This thesis describes three (3) action research (AR) cycles I conducted in collaboration with my co-participants in Ghana's colleges of education. The focus of our collaboration was to nurture creative and innovative teaching strategies for education on HIV/AIDS and other emerging health issues. It has become necessary to engineer this bottom-up approach to learning and research because we see the current way of teaching and learning in Ghanaian schools as mere regurgitating of information and reproducing same in examination without meaningful change in behavior. This assertion was reiterated by Ghana's minister of education, Dr. Yao Osei Adutwum when he addressed delegates at the just ended United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 2022. He says, "[y]ou can't memorize your way out of poverty but you can critically think and innovate out of poverty." My co-participants and I are of the view that many people will continue to die from HIV/AIDS if teachers continue to teach by encouraging students to memorize factsheets to reproduce in examinations. The action research described in this thesis seeks to empower teacher-educators in Ghanaian colleges of education with useful pedagogical and research tools. The long-term goal - beyond the timeframe of this thesis - is for them to train new teachers to be confident, bold and assertive to push cultural and systemic boundaries, to nurture equally assertive students to deal with health challenges (pandemics) which they may be confronted with. Methods used to gather data included focus group interviews, observations of lesson presentations and reflective notes (journals). The design of this research was, partially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings, however, still proved to be interesting. Among those findings were strong teacher educator participation and a significant improvement in teacher educators' understanding and employment of SCT teaching strategies suited to their HIV/AIDS and Other Tropical Diseases in Africa classes.

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This thesis is an exploration of how the communication of technical information can be facilitated by practices of collaborative media. While focusing on the domain of bicycles and more specifically on hobbyists working on their bikes, the aim of this study has been to show possible directions for the design of collaborative media for hands-on kind of work environments in general. Two design experiments were carried out in the process. While the first one attempts to connect local work with global resources, the second experiment is more deeply connected to an existing local community of bike enthusiasts and their practices of learning and knowing. Through carrying out the two design experiments, an argument was made that involving existing social structures into collaborative media design solutions is crucial due to the fact that these existing resources are deeply connected to practices of learning and knowing. However, more work needs to be done to generate more detailed solutions for different domains.

In this longitudinal, qualitative, multiple-case study, I investigated the following questions: What is it like for a Japanese student who has little experience in countries where English is spoken as an L1 to seek a graduate degree at a U.S. institution of higher education? What linguistic, cultural, and institutional obstacles do they face? How do they overcome them? How does the experience change them? By documenting and analyzing the lived experience of three Japanese women seeking advanced degrees in U.S. universities over a period of at least two years, I shed light on the academic and social factors that played a role in their ultimate success or failure. Drawing on the theories of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991), supplemented by activity theory (Engeström, 1999) I focus on the participants’ journeys from the periphery of their new academic communities toward fuller participation within them, with an eye for the way power relationships affect their progress. Using narrative inquiry as a research strategy, I tell my participants’ stories, describing and interpreting their experiences, as they (and I) understood them. The data comprise bi-annual interviews conducted on the participants’ respective campuses, my own observation journals from those visits, additional interviews in Japan, monthly Skype interviews, participants’ journals, course materials, department handbooks and policy statements, and other institutional materials. Findings are grouped into two broad categories: forms of participation and patterns of interaction. The main obstacles to participation included difficulty engaging with instructors and classmates in class, ineffective advising, dysfunction at the departmental level, and trouble managing reading and writing requirements. Patterns of interaction reveal how the participants overcame those obstacles, including forming and leveraging strong socio-academic networks to fill gaps in their own knowledge and to draw emotional support, finding alternative sources of insider support in the absence of effective advising, and developing strategies to cope with literacy demands. The findings suggest that inequities of power in the classroom and in the department can hinder academic socialization and make success less likely. However, these inequities can at times be overcome by agency and creativity. / Language Arts

The present study is an investigation of a recent phenomenon, the creation and maintenance of a student-centered online community using Line, a Web 2.0 mobile messaging (MIM) application. In recent years, mobile instant messaging has become the most widely utilized form of social media (Clement, 2019a), and has been increasingly used by students to interact about schoolwork (e.g., Cetinkaya, 2017; Bouhnik & Deshen, 2014; Tanaka, 2014). With the ubiquity of mobile technology use amongst students, how interactions in student-centered online groups contribute to the achievement of academic goals warrants further research. Therefore, this study had three purposes. The first purpose was to utilize Wenger’s (1998) community of practice framework to investigate whether an online group formed by the students could evolve into an academic community of practice. A second purpose was to analyze online interactions through the lens of uses and gratifications theory (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973) to discover the specific academic uses of MIM valued by the participants. Furthermore, the affordances (Gibson, 1977) that made the application amenable to academic purposes were investigated. The third purpose was to further analyze online interactions to uncover the specific ways in which the practices of the online academic group contributed to and conflicted with the achievement of course objectives. A case study approach (Yin, 2014) was used to provide a thick descriptive account of the online group and achieve the objectives of the study. The 12 participants in this study were members of an intact EAP course, which was part of an English-medium economics curriculum at a private Japanese university. The main source of data were two online groups created using the Line application, one group consisting of all members of the class and the other a group of four students created to work on the course project. Other sources of data included online documents saved to Google Drive, a survey, interviews, and course materials. Data from all sources were coded and analyzed first inductively, using codes from the three frameworks used in the study, and then inductively, to discover any other themes that emerged from the data. The analysis suggested that the online group created by the participants evolved into an academic community of practice. There was evidence of a focused academic domain because the vast majority of online posts dealt directly with course content. Moreover, interactions revealed the development of trust, reciprocity, and commitment, all key components of mutual engagement. Various group practices also emerged that supported students in their coursework and contributed to group learning. A key factor in community formation was attributed to the Line application meeting the academic needs of students. Key gratifications associated with the needs of the students included online interaction with a closed group, convenience, quickness, retrievability, information sharing, and emotional support. The affordances that enabled these gratifications to be obtained were selective connectivity, context-free access, asynchronous/synchronous communication, information aggregation, and multi-user content creation. Further analysis of the online interactions supported by these affordances showed that the prominent group practices directly supported course objectives. However, there were several conflicts associated with the use of MIM, such as problems with the constant flow of messages, unequal levels of contribution, and academically questionable activities. Finally, a summative analysis led to the creation of a model that demonstrated the relationships between learning objectives, student academic needs, gratifications, and affordances in the formation of a community within the context of a traditional university course. / Applied Linguistics

This case study conceptually illustrated how a leadership living-learning community provided an educational context well suited to enhance development of leaders within changing leadership and educational paradigms. Specifically, it highlighted how both leadership and learning have come to be viewed as sociocultural processes, and presented theoretical and applied descriptions of "communities of practice" and the identity formation process of "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The unit of analysis for this case study was a first-year, leadership-themed living-learning community at a four-year, land grant university in the Eastern United States. The purpose of the study was to explore how college students constructed leadership identities as they moved from first year members to second year peer leaders in the living-learning community. Nine sophomore students serving in peer leader roles and four faculty members serving as program instructors were the primary study participants. In-depth qualitative interviews with students and faculty, analysis of key program documents and students' written assignments, and a confirmatory student focus group contributed to the creation of eight primary themes and one overarching theme describing how students constructed leadership identities through community participation. The eight themes included access to experiences of membership, meanings of the first-year experience, beliefs about leadership, peer leader roles and practices, knowing in practice, meanings of multi-membership, and embodiment of the program mission. The overarching theme illustrated how peer leaders embody the mission-oriented program design as they move through—and ultimately out of—the community. Students' representations of their beliefs and practices enacted through community leadership roles emphasized college success strategies, foundational leadership knowledge and skill development, and preparation for future leadership roles. The findings of this study provided insight for educators who desire to design programs that foster college student leadership development. The findings revealed social and cultural implications related to higher education's call to enhance students' leadership capacity. There is a need to further explore leadership identity formation within other contexts, as well as the long-term impact of learning community experience on students' representations of leadership identity. / Ph. D.

This focused ethnography of Appalachian Trail (AT) long-distance hikers explored the situated and informal nature of individual knowledge construction as mediated through a community of practice. Unlike place-based or cyber-bound communities, the ever-changing membership and location dynamics of AT hikers offered a unique and researchable community for study. The complex and understudied sensemaking trajectories of individuals moving through this mobile community were investigated over three years through in-depth interviews and participant observations. Inductive analysis of expert and novice stories illuminated experiential patterns and collective traditions that comprise the AT learning culture. In contrast to traditional approaches to knowledge and skill acquisition, this study found socio-reflective exchanges, nested in hiking pods, to be critical sites for cognitive modeling and informal scaffolding between experts and novices. The situated encounters and developmental support of these nomadic pods were found to facilitate individuals' construction of community-based knowledge. / Ph. D.

This study investigates the impact of an online community's control structure on the knowledge sharing process in that community. Using a framework comprised of legitimate peripheral participation theory and the weak-ties phenomenon, the study focuses on a comparative analysis of self-organizing online communities (e.g., weblog networks) and centralized online communities (e.g., discussion forums communities) with respect to the efficacy of knowledge sharing in these communities. The findings of this study indicate that self-organizing communities of practice have more weak-ties among their members compared to centralized communities. As per weak-ties theory of Granovetter (1973, 1983), these findings suggest that self-organizing communities facilitate greater dissemination of knowledge and flow of information among their members than centralized communities. The abundance of weak-ties in their community structure also makes self-organizing communities better environments for the discovery of new information compared to centralized community environments. This study did not find any evidence of community structure impact on peripheral participation and the interaction activity level among peripheral participants of a given online community. These observations may have stemmed from the limitations of research design, however, it is safe to say as of now that verdict on peripheral participation differences in different community structures is inconclusive at best. / Master of Science