Search

Franco Passalacqua, who developed, analyzed, and implemented his project on “Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design” with school teachers in Italy. He believes that the challenge of teaching, at any level of education, is not only knowing how to foster the students’ desire to learn, but also to allow all students, regardless of their initial cultural, social, and economic circumstances, to construct knowledge that will enable them to become active citizens and to fully exercise their abilities and rights in public life. His chapter explores a narrative writing project implemented by teachers, to generate stories as a didactic pre-condition that can foster the construction of an initial level of socially just knowledge. In the course of this project, the participating teachers constructed fictional narratives to read to their students in class and use them to mediate the construction of interdisciplinary concepts and to cultivate a critical stance towards the objects of knowledge. To reach this goal, teachers who constructed narratives for imagination had to engage both with the students’ background knowledge, experience, misconceptions, and with their own personal perspective on the world, including personal values that were concealed behind and within the points of view they choose to adopt. But what made this didactic design through narrative writing particularly supportive of inclusive learning was the emphasis on a “handcrafted” process of investigating the students’ experiential world, which helped the teachers thematize their own relationship with knowledge and, consequently, enabled the teachers to design learning experiences that are coherent with active citizenship and democratic values.

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a syndrome caused by various etiologies. The clinical manifestations of DM are not indicative of the cause of the disease, but might be indicative of the stage and severity of the disease process. Accurately diagnosing and classifying diabetic dogs and cats by the underlying disease process is essential for current and future studies on early detection, prevention, and treatment of underlying disease. Here, we review the current etiology-based classification of DM and definitions of DM types in human medicine and discuss key points on the pathogenesis of each DM type and prediabetes. We then review current evidence for application of this etiology-based classification scheme in dogs and cats. In dogs, we emphasize the lack of consistent evidence for autoimmune DM (Type 1) and the possible importance of other DM types such as DM associated with exocrine pancreatic disease. While most dogs are first examined because of DM in an insulin-dependent state, early and accurate diagnosis of the underlying disease process could change the long-term outcome and allow some degree of insulin independence. In cats, we review the appropriateness of using the umbrella term of Type 2 DM and differentiating it from DM secondary to other endocrine disease like hypersomatotropism. This differentiation could have crucial implications on treatment and prognosis. We also discuss the challenges in defining and diagnosing prediabetes in cats.

Phenotypic screening is making a comeback in drug discovery as the maturation of chemical proteomics methods has facilitated target identification for bioactive small molecules. A limitation of these approaches is that time-consuming genetic methods or other means are often required to determine the biologically relevant target (or targets) from among multiple protein-compound interactions that are typically detected. Here, we have combined phenotypic screening of a directed small-molecule library with competitive activity-based protein profiling to map and functionally characterize the targets of screening hits. Using this approach, we identify carboxylesterase 3 (Ces3, also known as Ces1d) as a primary molecular target of bioactive compounds that promote lipid storage in adipocytes. We further show that Ces3 activity is markedly elevated during adipocyte differentiation. Treatment of two mouse models of obesity-diabetes with a Ces3 inhibitor ameliorates multiple features of metabolic syndrome, illustrating the power of the described strategy to accelerate the identification and pharmacologic validation of new therapeutic targets.