The majority of transgender youth have learning experiences in school that are less than optimal; however, there is a paucity of research on the competencies of educators of transgender learners that could ameliorate the comorbidities and adversities they endure in secondary school. The purpose of this study was to explore what knowledge, attitudes, and skills educators apply to serve transgender learners in secondary school. The conceptual framework of servant leadership was used in this inquiry. A single case study design was used to examine a secondary school participating in the Alberta Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Educator Network that serves all students, including transgender learners. Seven educators from various disciplines and roles participated in a staged collection of data sources, including (a) a document, (b) a questionnaire, and (c) an interview. Data were analyzed using a priori coding, followed by pattern coding. Results showed that educators applied an interrelated and mutual standard of knowledge conventions, attitudinal compassions, and skillful collaborations through various dimensions of servant leadership unique to transgender learners. Educators collectively (a) drew from knowledge largely based on professional experience and grounded in what students had experienced; (b) drew upon attitudes largely based on a shared level of agreement for their thoughts, positions, and feelings and grounded in acceptance, empathy, and focus on the student; and (c) demonstrated skills largely based on their individual roles and grounded in backing students. The findings of this study contribute to positive social change by informing the paradigms, perceptions, and practices of professionals who serve this marginalized group of learners in secondary education.

At a Southwestern Tennessee school, students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds consistently perform low on the state standardized test TN Ready Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP), as compared to students who are not from low socioeconomic status. In this qualitative case study elementary teachers’ views on instructional strategies for reading and math, professional development, and professional learning communities (PLC) were examined through a theoretical framework based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The study included interview data from 9 teachers teaching Grades 3-5 who have been using strategies to help increase students’ academic achievement. In addition, PLC meeting minutes, and teachers’ data notebooks were reviewed. Data analysis consisted of open coding to develop common themes and patterns. The results of the analysis contributed to an understanding of how teachers benefit from ongoing professional development and PLCs to help them teach struggling students. These results led to the development of a professional development plan that provides reading and math strategies to increase all students’ academic achievement levels. This contributes to a positive social change by creating opportunities to support teachers’ instructional practices and use research-based strategies for reading and math instruction, ultimately increasing student achievement levels so that schools meet their mandated adequate yearly progress goals.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Professional nurses constitute the highest number of health manpower all over the world. The nature of their work make them prone to physical and emotional trauma which sometimes affect the care they render. Therefore, nursing requires that professionals demonstrate acceptable levels of self-awareness and self-control which is congruent with the key principles of mindfulness contributing to a standard of nursing practices that do not always reach by providers as expected. Likewise, Nurse Managers are expected to utilise mindfulness principles in the planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling activities of their units. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a mindfulness-based unit management training programme for professional nurses in Ondo State, Nigeria. The objectives of this study were to: (a) determine the level of individual mindfulness of professional nurses. (b) measure the extent to which individual mindfulness impacts professional nurses’ mindfulness. (c) determine the effect of professional nurses’ mindfulness on unit management performance of professional nurses. (d) design mindfulness-based unit management programme for professional nurses. (e) verify the developed mindfulness-based unit management training programme for professional nurses.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of suffering for meaning making and spirituality in organizational contexts. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores how organizational spaces may be created for meaning making and how this is linked to the idea of compassion. Findings The paper suggests that while suffering has been explored in organizations, it has not been studied relative to existential meaning making. This is identified as a significant gap in research on organizational spirituality. The paper attempts to fill this gap and suggests that the study of suffering has to separate suffering as an objective phenomenon, which should be eliminated in organizations, from suffering as a subjective experience in which meaning may be found. It is also proposed that, for existential meaning to be uncovered in the face of suffering, organizational spaces have to be created in which such meaning making can take place. Originality/value The paper suggests that suffering can be a pathway to the discovery of spiritual meaning.

Many problems in software development can be traced to a narrow understanding of professional responsibility. The author examines ways in which software developers have tried to avoid accepting responsibility for their work After cataloguing various types of responsibility avoidance, the author introduces an expanded concept of positive responsibility. It is argued that the adoption of this sense of positive responsibility will reduce many problems in software development.

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Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1982. / Bibliography: leaf 91. / by William F. Fowble. / Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1982.

The Technical World of Warcraft explores the various technical instruction elements of World of Warcraft, more specifically observing issues faced by players who take on content at the highest level. The thesis raises the problem of the in-game technical documentation being utterly ineffective for the aforementioned players, causing them to create their own technical documents. While observing the environment found exclusively within the game, research from Jennifer DeWinter and Ryan Moeller, Mark Chen, Sarah Bishop, and more, is used to analyze the game's instructional elements from a critical angle. Several job listings from other major game development companies are also used to bring forward the idea that Activision-Blizzard does not have technical communicators creating their own in-game technical instruction. By considering these factors, the study calls attention to an area within the gaming industry that technical communicators could provide a great benefit and create better support for those who do enjoy video games.

While the field of writing studies has studied digital writing as a response to multiple calls for more research on digital forms of writing, research on hashtags has yet to build bridges between different disciplines' approaches to studying the uses and effects of hashtags. This dissertation builds that bridge in its interdisciplinary approach to the study of hashtags by focusing on how hashtags can be fully appreciated at the intersection of the fields of information research, linguistics, rhetoric, ethics, writing studies, new media studies, and discourse studies. Hashtags are writing innovations that perform unique digital functions rhetorically while still hearkening back to functions of both print and oral rhetorical traditions. Hashtags function linguistically as indicators of semantic meaning; additionally, hashtags also perform the role of search queries on social media, retrieving texts that include the same hashtag. Information researchers refer to the relationship between a search query and its results using the term "aboutness" (Kehoe and Gee, 2011). By considering how hashtags have an aboutness, the humanities can call upon information research to better understand the digital aspects of the hashtag's search function. Especially when hashtags are used to organize discourse, aboutness has an effect on how a discourse community's agendas and goals are expressed, as well as framing what is relevant and irrelevant to the discourse. As digital activists increasingly use hashtags to organize and circulate the goals of their discourse communities, knowledge of ethical strategies for hashtag use will help to better preserve a relevant aboutness for their discourse while enabling them to better leverage their hashtag for circulation. In this dissertation, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Twitter discourse that used #OrlandoStrong over the five-month period before the first anniversary of the Pulse shooting, I trace how the #OrlandoStrong discourse community used innovative rhetorical strategies to combat irrelevant content from ambiguating their discourse space. In Chapter One, I acknowledge the call from scholars to study digital tools and briefly describe the history of the Pulse shooting, reflecting on non-digital texts that employed #OrlandoStrong as memorials in the Orlando area. In Chapter Two, I focus on the literature surrounding hashtags, discourse, aboutness, intertextuality, hashtag activism, and informational compositions. In Chapter Three, I provide an overview of the stages of grounded theory methodology and the implications of critical discourse analysis before I detail how I approached the collection, coding, and analysis of the #OrlandoStrong Tweets I studied. The results of my study are reported in Chapter Four, offering examples of Tweets that were important to understanding how the discourse space became ambiguous through the use of hashtags. In Chapter Five, I reflect on ethical approaches to understanding the consequences of hashtag use, and then I offer an ethical recommendation for hashtag use by hashtag activists. I conclude Chapter Five with an example of a classroom activity that allows students to use hashtags to better understand the relationship between aboutness, (dis)ambiguation, discourse communities, and ethics. This classroom activity is provided with the hope that instructors from different disciplines will be able to provide ethical recommendations to future activists who may benefit from these rhetorical strategies.

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the influence that academic major advisors and informal mentors can have on an individual's identification with a professional organization and their ensuing level of involvement in that professional organization. The present study is unique in that it is among the few to examine mentoring and OCBs in the context of a voluntary professional organization. Participants were 309 individuals with a doctoral degree who are members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), a large professional organization with 7,847 total members (in 2011). The specific type of OCB investigated in this study was voluntary service as a member of committees within the professional organization. Results indicated that individuals' identification with a particular professional organization was stronger if their academic advisor had engaged in greater OCBs within the organization (i.e., chaired a greater number of committees) and if they had one or more informal mentors who were also members of the same professional organization. Those with a greater number of informal mentors in addition to their academic mentor engaged in greater OCBs within the organization (i.e., participated as a member of more committees). Finally, those reporting at least one informal mentor in addition to their academic advisor engaged in greater OCBs within the organization if their informal mentors had engaged in a greater number of OCBs and when those multiple mentors were more balanced with regard to their to their professional setting (i.e., academia or practitioner). Implications for theory and practice will be discussed.