The purpose of this thesis is to reflect upon the complex process of educating the sons and daughters of immigrant parents from diverse cultural communities. The study stresses the importance of valuing the language and culture of students in Aotearoa-New Zealand for whom English is another language. It is argued that the discourse of what shall be called ‘technocratic pedagogy’ falls short of meeting this goal. What is needed is more expansive and inclusive programmes that apprehend the social, economic, and political contexts of learning. This is necessary if the students are to continue their education not simply to absorb prescribed information and ideas but to actively understand, question, challenge, and change the school and the classroom. The thesis is written from the perspective of an indigenous Maori teacher trained in technocratic approaches of practice looking to aspects of her intimate culture, Tongan and Samoan ways of representing the world, and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy to transform contemporary education that tends to exclude the adolescents from learning in school. This thesis is not simply another contribution to the ways in which teachers of school English in general think about methodologies and approaches to learning; rather, it is addressed more specifically to those Maori, Tongan, and Samoan teachers in this country who work with and alongside communities who are from the Kingdom of Tonga and the islands of Samoa. Thus, there is great value placed on educational experience with indigenous Tongan and Samoan teachers and students in an educational project referred to in the thesis as a ‘School-within-a-school’. The School-within-a-school refers to a site of education for teaching school English to immigrant adolescents within a large, state, secondary school in the city of Auckland. Particular attention is also paid to educational experience with indigenous teachers in a Curriculum Committee and Maori and Tongan grassroots organisations located within the same school. A fresh approach to teaching English accepts culture as the ground on which to begin to reflect on a practice within a specific context. The teachers who have a dynamic relationship with students argue that culture is a primary site for contradictions and that a revolutionary challenge to technocratic pedagogy is necessary, but not sufficient, to value and actively include the students in school. Since the English language and its attendant practices, values, traditions, and aspirations are the grounds for the students' marginalisation, immediate, consciously organised changes in the teaching beliefs, contents of education, and society at large in Aotearoa are necessary parts of any reintegrative pedagogy. On this account, the belief is that pedagogy is vitally important since it can enable the students to understand the technocratic discourse and draw upon the personal and collective experiences to counter the tendency that denies them full participation in school and the classroom. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications / Timothy R. Steffensmeier / This thesis examines the production of identity within post web 2.0 virtual communities. Second Life, the community which this study focuses on, is a growing home of educational institutions. To better understand the process of constructing identity and community in the hyper-mediated future, this thesis grapples with the complicated process of creating oneself through analyzing the avatar as self and the home as community. Identity appears to continue to be both a liberating and constraining force, and creating oneself is not as simple as buying a new skin. Through a self-reflexive post-colonial virtual ethnographic exploration of the thesis writers experiences in the virtual world, light will be shed on the ways that identity is being shaped in relation to race and gender.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / Lawrence C. Scharmann / This research examines the impact of the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Act on elementary science education in the states of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Elementary teachers (n=928 total for all states) responded to an online survey, which included both closed-ended and open-ended questions pertaining to the time spent on science instruction and any changes made in science instruction since the implementation of NCLB. More than half of these teachers indicated they have cut time from science instruction since NCLB became law. Follow-up questions with regard to why changes were made in science instruction were also included in the survey. The need to increase time for math and reading instruction was a belief expressed by many of the respondents with other respondents stating a member of their administration mandated changes. This research also examines results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for each of these states to determine if the changes made in response to NCLB helped meet the goal of closing the achievement gap between the disaggregated subgroups of gender, race, and socioeconomic status (SES). The data from the NAEP shows only a few significant changes occurred; however, some included a significant increase in the achievement gap.

Seamfulness is a narrative-based and arts-informed inquiry into young women's "depression" as pedagogy. Unfolding in rural Nova Scotia, this research is rooted in my experience of depression as the most transformative event in my life story. While memoirists tell me I am not alone, there is currently a lack of research on personal understandings of depression, particularly for young adult women. Through storytelling sessions and self-publishing workshops, I explored four young Nova Scotian women's depression as a productive site for growth. Participants include four young women, including myself, who experienced depression in their early 20s, and have not had a major depressive episode for at least three years. Aged 29 to 40, we claim Métis, Scottish, Acadian, and British ancestries, and were raised and lived in rural Nova Scotian communities during this time. At the seams of adult education, disability studies, and art, I ask: How do young women narrate experiences of "depression" as education? How do handmade, self-published booklets (or “zines”) allow for exploring this topic as embodied, emotional and critical transformative learning? To address these questions, I employ arts-informed strategies and feminist, adult education, mental health, and disability studies literatures to investigate the critical and transformative learning accomplished by young women who experience depression. Through a feminist poststructuralist lens and using qualitative and arts-informed methods, I situate depression as valuable learning, labour, and gift on behalf of the societies and communities in which women live. I argue that just as zines are powerful forms for third space pedagogy, depression itself is a third space subjectivity that gives rise to the "disorienting dilemma" at the heart of transformative learning. I close with "Loose Ends," an exploration of depression as an unanswered question. This thesis engages visual and verbal strategies to disrupt epistemic and aesethetic conventions for academic texts. By foregrounding participant zines and stories, I privilege participant voices as the basis for framing their experience, rather than as material to reinforce or contest academic theories.

By analyzing surveys, census data, policies and curriculum, it is demonstrated that the Toronto District School Board’s policies for equitable, anti-heterosexist, and anti-homophobic curriculum become stymied by how students and sex are routinely treated as subjects of moral control in curriculum. According to Gilles Deleuze's (1988) interpretation of Baruch Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical works, the distinction between morals and ethics is also the difference between slavery and freedom. Together with theoretical perspectives of sex and sexuality from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, the distinction between morals and ethics works to specify how particular discourses of sex can work to enslave or to empower students. Comprehension and circulation of the distinction between morals and ethics is proposed to increase the potential for curriculum to reciprocate with students’ individual learning needs, support the free and autonomous organization of desire, and promote the possibility of a democratic, inclusive, pluralistic, and secular society.

In this thesis I characterize, through an analysis of some of the key themes and central insights of both Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, what Bernstein (2011) has called a “sea change” in contemporary philosophy. I illustrate how their main insights are profoundly educational and how they offer us an effective means of reconceptualising what education means within the context of our world today. I will particularly stress two important elements of this ‘sea change’ that figure prominently in both Peirce and Gadamer’s work. First, the central importance of situated agency, and second, the affirmation of a relational process ontology. When taken together, these insights entail a conception of education that radically affirms the transformative potential of human agency based on the fecundity of educational experience. This ‘sea change’ will be presented in juxtaposition to the problematic modern/Cartesian framework that is current in educational thought today.

In this thesis I characterize, through an analysis of some of the key themes and central insights of both Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, what Bernstein (2011) has called a “sea change” in contemporary philosophy. I illustrate how their main insights are profoundly educational and how they offer us an effective means of reconceptualising what education means within the context of our world today. I will particularly stress two important elements of this ‘sea change’ that figure prominently in both Peirce and Gadamer’s work. First, the central importance of situated agency, and second, the affirmation of a relational process ontology. When taken together, these insights entail a conception of education that radically affirms the transformative potential of human agency based on the fecundity of educational experience. This ‘sea change’ will be presented in juxtaposition to the problematic modern/Cartesian framework that is current in educational thought today.

In this thesis I will argue that the current predicament we find ourselves in of unsustainable practices can only be addressed through a fundamental shift in the way we view the world and ourselves in it. It is my contention that our most immediate path to achieving this shift is through education. In this thesis I investigate the philosophical basis and justification for education as the impetus for change that will lead to sustainable societies. This inquiry will rethink Freire’s work within our current socio-historical context. Limitations and critiques of Freire’s work will be examined in order to investigate the ability of his work to form the foundation of a paradigm shift towards education that promotes sustainability. The work of C.A. Bowers is used as the basis to interrogate Freire’s work and to re-think some areas to overcome limitations of Freire’s work in his application to Education for Sustainability.

This thesis investigates the practice of high-stakes standardized testing in Nigeria. Examining its colonial histories, its philosophical incongruities with African indigenous education, and its neocolonial foundations, it argues that high-stakes testing in Nigeria facilitates the erosion of a critical African worldview. It demonstrates that through high-stakes testing’s reproduction of social and regional inequalities, the unethicality of its systems and practices as well as its exemplification of Freire’s concept of normative and non liberatory education as the “practice of domination”; high-stakes standardized testing in Nigeria seamlessly fits into the neo-colonial and neoliberal logic of education as a site of psychological colonization and the material exploitation of the people by the ruling elite.

In this thesis I will argue that the current predicament we find ourselves in of unsustainable practices can only be addressed through a fundamental shift in the way we view the world and ourselves in it. It is my contention that our most immediate path to achieving this shift is through education. In this thesis I investigate the philosophical basis and justification for education as the impetus for change that will lead to sustainable societies. This inquiry will rethink Freire’s work within our current socio-historical context. Limitations and critiques of Freire’s work will be examined in order to investigate the ability of his work to form the foundation of a paradigm shift towards education that promotes sustainability. The work of C.A. Bowers is used as the basis to interrogate Freire’s work and to re-think some areas to overcome limitations of Freire’s work in his application to Education for Sustainability.