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According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. This increasing change is reflected in every aspect of people's lives, including the classroom. Now more than ever it is necessary for art educators to address the needs of the steadily increasing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. One way to do this is to cultivate in all students "a transformative perspective" through what proponents of multicultural education call Culturally Responsive Teaching. This article discusses how art educators can help students appreciate and affirm identities in a sociocultural context. The author contends that 21st-century art educators can successfully engage diverse learners through the praxis of culturally responsive teaching by developing a curriculum centered on culture and context, and by exposing students to the inter-textual artwork of artists like Charly Palmer. Examining Palmer's "What is Your Tar Baby?" exhibition within a particular cultural context, along with culturally responsive teaching strategies, creates an opportunity for the development of transformative knowledge and the emergence of culturally diverse art in classrooms. Villegas and Lucas (2002) identify six salient characteristics that prepare teachers to be successful in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. The author addresses two that can be readily employed through the exploration of Palmer's series: sociocultural consciousness, and the use of context to foster an affirming attitude toward students from culturally diverse backgrounds. (Contains 6 figures and 2 endnotes.)

In this article, I explore undergraduate Black women's collective and individual responses to the media's depiction of Black women. Through participatory action research (PAR), participants created digital counter-narratives, which I refer to as MeTelling Narratives, focused on a particular stereotype in visual culture that is commonly ascribed to the Black female body. I used a mixed methods approach (i.e., rhetorical criticism, content analysis, and narrative inquiry) to study participants' shared knowledge, beliefs, and identification with disempowering visual narratives of race and gender. In this PAR, the researchers create digital MeTelling Narratives that present complex relationship between cultural points of view and personal experiences [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The signature lesion of SSA/Ro autoantibody-associated congenital heart block (CHB) is fibrosis and a macrophage infiltrate, supporting an experimental focus on cues influencing the fibroblast component. The transcriptomes of human fetal cardiac fibroblasts were analyzed using two complementary approaches. Cardiac injury conditions were simulated in vitro by incubating human fetal cardiac fibroblasts with supernatants from macrophages transfected with the SSA/Ro-associated noncoding Y ssRNA. The top 10 upregulated transcripts in the stimulated fibroblasts reflected a type I interferon (IFN) response [e.g., IFN-induced protein 44-like (IFI44L), of MX dynamin-like GTPase (MX)1, MX2, and radical S -adenosyl methionine domain containing 2 (Rsad2)]. Within the fibrotic pathway, transcript levels of endothelin-1 (EDN1), phosphodiesterase (PDE)4D, chemokine (C-X-C motif) ligand (CXCL)2, and CXCL3 were upregulated, while others, including adenomedullin, RAP guanine nucleotide exchange factor 3 (RAPGEF3), tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMP)1, TIMP3, and dual specificity phosphatase 1, were downregulated. Agnostic Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery analysis revealed a significant increase in inflammatory genes, including complement C3A receptor 1 (C3AR1), F2R-like thrombin/trypsin receptor 3, and neutrophil cytosolic factor 2. In addition, stimulated fibroblasts expressed high levels of phospho-MADS box transcription enhancer factor 2 [a substrate of MAPK5 (ERK5)], which was inhibited by BIX-02189, a specific inhibitor of ERK5. Translation to human disease leveraged an unprecedented opportunity to interrogate the transcriptome of fibroblasts freshly isolated and cell sorted without stimulation from a fetal heart with CHB and a matched healthy heart. Consistent with the in vitro data, five IFN response genes were among the top 10 most highly expressed transcripts in CHB fibroblasts. In addition, the expression of matrix-related genes reflected fibrosis. These data support the novel finding that cardiac injury in CHB may occur secondary to abnormal remodeling due in part to upregulation of type 1 IFN response genes. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Congenital heart block is a rare disease of the fetal heart associated with maternal anti-Ro autoantibodies which can result in death and for survivors, lifelong pacing. This study provides in vivo and in vitro transcriptome-support that injury may be mediated by an effect of Type I Interferon on fetal fibroblasts., (Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.)