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In this report, long-time bilingual educator and language activist Wayne Holm reflects on the legacy of Joshua A. Fishman (1926–2015), one of the preeminent sociolinguists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With more than 1,000 articles and monographs on bilingualism and the maintenance and revitalization of minoritized mother tongues, Fishman left an unparalleled scholarly legacy. This report describes Fishman's contributions to sociolinguistic research and activism, the applications of his work to Native American language education, and the personal qualities and relationships that underlay those contributions: his love of his mother tongue, Yiddish; his teamwork with his wife of more than 60 years, Gella Schweid Fishman; and his travel through Navajoland to support local language revitalization efforts. Augmenting this report are notes and references provided by the Editors to further contextualize Fishman's enduring contributions to the field.

Roughly two-thirds of school-age Navajo children now attend public schools; roughly a quarter still attend federal schools. Since the mid-1950s, the federal government has put large amounts of money into effecting a shift on the Navajo Reservation from smaller one-community federal schools to larger multicommunity public schools on the Navajo Reservation. The federal schools that remain have become multicommunity boarding schools. The public schools tend to draw students from more Anglo-like, more English-speaking, homes, but these Navajo students and particularly Navajo-speaking students average some years behind state averages. This article is about a Navajo community and school that went back to parental involvement and community control, that went back to the native language and to the community and Reservation as a source of content and curriculum, and that went forward to a more appropriate, more effective education for their children.

Roughly 66% of school-age Navajo children now attend public schools; roughly 25% still attend federal schools. Since the mid-1950s, the federal government has put large amounts of money into effecting a shift on the Navajo Reservation from smaller one-community federal schools to larger multicommunity public schools. The federal schools that remain have become multicommunity boarding schools. The public schools tend to draw students from more Anglo-like, more English-speaking homes, but these Navajo students, & particularly Navajo-speaking students, average some years behind state averages. Described here is a Navajo community & school that went back to parental involvement & community control & returned to the native language, the community, & reservation as a source of content & curriculum. A more appropriate, more effective education for the children was realized. HA

This paper is a description of three experimental tests that attempt to measure communicative competence. The Spanish-English Dominance Assessment Test was developed to permit assignment of six- and seven-year-old children to appropriate streams in a New Mexico school with a bilingual education program. The Navajo-English Dominance Interview, also intended to be used with six-year-olds beginning school, was used to validate teacher ratings in a study of Navajo language maintenance. The Oral Placement Test for Adults is an experimental instrument to place non-literate adults in appropriate levels of an ESL program. The three tests display certain common principles in developing useable functional tests. Each is closely tied to the practical situation for which it was prepared and is intended to be used by relatively untrained testers with the simplest possible materials. Results are gross, classifying rather than ranking students, but this is appropriate to the goals.

As part of the study of the feasibility of teaching Navajo children to read in their own language first, a corpus of 11,128 sentences was collected by 22 interviewers in conversation with over 200 Navajo-speaking six year old children. The texts, a total of 53,008 words in length, were transcribed in normalized orthography and keypunched for computer processing. After various attempts at complete automation, affixes were stripped by a combination of computer algorithm and visual inspection, a kind of man-machine cooperation that seems inevitable in language data processing. Prepared by computer were a complete concordance, a word frequency list, a concordance of English loan words in the texts, a study of grapheme and unit frequencies, and a number of spelling lists. The study was of theoretical value in making clear the problems of Navajo word morphology, and has been pragmatically valuable in the development of reading materials in Navajo.

Background Wheat ( Triticum spp.) is an important source of food worldwide and the focus of considerable efforts to identify new combinations of genetic diversity for crop improvement. In particular, wheat starch composition is a major target for changes that could benefit human health. Starches with increased levels of amylose are of interest because of the correlation between higher amylose content and elevated levels of resistant starch, which has been shown to have beneficial effects on health for combating obesity and diabetes. TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) is a means to identify novel genetic variation without the need for direct selection of phenotypes. Results Using TILLING to identify novel genetic variation in each of the A and B genomes in tetraploid durum wheat and the A, B and D genomes in hexaploid bread wheat, we have identified mutations in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in starch branching enzyme IIa genes (SBEIIa). Combining these new alleles of SBEIIa through breeding resulted in the development of high amylose durum and bread wheat varieties containing 47-55% amylose and having elevated resistant starch levels compared to wild-type wheat. High amylose lines also had reduced expression of SBEIIa RNA, changes in starch granule morphology and altered starch granule protein profiles as evaluated by mass spectrometry. Conclusions We report the use of TILLING to develop new traits in crops with complex genomes without the use of transgenic modifications. Combined mutations in SBEIIa in durum and bread wheat varieties resulted in lines with significantly increased amylose and resistant starch contents.

Professional consensus has traditionally discouraged predictive genetic testing when no childhood interventions can reduce future morbidity or mortality. However, advances in genome sequencing and accumulating evidence that children and families cope adequately with predictive genetic information have weakened this consensus. The primary argument remaining against testing appeals to children’s “right to an open future.” It claims that the autonomy of the future adult is violated when others make an irreversible choice to obtain or disclose predictive genetic information during childhood. We evaluate this argument and conclude that children’s interest in an open future should not be understood as a right . Rather an open future is one significant interest to weigh against other important interests when evaluating decisions. Thus, predictive genetic testing is ethically permissible in principle, as long as the interests promoted outweigh potential harms. We conclude by offering an expanded model of children’s interests that might be considered in such circumstances, and present two case analyses to illustrate how this framework better guides decisions about predictive genetic testing in pediatrics.