Challenges to Climate Planning in Rural Inland Florida and Recommendations for Future Actions

Despite being farther away from direct impacts of sea-level rise, Florida’s rural inland localities, like those across the nation and world, can be as vulnerable to a changing climate as coastal ones. However, unlike their urban coastal peers, many have not addressed or acknowledged climate change. Few existing research projects have explored the reasons why. To begin filling the knowledge gap and understanding the complexities of the rural Florida climate story, this research aims to answer the question: What challenges are preventing rural inland communities in Florida from addressing climate change, and what do they need to overcome them? To characterize these obstacles and identify next steps, a combination of primary (i.e. surveys) and secondary sources from the author, government agencies, scientists, universities, and other expert organizations were analyzed holistically. The four challenges identified include: community sentiment, investment capacity, gaps in climate literacy, and external connections and coordination. These challenges are linked to numerous underlying issues characteristic of rural communities, such as socioeconomic levels, physical and social isolation, the availability of human capital, and cultural values and perceptions. Based on this information, the discussion section reviews how various stakeholders - local governments, community members, and external supporting agents - can actively curtail disparities in climate preparedness.

“My Language Learners Seemed Like Ghosts”: A Rural Teacher’s Transformational Journey Implementing the Seal of Biliteracy

This paper describes the personal and professional journey taken by one secondary Spanish teacher to implement the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) for English learners (ELs) in a rural Florida school district. The teacher’s goal was to promote bilingual pride among her ELs and to validate their bilingual abilities, which had been frequently unrecognized in the community. This promising practice in a rural Florida district demonstrated two important transformations: first was the teacher’s personal views about bilingualism as an asset rather than a deficit, and second was the instructional practices she employed and fierce advocacy for the ELs in her rural secondary school. Ultimately, the work of the teacher disrupted inequities that her bilingual students faced and positively affected her EL students’ views of bilingualism and their lives in the rural school community.

Zora Neale Hurston in the Florida Jooks

Like W. C. Handy and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston was a translator: she sought textual analogies—words on a page--for the bittersweet lyricism, dynamism, and bold self-declarations found in blues music made by Black people in the rural South of the early Twentieth Century. She was also, like both men, a migrant to the urban North, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. A biographical as well as literary-critical exploration, this chapter focuses on Hurston’s two best-known works: Mules and Men (1935), a folklore study, and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a cornerstone of the African American literary tradition. Both works vividly evoke the rough but vital blues culture of rural Florida, offering us Black spaces of self-making through the eyes of a Black female participant-observer. Both texts also force readers to confront the presence of scarifying, sometimes deadly violence within that juke-joint world. Hurston, this chapter argues, uses the novel to rewrite the folklore study, offering us a questing and indomitable young woman, Janie Crawford, who earns her way into the blues and lives out her destiny with the help of Tea Cake, a passionate, adventurous, and mercurial young bluesman.

Teachers Bridging the Digital Divide in Rural Schools with 1:1 Computing

This article shares the findings of a mixed method study about the implementation of 1:1 computing in a small rural Florida school district. Researchers used multiple regression analyses to examine whether Davis’ (1989) Technology Acceptance Model helped explain teachers’ adoption of 1:1. The results indicated that the rural teachers’ perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of 1:1 were significant predictors of both whole class and individualized instructions with 1:1. The qualitative phase of the study explored the ways in which the teachers integrated 1:1 into their instructional practices and what factors motivated them to do so. The analysis showed that the teachers used 1:1 largely to foster digital literacy and collaboration as well as to conduct student assessment. Reasons why the teachers integrated 1:1 into instruction included increasing student engagement, personalizing learning, and facilitating teacher productivity.

Time and the Trauma of Witnessing

This chapter explores ocular assessments of aging within defined communities, one in rural Florida and one in modern Manhattan, by Wharton and Rawlings. The witnessing of age, in such contexts, creates unexpected trauma, so destabilizing are the effects of changing bodies, especially as witnessed by individuals who find their own aging implicated by comparison. The narratives that stress traumatic witnessing are also those that depict not only rapidly changing youth, but also the simultaneous aging of older individuals, who find their own changing lives difficult to confront. Theirs are also the changes that are less spectacular, but more consequential, given the way they disqualify the aging from active and romantic experiences. Witnessing aging, thus becomes a challenging enterprise, and one that depends upon doubled bodies, or forms that age in tandem with one another; aging thus engenders acts of translation, so challenging is its apprehension.

Using an Electronic Medication Event–Monitoring System for Antiretroviral Therapy Self-Management Among African American Women Living With HIV in Rural Florida: Cohort Study

Background HIV remains a significant health issue in the United States and disproportionately affects African Americans. African American women living with HIV (AAWH) experience a particularly high number of barriers when attempting to manage their HIV care, including antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. To enable the development and assessment of effective interventions that address these barriers to support ART adherence, there is a critical need to understand more fully the use of objective measures of ART adherence among AAWH, including electronic medication dispensers for real-time surveillance. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the use of the Wisepill medication event–monitoring system (MEMS) and compare the objective and subjective measures of ART adherence. Methods We conducted a 30-day exploratory pilot study of the MEMS among a convenience sample of community-dwelling AAWH (N=14) in rural Florida. AAWH were trained on the use of the MEMS to determine the feasibility of collecting, capturing, and manipulating the MEMS data for an objective measure of ART adherence. Self-reported sociodemographic information, including a self-reported measure of ART adherence, was also collected from AAWH. Results We found that the majority of participants were successful at using the electronic MEMS. Daily use of the MEMS tended to be outside of the usual time participants took their medication. Three 30-day medication event patterns were found that characterized ART adherence, specifically uniform and nonuniform medication adherence and nonuniform medication nonadherence. There were relatively few MEMS disruptions among study participants. Overall, adjusted daily ART adherence was 81.08% and subjective ART adherence was 77.78%. Conclusions This pilot study on the use and evaluation of the Wisepill MEMS among AAWH in rural Florida is the first such study in the United States. The findings of this study are encouraging because 10 out of 12 participants consistently used the MEMS, there were relatively few failures, and objective adjusted daily and overall subjective ART adherence were very similar. On the basis of these findings, we think researchers should consider using the Wisepill MEMS in future studies of AAWH and people living with HIV in the United States after taking into account our practical suggestions. The following practical considerations are suggested when measuring objective medication adherence: (1) before using an MEMS, be familiar with the targeted populations’ characteristics; (2) choose an MEMS that aligns with the participants’ day-to-day activities; (3) ensure the MEMS’ features and resulting data support the research goals; (4) assess the match among the user’s ability, wireless features of the MEMS, and the geographic location of the participants; and (5) consider the cost of MEMS and the research budget.

Antiretroviral therapy self-management: Pilot study of an electronic medication event monitoring system among African-American women living with HIV in rural Florida (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) remains a significant health issue in the United States and disproportionately affects African Americans. African-American women living with HIV (AAWH) experience a particularly high number of barriers when attempting to manage their HIV care, including antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. To enable the development and assessment of effective interventions that address these barriers to support ART adherence, there is a critical need to understand more fully the use of objective measures of ART adherence among AAWH, including electronic medication dispensers for real-time surveillance. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the use of the Wisepill Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMS), and compare objective and subjective measures of ART adherence. METHODS We conducted a 30-day exploratory sequential mixed-methods pilot study of the MEMS among a convenience sample of community-dwelling AAWH (n=14) in rural Florida. AAWH were trained on the use of the MEMS to determine the feasibility of collecting, capturing, and manipulating the MEMS data for an objective measure of ART adherence. Self-report sociodemographic information, including a measure of antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, was also collected from AAWH. RESULTS We found that a majority of participants were successful at using the electronic MEMS. Daily use of the MEMS tended to be outside of the usual time participants took their medication. Three 30-day medication event patterns were found that characterized ART adherence, specifically uniformed and ununiformed medication adherence and ununiformed medication non-adherence. There were relatively few MEMS disruption among study participants. Overall, adjusted daily ART adherence was 81.08% and subjective ART adherence was 77.78%. CONCLUSIONS This pilot study on the use and evaluation of the Wisepill MEMS among AAWH in rural Florida is the first known in the US. The findings of this study are encouraging because ten out of twelve participants consistently used the MEMS, had relatively few MEMS, and objective adjusted daily and overall subjective ART adherence were very similar. Based findings from this study, we think researchers can be confident in using the Wisepill MEMS in future studies of AAWH and PLWH in the US after considering our practical suggestions. The following practical considerations are suggested when considering measuring objective medication adherence: (1) before using a MEMS be familiar with the targeted populations’ characteristics; (2) choose a MEMS that aligns with the participants’ day-to-day activities; (3) ensure the MEMS’ features and resulting data support the research goals; (4) assess the match between user’s ability, wireless features of the MEMS, and the geographic location of participants; and (5) considering the cost of MEMS and the research budget.