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How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain

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poverty brain stress neuroscience psychology cognition sociology learning

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society.
But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.
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- The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children.
- Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail.
- they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.
- Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.
- To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load.
- a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity.
- For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class.
- The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.
- the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.
- To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.
- That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

Bringing up baby bilingually | Twice blessed | The Economist

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bilingualism language children learning psychology brain cognition

WHETHER to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones.
A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the nub of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain
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- Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.
- The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”.
- So Dr Kovacs and Dr Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.
- The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention—counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.
- Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development.
- though, there are a few caveats. For one thing, these precocious cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals—those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits accrue to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.

24 Feb 09

Using Computers to Learn and Preserve Indigenous Languages

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indigenous language revitalization culture ojibwe software learning education

Grassroots Educational Multimedia (GEM)

10 Feb 09

Electronic High School - USOE

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online instruction learning education

Moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning

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education opensource moodle elearning software learning

09 Feb 09

Research publications by Alelo Inc., producers of virtual world simulations of real-life communication

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alelo language revitalization learning education resources publications research games

04 Feb 09

Integrating Technology Into Minority Language Preservation and Teaching Efforts: An Inside Job

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language education learning technology anthropology linguistics navajo revilization preservation culture indigenous

Technology and Indigenous Language Revitalization

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language learning education revitalization technology anthropology culture indigenous

The most ambitious effort in this regard is the creation of the Leokï
(Powerful
Voice) Bulletin Board System, believed to be one of the first BBS's in
the world entirely in an indigenous language
Leokï was created in 1995 by the Hale Kuamo�o Hawaiian
language curriculum office at the University of Hawai�i at Hilo. Its purpose
is to provide online support for Hawaiian language use in the immersion
schools and the broader community. Among the other features of Leokï
(which will be discussed below) is a section called Noi�i Nowelo
(Search for Knowledge), where traditional Hawaiian stories and songs are
published, as well as 19th century newspaper articles.
23 more annotations...
- Presently, Hawaiian immersion
  schools often adapt English-language textbooks via an elaborate translate-and-paste
  operation: the Hawaiian-language translations are photocopied and then
  pasted page-by-page over the English language of each individual textbook.
- Since newly-developed
  terms are not found in published dictionaries, a searchable bilingual dictionary
  of new vocabulary has been made available on the Hale Kuamo�o web site
  and is being developed for Leokï as well.
- According to Joshua Fishman (1991), the key to success in language revitalization
  is to achieve 'the intergenerational and demographically concentrated home-family-neighborhood:
  the basis of mother tongue transmission'
- the communication features?an
  e-mail system and a synchronous chat line?of Leokï are its most popular
  features, and are in fact the central reason the BBS was created.
- the children
  are working in long-distance collaboration
- Native Hawaiians, who for the most part face difficult social and economic
  conditions (Takenaka, 1995), have strong pragmatic pressures to devote
  their energies toward achieving their goals in English, rather than in
  Hawaiian. In this situation, Hawaiian educators have viewed developing
  a Hawaiian presence online as essential toward the effort to bring Hawaiian
  forward.
- It's like a double advantage for us, we're learning how to
  use new tools, like new technology and new tools, at the same time we're
  doing it in Hawaiian language, and so we get to learn two things at once.
  We learn new technology, and implementing it with Hawaiian language, which
  I think is really, really good. It looks almost as if it's a thing of the
  future for Hawaiian, because if you think about it, maybe there's [only]
  a few Hawaiian language papers. But instead of maybe having a Hawaiian
  language newspaper, you have something that might be just a little bit
  better, like the World Wide Web.
- the substantive (also called
  determinist, see Ebersole, 1995) view, argues that 'technology constitutes
  a new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world
  as an object of control'
- the instrumental (or neutralist, see
  Ebersole, 1995) view, considers technology to be devoid of any particular
  content or values and thus 'indifferent to the variety of ends it can be
  employed to achieve'
- In this view, it is not technology
  per se which creates problems or solutions, but rather how technologies
  are put to use.
- the critical theory of technology.
  Feenberg views technology as neither completely deterministic nor as completely
  neutral, but rather 'ambivalent' (p. 14). The ambivalence of technology
  is distinguished from neutrality 'by the role it attributes to value in
  the design, not merely the use, of technical systems' (p.
  14, emphasis added). Yet the values inherent in particular technologies
  do not mean that their impact is pre-determined; technology is 'not a destiny
  but a scene of struggle'
- 'machines require a social organization
  to become technologies'
- What must be evaluated then,
  for its neutrality or non-neutrality, is not merely the bytes and bits
  of the Internet but rather its social organization.
- As Castells (1996) points out, the Internet is both the most democratic
  and the least democratic of all mass media
- Hawaiian diacritical marks
  are not handled by ASCII
- Roy Bowers (1988), in his book on the cultural non-neutrality
  of educational computing, warned that non-Western cultures are threatened
  not by lack of access to computers, but rather by access, since the new
  forms of knowledge they encounter may often lead to unanticipated consequences
- the writings of Bowers and other media critics (e.g., Postman,
  1993) make it clear that they believe the entire computer culture, which
  the Internet has only accelerated, represents a threat to traditional ways
  of life.
- the community has
  seized on aspects of the Internet which they believe are most compatible
  with their own traditional patterns of communication and knowledge. These
  involve (a) the importance of social networks, and (b) interactive, multimedia
  learning.
- Hawaiian educators
  have emphasized the social and collaborative aspects of the Internet
- all the Internet projects that I
  observed in Hawaiian language classes placed a strong emphasis on integration
  of different media
- Working in an online environment provided students an excellent
  opportunity to explore and invest in their cultural identity by discussing
  issues of Hawaiian culture with other students near and far, and by publishing
  their own work related to Hawaiian life online for others to share. A number
  of students who went through this process came out with a stronger sense
  of being Hawaiian and a deeper commitment to the language and culture
- There is growing recognition that identity is a central issue not only
  in language revitalization but in the broader learning and use of second
  languages (e.g., Peirce, 1993, 1995). Educators would do well to consider
  the potential role of the Internet in facilitating students' investment
  in social identities that involve expanded use of and expertise in second
  languages.
- In my view, the work of Hawaiians
  represents an excellent model of a group of people working to positively
  amplify existing cultural practices in an online environment. I believe
  their achievements include some important lessons that may be beneficial
  for language educators working with a variety of culturally and linguistically
  diverse learners.

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