Posts from — September 2009

The first of four panel discussions, “Community Based Organizing in the Movimiento, Then and Now,” will be held from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Roosevelt Community Center near downtown San Jose. Admission is free.

Event #1: Wed. September 16, 2009: Community Based Organizing en el Movimiento, moderated by Maribel Martinez, SJSU Cesar Chavez Community Action Center, Program Director

Since 1969, community-based organizing has played a profound role in empowering San José’s diverse Latino community. Rallying around issues of quality education, police brutality, immigrant and labor rights, groups have employed militancy, culture and history as key organizing tools. Newer generations have also worked to strengthen the voices of mujeres and the LGBT community. Listen and share on the impact of the movimiento through the people that shaped it and continue its legacy. [Read more →]

The SJSU Women’s Resource Center will be showing, Dream Girls, a film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, 6:00-8:00PM on Wednesday, 09/09/09. Please join us!

As with many of you, out there in the blogosphere, I am really feeling the start of the new academic year. This time around, however, I am overcome with sadness and frustration as over the last 10 days I have have to turn away at least 100 students from my classes.  My heart is breaking for those who are struggling to obtain something to which they are entitled, an education.

One thing that I don’t really hear being talked about a lot in relation to all this budget crisis hoopla is the California Master Plan for Higher Education. For all those out there who don’t really know about the Master plan, I think its really important because it is something that has historically really defined California and made California such a great place to live. Here’s the thing, the Master Plan (created in 1960) was based on the principle of universal access and choice for education and was a product of a belief in education opportunity for Californians. It was a commitment to the idea of tuition-free education to residents of the state.

What we are currently seeing in the state of our State and our daily experiences in dealing with caps on enrollment, furloughs, students struggling to get classes and so on isn’t just about short term cost saving measures. It seems to me, it is also about dimantling an ideology that says everyone has a right to an education and it is the responsibility of the state to uphold access to that right.  And quite frankly, that is what really pisses me off about this whole thing.

Anyway, here is a really great site about the Master Plan. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/aboutuc/masterplan.html.  Maybe I should send this link to the CSU chancellor, board, and the governor. It seems like they may be suffering from selective memory.

A fascinating new study by Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler offers further  evidence that bilingualism enhances cognitive control in children. Despite popular myths about the need to teach “one language first”, a growing literature shows that bilingualism actually improves a child’s long-term language development.

The study authors tested the ability of 7-month-old pre-lingual babies to modify “a previously learned response and found that those raised in a bilingual home were able to do this, whereas babies from a monolingual home were not.

Dozens of babies learned that when they heard certain nonsense words, a puppet would always appear on the same side of a screen. All the babies – whether from monolingual or bilingual homes – soon learned to anticipate the appearance of the puppet, and shifted their eyes promptly to the appropriate side of the screen.

During the second phase of the experiment, the location of the puppet moved to the other side of the screen. Crucially, the babies from bilingual homes managed to learn to anticipate the new location, but the babies with monolingual parents did not – they were stuck on the previously learned response. The bilingual babies, by contrast, appeared to have the cognitive control needed to inhibit the previous response.

This difference between the two groups of babies persisted even when the task was made easier by using different nonsense words for when the puppet changed location, and it also persisted when visual stimuli, rather than spoken words, were used to cue puppet appearance.

The researchers said their findings suggested there’s an early mental benefit of being raised in a bilingual environment – one that’s apparent even before a baby can utter any words of their own. “Just processing two languages and having to deal with the representations of each of them is sufficient for enhancing cognitive control,” the researchers said.

Full story at BPS Research Digest

Original research article here