With increasing demand for school accountability following the NCLB Act of 2001, school leaders have a greater responsibility to students with disabilities than ever tinclude special education leadership due to the leadership imperative to meet the needs of all students (Lashley, 2007; Yell, 2012). Little attention, however, has been paid to special education and special education law in leadership preparation programs (Cusson, 2010; Pazey & Cole, 2013), leaving school leaders inadequately prepared to serve all students. The purpose of this study was to explore how six current school leaders who are graduates of a university-based “high-quality” principalship program created an inclusive school culture. Guided by the theoretical framework of sensemaking (Weick, 1995) and a phenomenological approach (Creswell, 2007; Patton, 1990), this study examined the ways in which six school leaders used what they know about special education and special education law to develop their understanding of such policy and sought to gain insight into why they made sense of and constructed their interpretations of the policy in a particular way. Of particular interest was their perceived roles in working with special education staff, and the effects their construction and application of inclusive education policy had on students with disabilities. The findings of this study suggest that these six school leaders’ sensemaking of inclusive education policy was influenced by three factors: knowledge, experiences, and personal contexts. Each of these three factors were situated within the context of the school leaders’ constructed identities. If the school leader perceived his or her role as a leader for special education, he or she was more inclined to seek special education and special education law content knowledge, ensure their campus staff attained and maintained the capacity to meet the needs of all students, and continuously searched for specific experiences and opportunities that they could make available to themselves and others that required them to grapple with difficult issues related to special education. In doing so, they were able to effect deeper-level change on their school campuses. / text

In an effort to better understand retention, a survey was developed to ask students at a southern land-grant university how they communicate with each other. Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) was previously used to identify communication networks in urban neighborhoods. My thesis adapted this theory and networks to identify the strength of three communication techniques of college students and how it effects a student’s sense of belonging which can impact that student’s intent to stay in school.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines heritage tourism as: "traveling to experience the places and activities that authentically represent the stories and peoples of the past and present. It includes irreplaceable historic, cultural, and natural resources." Heritage tourism is a lucrative industry in the United States. On average, heritage tourists spend $623 per trip compared to $457 for all U.S. travelers. The rise of heritage tourism is inextricably linked with several trends in American society, namely: the historic preservation movement, the desire for a sense of place, and nostalgia. These motivating tendencies often inspire problems of authenticity, commodification, and an unhealthy romanticization of the past.The present study seeks to analyze the heritage tourism industry in Florida. Chapter one offers a brief look at the history and anthropology of tourism. Chapter two provides an explanation of heritage tourism and the human motivations that drive it, as well as an examination of several U.S. locations where it is practiced. Chapter three provides a short history of tourism in Florida, an overview of state organizations and agencies that promote and practice heritage tourism, and a look at several of Florida's unique heritage tourism locations.Chapter four is a case study focusing on the heritage tourism industry in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States. St. Augustine presents the best example of heritage tourism in Florida, and offers a perfect setting in which to examine many of the typical problems of heritage tourism. A popular tourist site since the 1800s, St. Augustine followed the lead of Colonial Williamsburg by extensively renovating its historic district in the 1960s. Tourism is the city's only true industry, but the number of tourists that visit annually pales in comparison to non-historical Florida attractions like Disney World. St. Augustine raises unique questions about the neglect of the Hispanic influence in the history of the United States, the American public's fascination with myth and primacy, and the inherent difficulties of maintaining authenticity in any heritage tourism location.

Bakgrund: Sedan 2010 är revisionsplikten för de små företagen i Sverige avskaffad vilket innebär att småföretagare idag har valmöjlighet för frivillig revision. Den främsta anledningen till att slopa revisionsplikten var att revisionen är en onödig, tidskrävande och kostsam aktivitet för småföretag. Många företag som berördes av reformen använde sig av den valmöjligheten vilket medför att 60 procent av småföretag i nuläget har valt bort revision. Dock finns det fortfarande 40 procent som finner att revisionen tillför en nytta och betraktar den som en viktig del av verksamheten. Detta tyder på att företag har delade åsikter om revisionens betydelse och värde och därmed olika benägenhet att välja att genomgå revision. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att få en ökad förståelse för hur revision och småföretagens beslut att behålla revision skapar mening och undersöka bakomliggande meningsskapandefaktorer till valet att fortsätta att ha revision. Metod: Studien har baserats på en kvalitativ forskningsmetod. Undersökningsobjekten utgjordes av sex småföretag inom byggbranschen belägna i Västra Götaland och Jönköpings län. Sex semistrukturerade besöksintervjuer med företagsägare genomfördes för att undersöka fenomenet. Det empiriska materialet har sedan analyserats utifrån analysmodellen för att kunna besvara studiens problemformulering. Slutsats: Respondenterna har en positiv attityd till revision och har olika anledningar till att behålla den. Främsta anledningarna att välja revision är egen trygghet och strävan efter att förvalta verksamheten lagenligt. Vi finner att resultatet visar att revision är en meningsskapande aktivitet som leder till att företaget behåller den och därmed skapar mening med sitt val. Företagen skapar mening med sitt val genom att sända positiva signaler till omgivningen och därmed differentierar sig och skapar en identitet. Tidigare erfarenheter är den främsta meningsskapande faktorn som påverkar beslutsfattande som i sin tur leder till att meningen skapas både retrospektivt och prospektivt. / Background: Since 2010 the provision of statutory audit for small enterprises has been abolished in Sweden. In accordance with this new legislation micro entrepreneur now have the choice for voluntary audit. The main reason behind the abolishment of statutory audit was that auditing as an activity was unnecessary, an administrative burden and a financial cost burden to small enterprises. Many of Swedish enterprises that were affected by the reform of statutory audit exemption used this option of choice, currently it has resulted in that 60 percent of small enterprises have chosen not to have audits. This means that 40 percent of enterprises who still keep their audit find benefits of being audited and view it as an important part of business. This indicates that the enterprises have different opinions about the audit’s importance and value, and thus different tendency to choose to undergo a voluntary audit. Purpose: This study aims to have an increased understanding of how audits and micro entrepreneurs' decision of keeping audits makes sense and to examine the underlying factors of making sense for choosing to continue to have an audit. Methods: This study has a qualitative research method. The respondents of the survey consisted of sex small enterprises in the construction industry, seated in Västra Götaland and Jönköpings County (län). To explore the phenomenon of the study, semi-structured interviews were carried out with owners of six small enterprises. The empirical data was then analysed from our analysis model to answer the study’s research question. Conclusions: The respondents have a positive attitude to audits and have different reasons to keep it. The main reasons behind the choice to continue with audits, are own security and the aim to conduct legal business. We find that the results show that audit is a sense making activity which results in why enterprises keep it, and therefore making sense with their choice of audit. Enterprises make sense of their choice by sending positive signals to environment, and therefore differentiate themselves and make identity. Previous experience is the main factor of sense making which affects the decision-making which in turn leads to that meaning is both retrospective and prospective.

Psykisk ohälsa blir allt vanligare bland svenskar och ökar i synnerhet hos yngre vuxna – men hur kommer det sig att majoriteten fortfarande är friska? Syftet med denna studie var att kartlägga nivåerna av upplevd self-efficacy (SE), känsla av sammanhang (KASAM), respektive framtidsoptimism (FO) hos Umeå Universitets psykologprogramstudenter. Studien undersökte även om det fanns några könsrelaterade skillnader i de tre beroendevariablerna, samt jämförde studenternas skattningar med värden från liknande svenska undersökningar. Resultatet visade att studenter i början av programmet skattar lägre nivåer av både SE och KASAM än de som befann sig i mitten, respektive slutet av utbildningen. Det fanns ingen signifikant könsskillnad. Jämförelserna påvisade en signifikant skillnad mellan psykologprogramstudenterna och deltagarna i tidigare studier. Studenterna skattade lägre nivåer på skalorna än åldersblandade urval, vilket troligtvis beror på att skattningarna tenderar att bli högre med stigande ålder och att rollen som student – i synnerhet när den är ny – kan innebära ökad osäkerhet och påfrestningar. / Mental health problems are becoming more common in the Swedish population, particularly among young adults - but how come the majority is still healthy? The purpose of this study was to map out the levels of perceived self-efficacy (SE), sense of coherence (SOC), and future oriented optimism (FO) of the students studying the psychologist program at Umeå University. The study also examined gender differences, and compared the students' estimates with values from similar Swedish studies. The results showed that students in the beginning of the program estimated lower levels of both SE and SOC than those who found themselves in the middle, and the end. There were no significant gender differences. The comparisons showed a significant difference between the psychologist students and participants in the other studies. The students estimated lower levels than did people with mixed ages, which is probably due to phenomenon that the estimates tend to rise with increasing age. Also, the role of being a student - especially when it is new - may involve increased levels of insecurity and stress.

In this dissertation, we introduce a graph-based model of instance-based, usage meaning that is cast as a problem of probabilistic inference. The main aim of this model is to provide a flexible platform that can be used to explore multiple hypotheses about usage meaning computation. Our model takes up and extends the proposals of Erk and Pado [2007] and McCarthy and Navigli [2009] by representing usage meaning as a probability distribution over potential paraphrases. We use undirected graphical models to infer this probability distribution for every content word in a given sentence. Graphical models represent complex probability distributions through a graph. In the graph, nodes stand for random variables, and edges stand for direct probabilistic interactions between them. The lack of edges between any two variables reflect independence assumptions. In our model, we represent each content word of the sentence through two adjacent nodes: the observed node represents the surface form of the word itself, and the hidden node represents its usage meaning. The distribution over values that we infer for the hidden node is a paraphrase distribution for the observed word. To encode the fact that lexical semantic information is exchanged between syntactic neighbors, the graph contains edges that mirror the dependency graph for the sentence. Further knowledge sources that influence the hidden nodes are represented through additional edges that, for example, connect to document topic. The integration of adjacent knowledge sources is accomplished in a standard way by multiplying factors and marginalizing over variables. Evaluating on a paraphrasing task, we find that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art usage vector model [Thater et al., 2010] on all parts of speech except verbs, where the previous model wins by a small margin. But our main focus is not on the numbers but on the fact that our model is flexible enough to encode different hypotheses about usage meaning computation. In particular, we concentrate on five questions (with minor variants): - Nonlocal syntactic context: Existing usage vector models only use a word's direct syntactic neighbors for disambiguation or inferring some other meaning representation. Would it help to have contextual information instead "flow" along the entire dependency graph, each word's inferred meaning relying on the paraphrase distribution of its neighbors? - Influence of collocational information: In some cases, it is intuitively plausible to use the selectional preference of a neighboring word towards the target to determine its meaning in context. How does modeling selectional preferences into the model affect performance? - Non-syntactic bag-of-words context: To what extent can non-syntactic information in the form of bag-of-words context help in inferring meaning? - Effects of parametrization: We experiment with two transformations of MLE. One interpolates various MLEs and another transforms it by exponentiating pointwise mutual information. Which performs better? - Type of hidden nodes: Our model posits a tier of hidden nodes immediately adjacent the surface tier of observed words to capture dynamic usage meaning. We examine the model based on by varying the hidden nodes such that in one the nodes have actual words as values and in the other the nodes have nameless indexes as values. The former has the benefit of interpretability while the latter allows more standard parameter estimation. Portions of this dissertation are derived from joint work between the author and Katrin Erk [submitted]. / text

The potential to supplement the potable water supply with highly treated municipal wastewater, or sewage, is of increasing interest to water managers and planners in many parts of the world. Seen as an option of last resort as recently as the late 1990s, today engineers commonly consider potable water reuse projects to be as safe as, if not safer than, conventionally sourced drinking water supplies. Nevertheless, only a few cities across the world intentionally augment drinking water supplies with highly treated wastewater. The objective of my dissertation is to examine the governance of potable recycled water planning to better understand how potable recycling projects emerge as a water management strategy. Political aspects of planned potable reuse are often recognized, and even lamented by water planners and industry experts. However, there is a paucity of research that empirically analyzes the political aspects that influence public decisions on potable water projects. This study asks: how are potable water projects made, shaped, and frustrated? To examine the governance arrangements of this emerging water management strategy this research project considers three critical issues: (1) public values and social pressure, (2) the political, legal, and institutional contexts, and (3) the role of subjectivity in defining facts, themes, and solutions. As part of this study I use Q Methodology to explore shared attitudes regarding the principles that should govern the future of planned potable reuse. The overall analyses support the notion that there is more than one way to understand and approach potable water recycling, and that socially-held viewpoints are informed by social-spatial practices. The results reveal two distinct "common sense" shared ways of thinking that pivot on ideas about the appropriate technology and reflect contested visions of ideal society. My dissertation is the first to apply Q Methodology to water recycling in the United States, and I use it to examine the subjective preferences of people who participate in water recycling operations or planning. Results indicate that there are at least two commonly held viewpoints concerning the future of planned potable water recycling, which I have labeled "neosanitarian" and "ecosanitarian." Drawing upon tenets established in the Progressive Era, neosanitarians strongly believe that potable water recycling is a safe, feasible, and appropriate way to expand urban water supplies. Drawing upon tenets established in ecology, ecosanitarians are not opposed to potable water recycling, however they are also interested in radical alternatives to the sanitary status quo. Both neosanitarians and ecosanitarians want to see a more sustainable approach to water planning, yet they disagree on what a more sustainable approach actually looks like in practice. For example, neosanitarians favor microfiltration and advanced wastewater treatment, while ecosanitarians prefer composting toilets and preventative actions. Both neosanitarians and ecosanitarians accept potable reuse as a workable solution, yet there are deep divisions between the two regarding the appropriate scale of technology, the proper level of public participation, and the root cause of water scarcity. While there is wide-spread agreement on certain ends (e.g., sustainability, potable reuse), there is serious disagreement about the appropriate the means to getting there (e.g., appropriate technology, level of public participation). The results illustrate how different "ways of seeing the world" contribute to the technological choices that define appropriate behavior, which, in turn, produces different kinds of communities and environments, and conditions the range of political possibilities.

No description available.

The purpose of this research study aimed to critically examine personal and professional issues related to a small group of visual arts MFA graduate students and myself as we participated in a semester-long course entitled, “Issues of Relevance and Character in the Fine Arts,” at a large public university in the United States. In the form of a colloquium series, the course aimed to explore a graduate student’s developing sense of self and its impact on the different roles he or she often embodies while pursuing an MFA in a School of Art. These roles include those of an individual, a student, an artist, a teaching assistant, and a future professional in the field of the visual arts. Employing a participatory action research methodology, I was also a participant in the study. I regularly documented the oral, written, and visual data that emerged from the participants’ considerations of their immediate circumstances both inside and outside the School of Art as well as their interactions with the reflexive pedagogies utilized in the colloquium sessions. This dissertation also reviewed research studies conducted on graduate student development, students in visual arts MFA programs, the historical development of the MFA degree, as well as faculty members in MFA programs and their curricular and pedagogical practices. Findings indicated the following: First, strong convictions seemed to be intrinsic to the participants’ pursuit of their MFA degrees. They appeared eager to learn about becoming a professional in the field, and each participant expressed interest in teaching the visual arts as instructors in higher education. Second, participating in a course such as “Issues of Relevance and Character in the Fine Arts,” seemed to offer the participants a receptive and reflective platform to convey the voices of the “characters” they embodied as MFA students. For example, the participants appeared to clarify intra- and interpersonal priorities, educational goals and artistic aspirations. Their personal and professional development was influenced by the complex relationships they shared with others in their MFA programs. The MFA participants grappled with the connections and disconnections that appeared to exist between their professors, peers, and themselves. A third theme addressed the impact of my participation within the study. With an established background in both teaching and taking courses in the studio arts and Art and Visual Culture Education, the findings suggest that I was able to empathize with the three other participants on several fronts. Fourth, the findings also address the curricular and pedagogical strengths and limitations of the course. The implications of this research study suggest the need for (a) more action research studies of MFA graduate students, as the methodology seemed to enhance the reflexive and exploratory nature of self-inquiry; (b) a series of required courses within MFA curricula that help graduates to systematically reflect upon their roles as graduate students in terms of their immediate goals, as well as their aspirations for the future; (c) research and professional development opportunities for faculty members so that they might become more aware of the ways that their MFA curricula and instructional practices influence a graduate student's sense of self both positively and negatively; and (d) research on how art and visual culture educators can be involved in assisting MFA graduate students and faculty members develop new perspectives related to their instructional and mentoring practices.

Abstract Title: Organization is communication. Communication is organization. - A case study of the communication between the management and the employees at Save the Children Sweden. (Organisation är kommunikation. Kommunikation är organisation. - En studie av kommunikationen mellan chef och medarbetare på Rädda Barnen) Number of pages: 37, without enclosures Author: Anna Lilius Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Spring 2008 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University Purpose/Aim: The aim of the study is to analyze and evaluate the communication between the management and the employees in the organization today and compare it with the organization's new strategy for internal communication. The questions asked are: 1) How is the communication between management and employees perceived by respective parties today and 2) What, if any, are the differences between the situation today as described in question 1 and the strategy for internal communication. Material/Method: Qualitative research method. By interviewing four members of lower management and four employees, an analysis was made of how the communication between management and employees is perceived today. The results from the interviews were analyzed with the help of current theories within organizational communication, and the compared with the new strategy for internal communication. Main results: While the results from the interviews had some similarities in relation to the importance of information of the organization's goals, they varied between the groups in respect to the degree of dialogue that was experienced. There were also differing results as to the communicational responsibilities of the employees; while the management saw that the employees had a crucial and very important communicational role, the employees themselves did not acknowledge it in any largersense. Keywords: Organizational communication, Internal communication, Dialogue, Sense making