrate how Latinx young people contest racist narratives, reclaim who they are, and author new spaces for solidarity. Findings detail the ways that students utilized podcasts as a tool to promote creativity and self-expression, and to connect personal experiences to broader pressing discourses about immigration, language, racialization processes, and resistance. more...

Music remains a fundamental aspect of sociocultural traditions and environments. In this article, I explore a sierreño band of translingual youth artists and their appropriation of norteño music in their designing of new forms of expression. Employing the concept of communities of practice, I examine three youth musicians' experiences as members of a grupo sierreño (sierreño band) to highlight the nature of learning, sharing, and collaborative cultural action taking place in the membership of this collective. I use translingual literacy and translanguaging as sociocultural frames for understanding how the focal bilingual youth leverage their full semiotic and linguistic repertoires for productive musical and cultural practice and literacy. Drawing from ethnographic methods, the findings highlight the translingual ingenuity and power of the focal youth musicians as active agents in the construction of their musical and linguistic lives and their families' financial stability through the formation of their own creative translingual economy. Attending to these cultural activities can shed light on how transnational and translingual young people negotiate and make decisions, sophisticatedly employ literacies to communicate and solve problems, and come to make sense of their social worlds. Thoughtfully considering the musicality of young people can help educators better understand them as agentic constructors of their own creative capacities, skills, knowledge, and cultural lifeworlds. more...

Changing demography in the Southwest USA has shifted the racial compositions of many neighborhoods that were once predominantly African American to majority Latinx immigrant communities (Orfield and Frankenberg 2014). Today, it's common for these two youth communities to learn side-by-side in urban and suburban classrooms where they are often positioned to share each other's cultural practices (Martinez 2017). However, language and literacy research often positions these two minoritized communities as mutually exclusive (Paris 2010). Moreover, while researchers have urged the analysis of these two youth communities comparatively few studies document classroom units that cultivate spaces for 'linguistic solidarity' (Martinez 2017). Drawing from an ethnographic study of an 11th-grade ethnic studies class, the authors explore how Arturo (third author) took up a critical translingual approach in his classroom where students--both Latinx and African American--collaborated through the cowriting of corridos (Mexican ballads) about their lived experiences with in/justice. The findings demonstrate the ways that this unit invited students to write across racial, ethnic, and linguistic borders and fostered language and cultural sharing, political consciousness, and solidarity. more...

For many Mexican-origin bi/multilingual children, Mexican music education begins early in their home. Music is inextricably linked with the sociocultural context in which it is produced, consumed, and taught and the interrelationship between music, society, and culture. Using ethnographic methods, this article examines a small group of bilingual and emergent bilingual Mexican-origin students who regularly congregated in their English teacher's classroom at lunchtime to recite and perform romance ballads, or what we refer to as baladas románticas, on a weekly basis. We use participant observation, plática-inspired interviews, focus groups, and video recordings to present ethnographic knowledge about how, for these young people, music was a way of being and a deliberate act to build community. Our findings describe the ways the bilingual students found themselves at the margins of their K-12 schooling experiences and, in turn, agentically fostered their own space for translingual expression and solace. This manifested in two primary ways: (1) how they collectively fostered their own form of convivencia (humanizing coexistence) anchored in their ancestral and cultural knowledge through their music-making; and (2) how their music-making allowed them to release translingual and transmodal play and creativity that might have otherwise been suppressed at school. We end with a call for literacy researchers and educators to continue to recognize and honor students' lived translingual experiences, identities, and musical gifts as resources for learning. more...

This article briefly reviews the colonial roots of English education in the United States and outlines current practices that perpetuate harm in the lives of students of color in K-12 schools. Through an examination of theoretical scholarship and empirical research related to repairing the harm invoked by colonizing English education practices, the authors collectively build on Winn’s (2013) call for researchers to imagine and engage in practices of restorative teacher education within specific area groups. Drawing on their collective research experiences, the authors highlight practices that support the reparative, restorative, and humanizing literacy pedagogies necessary for 21st century schools, with the aim of deepening knowledge and practices that advance “restorative English education”. more...

Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Ethnic Studies, activist new media, and critical digital literacies, this article explores the nature of a ninth-grade curricular unit about how one’s daily environment impacts one’s health and well-being. Using a combination of ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods, the authors highlight an Ethnic Studies teacher’s innovative and community-based pedagogy that honed students’ critical digital literacies and civic action practices through their engagement with the digital media app “See, Click, Fix.” Findings detail students’ perspectives about how the unit both helped them resist deficit-oriented ideologies and served as a conduit for critical civic literacies. The authors contend that the fostering of critical digital literacies remain extremely imperative to the future and expansion of Ethnic Studies courses. more...

In this research article, Cati V. de los Ríos examines US-Mexican transnational youths' engagement with the Mexican musical genre corridos, border folk ballads, and its subgenre, narcocorridos, folk ballads that illuminate elements of the drug trade and often glamorize drug cartels. She draws from ethnographic methods to present empirical knowledge of four young musicians' critical readings of these genres and their place-making and community-binding practices across their public high school. She demonstrates how these transnational youth draw from their communicative practices to construct meaningful communities on their school campus and details how their evocative musical school performances serve as a cultural resistance to contemporary anti-migrant sentiments. Rather than positioning youth consumption of narcocorridos as simply a “deviant” activity, the findings argue that youth engage critically, intellectually, and aesthetically with narcocorridos as a popular culture practice and that some songs carry important transnational critiques and lessons on capitalism, state-sanctioned violence, and globalization. more...

As mothers and education professors, we weave these two identities to reflect on the anti-racist K--12 schooling we envision and work toward for all children, including our own multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial children. We begin this article with a brief introduction to who we are as mothers, then shift to problematizing dominant school curricula and centering multiraciality and multilingualism as important elements in the lives of children. Lastly, we uplift culturally and linguistically relevant approaches to teaching and curriculum that can more fully honor and recognize students' bi/multilingualism and multiracial identities. more...

This article explores how a local community came to value a Latinx bookstore as a supplementary knowledge space for Latinx history, literature, and culture. Findings detail how the bookstore served as a catalyst for a heterogeneous group of Latinx families and educators to: (1) access empowering reflections of Latinx histories that were not found in traditional K-12 school curricula; and (2) build alternative libraries in homes and classrooms that centered Latinx communities' sociopolitical worlds. more...

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students' writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent's participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student's writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students' histories are inextricably linked. more...

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. more...

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) represents a challenge to university teachers to adapt their assessment systems, directing them towards continuous assessment. The integration of competence-based learning as an educational benchmark has also led to a perspective more focused on student and with complex learning situations closer to reality. However, its assessment entails an increase in lecturers' workload and a continuous demand for students due to the diversity of assessment tests required to assess each aspect of competences. After a period in which those changes have been introduced, the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) considered to analyse the assessment systems and the ways to improve them, at both bachelor's and master's degree programmes. The methodology used is based on the model "Working with People", which for the first time at the UPM, creates a participatory process with students and lecturers aimed at knowing their opinion and their feelings about the assessment process and the potential for improvement. Eight WWW-workshops were developed, with 32 students and 39 university teachers in total. The results indicate that the perception of students and lecturers regarding the assessment systems have many common points, as well as the need to undertake an improvement strategy for integrating actions from all three model dimensions, seeking a balance in joint work among lecturers, university administrators and students. This work has been performed within the framework of educational innovations cross-cutting project named "Analysis of the UPM Degree Programmes Evaluation Procedures and Proposal for Improvements" (EVALÚA), supported by the Educational Innovation Department. more...

While current research focuses on the marginalization and educational crises of students classified as English language learners - whom we identify as emergent bilinguals (García & Kleifgen, 2010) - this article highlights some of the contexts for learning that help these students thrive academically, culturally, and socially in two urban English classrooms. We explore the concept of translanguaging (García, 2009a; García & Li Wei, 2014) through the writing of two students who took up this practice as a challenge to coloniality in English classrooms. We also outline how two secondary teachers in New York City and Los Angeles adopted a translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). Through our analysis of two focal emergent bilingual students, we demonstrate how a translanguaging pedagogy - one that puts students' language practices at the center and makes space for students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural resources at all times - is a necessary step forward in twenty-first-century English instruction. Our findings illustrate that the teachers' translanguaging pedagogies disrupted the inherently monolingual and colonial tendencies of English classrooms through curricula that promoted metalinguistic awareness and reflection about their own linguistic and cultural identities, and integrated students' diverse language practices to push back against colonialist ideologies. Our study adds to the nascent body of literature that translates theories of translanguaging into practical pedagogical approaches in secondary English classrooms. more...

This study uses photovoice to examine the ways in which Chicanx youths hone their critical and multimodal literacy skills in a secondary ethnic studies course. While the institutionalization of secondary ethnic studies courses swiftly expands in school districts across the United States, more research is necessary to understand the nature of these courses. This inquiry examines student photovoice compositions, participant observations, and in-depth semistructured interviews to ascertain some of the affordances of an ethnic studies course from the perspectives of participating students. The following question guides this paper: How do students articulate the importance of ethnic studies in their lives? Students’ creations of photovoice compositions allowed them to communicate ideas around ethnic studies in authentic ways that valued their cultural practices and resources. Findings highlight student literacies of social action across three domains: individual, community, and structural. more...

This article explores how a secondary ethnic studies course leveraged immigrant families' literacies rooted in the Mexican spiritual ritual of Las Posadas for in-school literacy instruction and to engage in community-responsive grassroots processions as social protest. Using ethnographic and participatory design research, the authors--one a university researcher and the other an ethnic studies teacher--examine the literacy practices of a long-standing immigrant community--classroom partnership that unites day laborers, families, students, and teachers in the name of justice and refuge. Using photographs, interviews, students' literacy artifacts, focus groups, and field notes, this study asks, (a) What do literacies look like in an ethnic studies course that designed learning around local community knowledge and sanctuary? (b) How do students respond to such curricular design? This study contributes ethnographic knowledge on school-based participatory research projects that build on the intergenerational literacies, sociopolitical awareness, and social movements of Latinx immigrant families. more...

Copyright of Bitácora Urbano/Territorial is the property of Bitacora Urbano/Territorial and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) more...

Copyright of Bitácora Urbano/Territorial is the property of Bitacora Urbano/Territorial and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) more...