This dissertation examines three relationships between nature centers and their local communities. First, what are the values provided by local centers as perceived by community members? Second, what factors lead community members to support local centers? And third, what are the constraints to visiting local centers as perceived by community members? We surveyed random samples of community members living around 16 diverse nature centers across the United States and conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses to address these questions. Chapter one introduces the study and provides a literature review of theories and empirical research related to the research questions. Chapter two reports the results of an exploratory factor analysis on the level of importance communities assign to fourteen nature center services. The factor analysis revealed four underlying values: environmental connection, leisure provision, civic engagement, and community resilience. Chapter three tests sixteen hypothesized predictors of community support for nature centers. All these variables were significant, suggesting people volunteer at, donate to, or respond to threats at nature centers for a range of reasons. These include those related to supporting nature center missions (e.g. environmental connection significance and commitment to nature) but also other reasons such as friends' and family's perceptions of nature centers and assessments of the center staff members. Chapter four explores constraints that emerge during different stages of the decision-making process people go through when considering whether or not to visit a local nature center. The greatest constraints emerge in early stages (e.g. center awareness) and late stages (e.g. limited finances, transportation, and time) of decision-making. Chapter five discusses the study's implications to theory, including ecosystem service and educational leisure setting valuation, environmentally significant and charitable support behavior, and leisure constraints, as well as nature center practice. Centers that consider these implications might better serve their local communities and achieve their missions. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to increase knowledge about the experiences of adult amateur string players. Through narrative inquiry, this study presents the unique stories of two amateur string players who have sustained their active music-making throughout their adult lives. Leaders in music education have promised lifelong music-making and touted it as a benefit of supporting music in schools. This promise is part of vision statements, symposia, advocacy efforts, and guiding documents for the last century. Yet, the most common outcome for students who participate in school music programs is that they quit before they graduate high school, or soon afterward. The idea of school music segueing into lifetime music-making for large numbers of students remains an aspiration and not the outcome. I used narrative inquiry to explore and present the stories of these two players. Their experiences are unique, and it is not appropriate to generalize their narratives to others. However, I hope that by closely examining the experiences they considered impactful in their lives as music students and amateur musicians, music educators can better understand the ways their teaching practices might lead to students' enjoyment of music-making past their student years. Implications for practicing music teachers and future research are discussed.

People’s selection of leisure activities is a complex choice because of implicit human factors and explicit environmental factors. Satisfactory participation in leisure activities is an important task since keeping a regular active lifestyle can help to maintain and improve the wellbeing of people. Technology could help in selecting the most appropriate activities by designing and implementing activities, collecting people profiles and their preferences relations. In fact, recommendation systems, have been successfully used in the last years in similar tasks with different types of recommendation systems. This thesis aims at the design, implementation, and evaluation of recommendation systems that could help us to better understand the complex choice of selecting leisure activities. In this work, we first define an evaluation framework for different recommendations systems. Then we compare their performances using different evaluation metrics. Thus, we explore and try to better understand the user’s preferences over leisure activities. After, having a comprehensive analysis of modelling recommended items and leisure activities, we also design and implement a content-based leisure activity recommendation system to make use of a taxonomy of activities. Moreover, in the course of our research, we have collected and evaluated two datasets obtained one from the Meetup social network and the other from crowd-workers and made them available as open data sources for further evaluation in the recommendation system research community.

This thesis addresses needlework between 1920 and 1970 as a window into women's broader experiences, and also asserts it as a valid topic of historical analysis in its own right. Needlecraft was a ubiquitous part of women's lives which has until recently been largely neglected by historians. The growing historiography of needlework has relied heavily on fashion and design history perspectives, focusing on the products of needlework and examples of creative needlewomen. Moving beyond this model, this thesis establishes the importance of process as well as product in studying needlework, revealing the meanings women found in, attached to, and created through the ephemeral moment of making. Searching for the ordinary and typical, it eschews previous preoccupations with creation, affirming re-creation and recreation as more central to amateur needlework. Drawing upon diverse sources including oral history research, objects, Mass Observation archives, and specialist needlework magazines, this thesis examines five key aspects of women's engagement with needlework: definitions of ‘leisure' and ‘work'; motivations of thrift in peacetime and war; emotions; the modern and the traditional and finally, the gendering of needlework. It explores needlework through three central themes of identity, obligation and pleasure. Whilst asserting the validity and importance of needlework as a subject of research in its own right, it also contributes to larger debates within women's history. It sheds light on the chronology and significance of domestic thrift, the meanings of feminised activities, the emotional context of home front life, women's engagement with modern design and concepts of ‘leisure' and ‘work' within women's history.

This thesis is written as an essay, which considers sculpture outside of its definition as art object. Having as its goal finding an intrinsic definition of sculpture, the essay sets on a short journey meandering between ideas, historic precedents, and anecdotes. Among some of the discussed thing are: necessity, labor, leisure, Olduvai chopping stone tool, making, human hand, brain, body, pineal gland, third eye, speculation, materiality, Dixie cup, objecthood, sign, imagination, ENIAC, immateriality, myth, labor, leisure, storytelling, alien, alienation, destruction, creativity, genius, death, weed. The essay concludes that sculpture does not need a definition.

Anotation: This thesis deals with leisure activities of children of preschool age and children of school age and it is trying to discover their favorite activities and interests, regularly visited leisure and quantity of it. The theoretical part deals with terms as free time, family, child of preschool age and child of school age, education in free time. It also deals with overloaded children and with problems associated with overloading. The aim of this thesis is the evaluation and analysis how children of preschool age and children of school age spending their free time. Through research questions we were trying to find out how children spend their free time and how many aktivities do they have in their free time. The empirical part contains the analysis of used methods , research investigation in the kindergarten and primary school in Martin. It also includes treatment of results - Its processed in tables, graphs and written comments.

Leisure education as a compenzation for unilateral burden at basic school Abstract This thesis deals with special interest education and its functions in relation to school-sided load. The theoretical part is based on the current state of education policy in the interest of education. Are also presented in detail the current issues of interest in learning Czech Republic (its functions, objectives, forms, leisure education institution, etc.) and Europe, where the pet training referred to as after-school care. In the practical part of the work carried out research on the benefits of leisure education for pupils in primary schools. The work also includes a proposal for defining the appropriate use of free time as compensation for unilateral burden of schooling. Keywords Leisure education, school club, leisure time, after-school care, the burden of the school environment, school educational program school clubs

This thesis deals with the character of leisure activities offered by kindergartens in České Budějovice. The theoretical part characterizes interest and leisure activities in the general meaning and in a child at preschool age. Next, it describes the relationship of the areas of leisure activities and the areas of preschool education. The practical part - research - presents the characteristics of leisure activities offered in kindergartens in České Budějovice, the extra activities offered, the reasons for their use, and their specific form. The data collected is interpreted in the context of leisure pedagogy and preschool pedagogy.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-04T18:33:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Heloisa Nogueira Cordeiro.pdf: 271689 bytes, checksum: 5f4f2ec68f92711874ece1b0356da74e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-11-18 / The present work follows the line of research University, Teaching and Teacher Training . It investigates the conceptions of leisure and recreation of students of the Graduate Course in a Department of Physical Education. Today there is great interest in the idea of leisure and recreation, principally in Physical Education courses. Although these studies highly appreciate leisure and recreation as reachable possibilities in the formation of new citizens, we have noted that the contents divulged in these courses are limited to only one field of interest of leisure, physical-sports, ignoring the cultural diversity of the contents that permeate this question. The possibility of establishing multidisciplinary actions about leisure and recreation are therefore lost because of this. This study is based on the conception of leisure and recreation from the point of view of scholars of the Sociology of Leisure like Dumazedier, Heloisa Bruhns, Bramante, H?lder Isayama, Christianne Werneck and especially N?lson Carvalho Marcellino. He is the author of innumerable works about the idea and has contributed a lot to a more humanistic and educative view of leisure. As the methodological perspective of this study we describe it as a qualitative investigation, recognizing that for its objectives this angle would lead us to a better contemplation of the data. Analysis of this data revealed that the conceptions of leisure and recreation of the graduate students are still diffuse, uncritical and very little consistent. / O presente trabalho est? inserido na linha de pesquisa Universidade, Doc?ncia e Forma??o de Professores , e investiga as concep??es de lazer e recrea??o dos discentes do curso de gradua??o de uma faculdade de Educa??o F?sica. Atualmente ? grande o interesse sobre a tem?tica lazer e recrea??o, principalmente nos cursos de Educa??o F?sica. Apesar desses estudos vislumbrarem o lazer e a recrea??o como possibilidades abrangentes na forma??o de um novo cidad?o, notamos que os conte?dos difundidos nesses cursos se restringem a um ?nico campo de interesse do lazer, o f?sico-esportivo, desconhecendo a diversidade cultural dos conte?dos que permeiam essa tem?tica. A possibilidade de se estabelecer a??es multidisciplinares sobre o lazer e a recrea??o se perdem com isso. Este estudo est? fundamentado na concep??o de lazer e recrea??o na vis?o de estudiosos da sociologia do lazer, como Dumazedier, Heloisa Bruhns, Bramante, H?lder Isayama, Christianne Werneck, e, em especial, N?lson Carvalho Marcellino, autor de in?meras obras sobre o tema, e que tem contribu?do muito para uma vis?o mais human?stica e educativa do lazer. Fixamos como perspectiva metodol?gica deste estudo a investiga??o qualitativa, reconhecendo que pelos objetivos esta vertente nos levar? a uma melhor contempla??o dos dados. A an?lise desses dados nos mostra que as concep??es de lazer e recrea??o dos alunos de gradua??o ainda s?o difusas, acr?ticas e poucos consistentes.

by Li Yuk Fung. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-64). / ABSTRACT --- p.i / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.ii / LIST OF EXHIBITS --- p.iv / PREFACE --- p.v / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Objectives --- p.1 / Scope of Study --- p.1 / Methodology --- p.2 / Secondary Data Collection --- p.2 / Observations --- p.3 / Primary Data Collection --- p.3 / Literature Review --- p.4 / Limitations --- p.4 / Chapter II. --- THE COMPANY --- p.5 / History and Background --- p.5 / Organizational Structure --- p.6 / Business Strategies --- p.8 / Marketing Mix --- p.8 / Market Segmentation --- p.14 / Competitiveness --- p.17 / Chapter III. --- INDUSTRIAL ANALYSIS --- p.21 / Environmental Analysis --- p.21 / Economic Environment --- p.22 / Socio/Cultural Factors --- p.23 / Demographic Factors --- p.23 / Technological Environment --- p.24 / Legal Environment --- p.24 / Customers --- p.25 / Government Sector --- p.25 / Private Sector --- p.27 / Institutional Sector --- p.28 / Suppliers --- p.30 / Competitors --- p.33 / Entry Barriers --- p.34 / Critical Success Factors for the Industry --- p.34 / Chapter IV. --- SWOT ANALYSIS --- p.35 / Internal Strengths --- p.35 / Internal Weaknesses --- p.37 / Future Opportunities --- p.41 / Environmental Threats --- p.44 / Problem Identifications --- p.45 / Chapter V. --- CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS --- p.48 / Recommendations --- p.48 / Implications and Evaluations --- p.53 / Conclusions --- p.57 / APPENDIX --- p.58 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.63