The purpose of this qualitative study is to illustrate how experienced teachers of students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders (EB/D) working in middle school settings conduct their work. In the current context of public education, the work of teaching students with EB/D is considered stressful and undesirable by many individuals and has resulted in a shortage of adequately prepared and experienced special educators willing to teach this vulnerable population (Westat, 2002). In response to the shortage, school districts may resort to hiring improperly prepared individuals-- a practice that impedes the provision of an appropriate education to students with disabilities (Kauffman, 2001; Turnbull & Turnbull; 1998). In order to understand the work of those special educators who have remained in the field of teaching students with EB/D, this exploratory case study examined the work of four experienced special education teachers teaching students with EB/D in various instructional settings in middle schools in Virginia. Activity theory (Engeström, 1999) provided the conceptual framework in this study. The results of this study support the current research literature on the work of teaching students with EB/D. The teachers spent their workday (a) supporting their students’ progress in the general education curriculum, (b) developing their students’ prosocial skills, and (c) fulfilling multiple non-teaching related duties. Efforts to teach their students were impeded by (a) difficulties in working relationships with certain general education teachers and (b) meeting the complex responsibilities of being a special educator in the current context of public middle schools. / Ph. D.

This research examines the relationship between race and exposure to online hate material. The utilization of websites, weblogs, newsgroups, online games, radio broadcasts, online newsletters and a myriad of other online platforms has proliferated race-based hate groups in the US (Shafer 2002). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of hate groups has been on the rise since the 1990s and continues to gain momentum with the advent of social media (Potok 2017). Exposure to separatist ideologies has propelled these radical rightwing groups into the mainstream by way of social media platforms, as they are "the most active producers of online hate material" (Costello, Hawdon, Ratliff, and Grantham 2016: pg. 313). That dissemination of radical rightwing ideologies, such as white supremacy, racial purity and racial solidarity, exists is not enough in understanding what individuals are exposed to race-based hate ideologies in online platforms. Exposure is the key to understanding the growth of these race-based hate groups and ways of countering the efforts to disseminate radical rightwing ideologies due to its relationship to hate group emergence and persistence. More so, understanding how these groups target individuals and recruit through social networking sites can provide insight into exposure. Exposure to hate material aids groups in recruiting new members and victimizing potential targets. In the same manner, exposure to hate material is victimization of those who are exposed. In a sample collected by Costello et al. (2016a), of those exposed to hate material online nearly half centered on race. Thus, it is tantamount that research be conducted examining the role that race plays in determining who is exposed to hate material online, and how individuals react to hate material based on race. This dissertation will examine the importance of exposure to hate. Specifically, this dissertation will analyze survey data gathered from the Online Extremism Survey using logistic regression analysis and linear regression to understand exposure to hate material online and routine activity theory. / Ph. D.

Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, commercialization (e.g., patenting discoveries, licensing technologies, and developing startups) has become increasingly prominent at universities across the nation. These activities can be beneficial for universities as mechanisms to increase research dollars, unrestricted funds, student success, institutional prestige, and public benefit, while developing an innovation and entrepreneurship culture. However, although faculty members are a key source of human capital within the university commercialization process, studies of faculty members' experiences with university commercialization are scarce. To better understand these experiences, I conducted a multiple case study exploring engineering faculty members' commercialization experiences at three land-grant universities, using Activity Theory as an analytical framework. Each case consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 5-6 engineering faculty members, 1-2 university administrators, and a technology transfer officer, as well as university commercialization documentation (e.g., university commercialization policy documents and web resources). I analyzed the data using provisional coding (activity system elements, supports, challenges, and affect), inductive coding, and within and cross-case analysis techniques. The study's findings include characteristics of the university commercialization activity system, supports for and challenges to faculty engagement, and provisional recommendations to enhance the university commercialization work system. Key findings include faculty members' desire to make an impact with their work, lack of training and expertise relative to commercialization, conflicting attitudes towards commercialization from colleagues and administrations, and tensions about the place of commercialization within the university's mission. This study highlights an important and underrepresented voice in university commercialization research—"the voice of the individual faculty member. By understanding how faculty members experience university commercialization, university leaders are able to make well-informed decisions regarding the university's mission, culture, work structure, resource allocation, and incentive systems related to this increasingly-prominent faculty activity. Moreover, faculty members and industry collaborators interested in university commercialization can use the study's results to make decisions regarding if and how to best proceed with university commercialization activities. Accordingly, this work not only contributes to faculty work system design, but it also contributes a unique systems research approach to the university commercialization literature. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty members' previous writing experiences in a variety of activity systems shaped their current understanding of writing, as well as to analyze the ways in which this understanding manifests itself in the courses they teach.  Using a survey, interviews, genre analysis, and class observations, I aimed to gain an understanding of the ways that faculty members across disciplines transferred and/or recontextualized their own disciplinary writing knowledge.  Previous research on faculty writing knowledge is often limited to participants at universities with long-standing, formalized WAC programs.  Through nine case-study analyses of faculty across disciplines, this study expands the scope of previous research by focusing on a more diverse set of faculty to contribute to our knowledge of how faculty members negotiate their own understanding of writing with their goals for student writing.  The participants' ability to transfer writing knowledge was largely determined by the way they understood their own processes of learning to write. Those who understood learning to writing from a social interactive perspective transferred rhetorical knowledge among activity systems, while faculty who understood learning to write from a text-based ideology relied on their knowledge of form, grammar and/or mechanics.  Participants who shared a writer-based understanding, on the other hand, were resistant to the notion that writing can be taught.  Though not entirely inclusive, these unique understandings of how writers develop manifest themselves in the ways disciplinary faculty include writing in their courses. This study demonstrates the nuanced and complex reasons for faculty choices in relation to student writing and encourages WAC/WID writing scholars to consider the complexities of faculty understandings of writing knowledge. / Ph. D.

Yes / The resilience of systems derives from many inputs, relating both to design and to operational planning. In the latter context the role and effective functioning of the ‘blue light’ emergency services is often critical. The judgements and decisions that have to be made are complex and time-constrained, often undertaken before all the critical information that might be wanted is available. Recent developments in decision research, notably the on-going dual process debate, suggest that the process of decision making adopted is often more complex than had previously been appreciated and strongly linked to both context and individual factors, notably expertise. In the light of such developments, this paper presents an empirical study of emergency responders working in realistic, non-laboratory conditions. It argues that recent moves to recognise the need to support, through the way in which information is provided, more intuitive as well as analytic modes of thinking in decision support are timely and that an important research agenda exists linking decision support design with a fuller understanding of exactly how individuals make their decisions in emergency conditions. / This research was funded by ESRC and 1Spatial, a Cambridge-based software company specialising in high volume, business critical data.

Grooming is an internet based crime that affects children over the world, and during the covid-19 pandemic, children have been disproportionately affected and in specific risk for becoming targeted. While Sweden's covid-19 strategy differs from other countries in Europe and the rest of the world, since there has not been a national “lock-down”, however, schools have temporarily implemented distance. This study uses a qualitative approach to examine the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on grooming, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with people working as police officers and social services workers. The material collected from the interviews was analyzed using the routine activity theory and the cyber-lifestyle routine activity theory. The study found that grooming did not appear to increase in Sweden due to the covid-19 pandemic, although there was a concern about it when the pandemic began. It also found that digital resilience is required to protect vulnerable children when societal crises arise. / <p>2021-01-14</p>

This study is about the children in a fourth and fifth grade Swedish primary school class and their play during breaktimes. The study takes the theoretical point of departure in seeing children’s breaktime play as a cultural historical activity. The overarching research problem concerns breaktime play emphasising the phenomena of children’s negotiation, participation and agency. It concerns how breaktime play takes shape and which capacities children possess, who are breaktime play literate, to participate and to uphold play. What is the significance of children’s capacity to negotiate rules and roles? How do they use culturally, historically developed objects and motives to transform and expand established versions of play and games? The research problem foregrounds how the play activity emerges, is carried out and how participation is enabled through negotiation. The aim of the study is to explore the phenomena of children’s negotiation and agency in dialectical change processes in breaktime play activity. The questions explored are:  RQ: What are the mechanisms in dialectical processes of collectividual action and collective object transformation in children’s play activity?  How does the play activity emerge? How does the object of the play activity transform? The data consists of field notes from participant observations and of audio memos. Audio memos, short smartphone recordings of the children’s verbal reflections on aspects of their actions and experiences, were continuously produced to get the children’s verbal reflections in the immediacy of acting. Various documents and interviews form additional data. The findings show how the children negotiate involvement, rules, role set-up and the hierarchy of demands as a continuous elaboration of the conditions to establish and maintain boundaries of playfully accomplished activity. The notion of negotiagency is introduced, uncovering that breaktime play literacy does not occur in the children’s minds apart from social interaction but develops in and through negotiation. Negotiagency emerges and is realised when the children are engaged in a playfully accomplished activity. The dialectical processes of collectividual action and collective object transformation in playfully accomplished activity are enabled through negotiation. This whole mechanism is referred to as Dialectics of Negotiagency.

Physiotherapy student practice education, the focus of this thesis, is a highly valued, yet scarcely researched component of pre-registration physiotherapy education. Moreover, the student voice is largely absent from existing research. In this study, 14 physiotherapy students’ perspectives of practice education were gained through email communications (n=13) and face-to-face interviews (n=12). To provide an in-depth and provocative view, physiotherapy student practice education was analysed as a type of activity system, employing concepts borrowed from cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Interacting activity systems, objects, players, rules, norms, divisions of labour, mediating artefacts, intra- and inter-systemic contradictions were explored and identified. The findings show that assessment skewed students’ object motives. Practice educators were positioned as powerful gatekeeper/assessor gift-holders. Physiotherapy students enacted ‘learning practice’ norms, such as extensive reading, and adopted the position of practice educator-pleaser. Students sometimes refrained from speaking when they wanted to, for example, to challenge unprofessional staff behaviour. Students were reluctant to show themselves as learners, feeling instead that they needed to present themselves as knowledgeable, able practitioners. However, students did not easily recognise themselves as able contributors to practice. For students, knowledge for practice was focussed on patient assessment and treatment, but the level, depth and volume of knowledge required was perceived differently across distinctive practice areas. Intra- and inter-systemic contradictions, such as the skewing of student object motives towards assessment, and away from whole-patient-centred care, are highlighted. The study findings therefore have implications for patient care as well as for the object of physiotherapy student practice education, student learning and assessment and workplace learning. A cross-profession review of the object of physiotherapy student practice education, to include the voice of service users, students, practice educators, HEIs and service providers, is recommended. A review of physiotherapy student practice-placement assessment, which seemed to be at the core of PSPE dynamics and conditions, is recommended, to take account of the extent to which assessment can influence students’ PSPE object motives, PE/student dynamics and student/patient interactions. Developmental Work Research is proposed as a way forward for future research in this area.

The thesis aims to contribute to the research on the management and use of information in organisations by providing a holistic understanding of the various information practices and needs as well as attitudes towards information at different levels in the broader socio-historical context of a specific organisation. To this end, findings and approaches from research traditions in library and information science, management studies and organisational theory are combined in an activity-theoretical approach with some neo-institutional aspects. An empirical study using this theoretical framework investigates information activities in a Swedish youth organisation with the aim of contributing to peace and democracy. This study aims to answer research questions concerning how the individual and collective information practices of its Board members and the development of organisational strategies and routines for information activities are related to each other and to the socio-historical context of such organisations. The empirical data was gathered, firstly, through a qualitative case study of one youth/peace organisation, in which 14 members from two Boards were interviewed, 6 meetings were observed and e-mail communication and organisational documents were studied. The results were used in two questionnaires to Board members in a total sample of 9 similar youth/peace organisations to explore the assumption that a common socio-historical context would result in similar activities and constraints. Environmental scanning, seeking information, storing and retrieving information, creating information products, disseminating information to the environment and sharing information within the organisation are identified as distinct information activity systems in the case organisation that could be combined in a broader information management activity system. The outcome of Board members' individual, collective and organisational actions within these activities is mediated by a combination of how they perceive the objects, the available tools and resources, the chosen or emerging division of labour, organisational and collective aims and individual goals, and the explicit rules and implicit values that could be applied to the action in an organisational context. Most strategies are emergent in nature and start in a bottom-up process. A basic contradiction stemming from the socio-historical context of youth/peace organisations underlies the tensions in information activities. Board members have to make sense of contrasting identities in which empowerment is contrasted with professionalism as a basis for the organisations' legitimacy. The theoretical contribution of this study is the creation of two activity theoretical models for the analysis of information activities in organisations. The models provide a way to discuss the links between individual and collective information behaviour and organisational information management in a holistic perspective. They raise questions about the nature of these relationships and encompass the contextual aspects of information practices thus leading to a greater understanding of the ways in which information management develops in specific organisational contexts.

The aim of this thesis is to develop theories and formal methods to endow a computing machinery with capabilities to identify, represent, reason and evaluate complex activities that are directed by an individual’s needs, goals, motives, preferences and environment, information which can be inconsistent and incomplete. Current methods for formalising and reasoning about human activity are typically limited to basic actions, e.g., walking, sitting, sleeping, etc., excluding elements of an activity. This research proposes a new formal activity-centric model that captures complex human activity based on a systemic activity structure that is understood as a purposeful, social, mediated, hierarchically organized and continuously developing interaction between people and word. This research has also resulted in a common-sense reasoning method based on argumentation, in order to provide defeasible explanations of the activity that an individual performs based on the activity-centric model of human activity. Reasoning about an activity is based on the novel notion of an argument under semantics-based inferences that is developed in this research, which allows the building of structured arguments and inferring consistent conclusions. Structured arguments are used for explaining complex activities in a bottom-up manner, by introducing the notion of fragments of activity. Based on these fragments, consistent argumentation based interpretations of activity can be generated, which adhere to the activity-centric model of complex human activity. For resembling the kind of deductive analysis that a clinician performs in the assessment of activities, two quantitative measurements for evaluating performance and capacity are introduced and formalized. By analysing these qualifiers using different argumentation semantics, information useful for different purposes can be generated. e.g., such as detecting risk in older adults for falling down, or more specific information about activity performance and activity completion. Both types of information can form the base for an intelligent machinery to provide tailored recommendation to an individual. The contributions were implemented in different proof-of-concept systems, designed for evaluating complex activities and improving individual’s health in daily life. These systems were empirically evaluated with the purpose of evaluating theories and methodologies with potential users. The results have the potential to be utilized in domains such as ambient assisted living, assistive technology, activity assessment and self-management systems for improving health.