Low levels of productivity and recent evolutions in technology and practices are pushing the construction industry to collaborate on a higher level. A key component of effective collaboration is trust. Research also suggests that increased trust levels can lead to improved productivity in team performance. Trust appears to be valued by industry practitioners at the executive level but it also appears that active management of trust is minimal. With Design Science Research methodology as a framework, this project uses a mixed methods approach to develop and test a tool designed to assist in the management of trust levels between construction project participants. This project lays the groundwork for additional research into trust-building in construction by testing whether or not trust can be actively built and managed by rigorous analysis of current and upcoming relationships. In addition to supporting data from case studies, this was accomplished by introducing specific trust-building techniques into student group interactions and comparing changes in interpersonal trust levels to a control group of students. Results from the case studies and student experiment show some support for the idea that interpersonal trust levels, as perceived by the person making the attempts to build trust within the group, can be increased through use of a tool such as the one developed. Further testing and development is needed prior to wider industry application.

The representation of ourselves and our environment is based on the combination of information from multiple sensory systems. Each sensory modality is represented within a different frame of reference, in other words each sensory system uses a different code to represent the same properties of the environment (ex. visual stimuli in an eye-centered frame of reference; hand position would be shoulder-centered). Combing this information into a singular coordinate frame is complex. For instance, the eye and shoulder have different centers of rotation, therefore any changes in eye position or body posture will affect the relationship between them. What is still unknown is how the brain integrates these different sources of information into an internal representation, and what effect extra-retinal signals can have on this process. This thesis was designed to investigate the effect of head roll on action and perception. In Experiment 1, we wanted to determine how the integration of vision and proprioception for action was affected by changes in head roll. To investigate this question subjects performed a reaching task at three different head roll positions, where they would experience conflicts between their viewed and actual hand position. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of head roll on sensory perception. To explore this idea subjects performed a task where they needed to judge the position of their unseen index fingertip relative to a visual target. Our findings reveal that eccentric head roll conditions influence both action and perception – revealed by an increase in movement variability and a decreased ability to discriminate the position of the unseen fingertip relative to visual targets. In summary, we have discovered that introducing eccentric head roll positions affects the perception of ourselves within the environment and the way that we integrate sensory information. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-21 14:07:09.217

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The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute with knowledge about the conditions for preschool children’s meaning making with regard to sustainable development. With a focus on critical actions, the thesis explores how education is executed and how a critical action may be conducted in a preschool practice. Different teaching situations in preschool have been analysed in order to determine how and which actions are privileged in the various situations, what the consequences of these actions are, and what kind of conditions that enable children to develop critical action competence. The results show that teachers affect children’s meaning making by directing actions toward a specific learning content. The conditions in which children learn action competences for sustainable development may be affected by which actions are privileged or excluded in the situation. The analyses of conditions for children to act critically in this thesis are when: the teacher aims the attention towards a pluralistic teaching content, where the content consists of value judgments. variations of views are highlighted – by the help of other children or from example different viewpoints in a book. children have the courage or/and feel safe expressing contradicting views. Although the situations in which children act critically are few and far between in the empirical material, they do exist and are important to highlight, especially as few other studies explore what meaning making processes look like when critical actions are privileged. The thesis therefore contributes to the research by providing analyses of situations in which children act critically in preschool.

Peace processes require an opening to self and others — a willingness to confront what is and to vision beyond present challenges to a brighter future. This type of engagement is crucial for the peaceful development of healthy, functioning societies — societies such as Ukraine, a country thrust without preparation from regional Soviet status to independent country searching for democracy. Eighteen years post-Independence the Ukrainian parliament continues to flounder unsupported by citizens. Active participation in civic affairs required for democracy is unfamiliar for most Ukrainian citizens, having internalized centuries of divisive oppression under a series of authoritarian regimes. Democracy-building and peace-building require participant agency and voice; rising out of oppression, people often need support to speak about and transform their lived experiences. This study, cognizant of the centrality of gender analysis in any context, explored the roles women’s shared narrative, dialogue, and group-visioning play in the support of personal empowerment and bridge building between diverse communities. The study invited women from the European Union-focused Western region of Lviv, Ukraine and the more Soviet/Russian-identified Eastern region of Crimea, first to share their personal stories with the researcher and second, to meet in their regional groups to vision for themselves, their families, and Ukraine. The third phase of this study invited these diverse regional groups to meet in a neutral space, reflexively exploring their parallel processes, while in phase four participants reviewed their experiences of the study. Despite initial beliefs that they have little in common, women in both regions said study participation changed them. They found telling their stories “from beginning to end” allowed them to reflect upon their own values and strengths, and having connected with themselves and their roots, they were then able to reach out to others. Rather than looking for differences, participants sought ways to express a shared vision for an inclusive, functional, peace-building future for themselves, their families, and Ukraine as a whole.

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This thesis addresses the question of educating for democratic development from the perspective of women leaders in community development organizations. The goal of this study is to expand our current understanding of education by giving voice to women's insights and experiences while considering their philosophical and practical contributions to the field. / Education is first considered in its traditional form as a static phenomenon which promotes hierarchy and perpetuates the status quo. The deconstruction of oppression is then addressed in order to develop a theoretical framework of critical, feminist and engaged pedagogies. This framework offers insight into a reconstruction of education as an instrument for promoting social responsibility and social action. / Nine women leaders in social action are interviewed using qualitative and phenomenological research methodologies. Their motivations, philosophies and organizational practices, and ideas are considered in the context of education. As a result, the insight that these women offer to the field of education is revealed and illustrated.

This thesis develops a multidisciplinarily grounded account of the cultural causes of environmental problems discussed as a question in philosophical and sociological theory of social action. The approach is articulated by an original reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Part 1 of the thesis critically discusses a prominent view of the cultural causes found in environmentalism and environmental history with significant popular appeal. In this view, labelled the ideological approach, the human nature relationship is characterised essentially by our culture's alleged disrespectful, manipulative and materialistic attitude to nature that is said to have been internalised by the modern human being and to fundamentally drive our ecologically consequential activities. An alternative organisatory approach is suggested based on the view that due to division of labour of culturally and geographically dispersed masses, as well as the everyday character of activities in terms of which we collectively cause environmental problems in global industrial market society, no general ideological source of social action can plausibly be posited. An organisatory approach to the human environmental burden as a function of the collective performance by masses of a shared organisation of activity on a recursive, everyday basis is a more realistic account of the intensity of human environmental impact. Part 2 argues that the ideological approach in environmentalism and beyond can be seen to imply a form of collectivism also found in many classics of Wittgensteinian philosophy and social theory, an important common denominator being their ontological focus on the mental source of social action in shared conceptual schemes, normative orientations and the like. By contrast, in the Wittgenstein reading developed in this thesis, his perspective was non-ontological, viewing social activity as developing processes not defined by their mental source in shared conceptions but by their organisation. Social life is viewed as being based on agreement in form of life, that is, in organisation of human activity. The thesis is a rare and original attempt to make philosophy relevant in the discussion of a pressing contemporary problem that also advances Wittgenstein-scholarship to a novel area.

Using a multimodal approach to literacy, this thesis explores student dialogue and responses from viewing wordless and image-rich books to answer the following questions: What impact does visual literacy instruction have on students’ learning and achievement in reading and viewing comprehension? What are grade five students’ perspectives on being involved in reading and viewing wordless and image-rich books in the classroom? Action research methodology is employed by the teacher researcher in a grade five classroom. Qualitative data sourced from whole class observations, small group reading interviews, student work samples, a colleague’s observational notes, and quantitative data from reading assessments reveal insights into the affordances of presenting visually rich texts to students. The author focuses the discussion on reading comprehension strategies, visual elements, and the experience of reading wordless and image-rich books. He concludes that students are able to use deeper level reading comprehension strategies and articulate their understanding while viewing images.