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Since the 1980s, pre-registration nurse education has undergone dramatic changes that have led to the creation of a new course - Project 2000 - and its delivery within the Higher Education sector. Very little written during this period has addressed the issue of nurse learner wastage/persistence. The literature on nurse learner wastage/persistence prior to this period has tended to be largely atheoretical in nature. One of the chief objectives of this study was to produce a much more complex picture of wastage/persistence. This involved the building of a theoretical framework designed to explore one aspect of voluntary wastage - the interaction between integration and wastage/persistence, and which could capture the complexity of the phenomenon by taking into account the interaction between the individual and the institution within the process of wastage/persistence. This study draws on Tinto's (1975) Student Integration Model, which identified the learners' integration into an institution to be one of the critical factors in understanding the wastage/persistence of learners, as well as on some of the studies within the area of nurse learner wastage/persistence which have examined the role of a learner's identity in the wastage/persistence process. Accordingly, this study defined integration in terms of how well a learner has adopted the identity/ies afforded to them by the institution. Finally, drawing inspiration from Foucault (1988, 1990,1991), this study re-conceptualised identity in terms of the concept of subjectivity and defined integration in terms of how well the learner was able to subscribe to the discourses (and the subject positions that these made available) that constituted the given institution. A multiple case study was carried out that focused on leavers and stayers in the first year of a Project 2000 course in three particular cohorts within a particular institution. A modified version of discourse analysis, referred to as MODA (Meaning Orientated Discourse Analysis), was used. Two major discourses were identified which offered the learner a number of contradictory subject positions regarding what it means to be a learner and a nurse - the 'autonomous' and the 'apprentice' discourse. It was found that stayers were those most able to manage these contradictory subject positions offered by these discourses. This meant that they were more playful in their discursive reading patterns than leavers. This playfulness implied they were not only doing a lot more with these discourses, but that that the nature of what they were doing enabled them to accept and embrace the contradictory notions of what it means to be a learner and a nurse existing in the institution. The stayers' management of discourses was a reflection of the high level of integration that they had achieved within a institution that is riddled with two incommensurable discourses which offer competing definitions of what it means to be a nurse and a learner.

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

This study examines the racial discourses of six and seven year old Puerto Rican children participating in small group literature circles over one academic year. The main research question is "How do Puerto Rican young children in a multiage classroom construct race through dialogue within the figured worlds of literature circles?"This study is based on teacher research qualitative research design, using methods and techniques from ethnography and case study research. This study describes the dialogue of 20 Puerto Rican children, during 4 literature circles. These were chosen as case studies to examine in depth student's racial ideological explorations. Data gathering methods included field notes from participant observation, audiotapes, videotapes, and transcripts.A detailed description and analysis of children's responses to literature, this study documents how young Puerto Rican children's ambiguity and inconsistent usages and meanings of racial terminologies to signify their worlds. Through emerging ideological discourses such as colorblindness and esentializing discourses, young children explore discomfort instead of neutral, inclusive and unifying racial constructions, along with racial harmony that celebrates goodwill and benevolence. Literature circles as figured worlds informed by Rosenblatt's reader-response theory and Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain (2003) social practice theory of identity, are proposed to be a space were racial identities form and reform, facilitating variable forms of racial talk.The findings of this research illustrate the importance of teacher research as one form of qualitative research to illustrate the complexity of children's racial talk aimed toward educational racial understandings and change. The importance of racial discourses in young children's racial explorations to signify their worlds.

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A country’s international reputation has profound implications for its citizens; given that national image or reputation is built and circulated using language on a global scale, translation is necessarily involved. This project draws on bilingual corpora of government and media texts to examine how Canada was framed in the discourses and narratives in circulation in its two official languages at the time of the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits, using concepts and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, narrative theory, and corpus linguistics. Examining some aspects of language in use such as collocation, semantic relations, and metaphor, several of the ways in which Canada was framed in the two contexts and languages were compared. The project concludes that discourses and narratives may differ between sources and languages, thereby highlighting the importance of recognizing the impact of translation on the variety of national representations within discourses and narratives.

In this thesis, I examine how health stakeholders in British Columbia think and talk about human trafficking. I interrogate the health stakeholders’ speech as a site where broad societal discourses associated with human trafficking manifest. Using critical race theory, interlocking analysis, and a Foucauldian discourse analysis approach, I critically deconstruct health stakeholders’ understandings of human trafficking and persons who are trafficked. I pay particular attention to the discursive strategies the health stakeholders employ to construct the subjectivities of both persons who are trafficked and themselves in human trafficking discourse. I argue that these meaning-making processes and the uncritical reproduction of dominant human trafficking discourse in the health sector at least, in part, account for the lack of development and implementation of provincial human trafficking-specific policy and services to date. Given this absence, this thesis encourages health stakeholders to create evidence-based initiatives to address human trafficking and the health needs of persons who are trafficked. / Graduate / 0452 / aclancey@hotmail.com

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