Magister Bibliothecologiae - MBibl / The study investigated the significance of collaboration in the management and preservation of audio-visual archives at the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) in light of the challenges presented by this heritage resource. An exploration of literature has revealed that managing audio-visuals is not an easy part and most cultural heritage institutions in developing counties have been struggling. The underlying premise is that collaboration ensures efficiency and effectiveness in the management and preservation of audio-visual archives

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The complexity of human health and its determinants has been developing gradually and the means to attend to them has gone beyond the scope of a specific health discipline. Advocacy is underway by health stakeholders such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), higher learning institutions and individual scholars to incorporate interprofessional practice initiatives in health as a means of ensuring that health practitioners share ideas communicate and collaborate in order to put forward a comprehensive management plan for patients. These initiatives seek to ensure that a problem that could hardly be solved uniprofessionally is shed light on. The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is among the universities in the world that have incorporated an Interdisciplinary Core Courses Curriculum to be undertaken by all undergraduate students enrolled in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences (FCHS) hence aiming at producing graduates who are collaboration conscious in their practice. This effort adds into the UWC’s endeavor of producing socially responsible graduates. This study analysed the UWC curriculum in order to ascertain its cognitive rigor for delivery of the interprofessional competencies. It further sought to identify whether the effort that the FCHS is putting through the Interdisciplinary Core Courses in having an impact on the perceptions of final year students during their field work placements in various health care institutions. The study also sought to find out whether the health care institutions practice policies are interprofessional practice friendly. Finally, the views and perceptions towards interprofessional collaboration (IPC) of institutional manager’s for institutions where UWC places more than one discipline of students for practice were explored.

This thesis takes a theoretical framework constructed for transdisciplinary research within different natural science disciplines and investigates what kind of new knowledge is produced when this framework is applied to projects at the interface of art and natural science. The main case study is “Sauti ya Wakulima – The Voice of the Farmers”, which involves collaboration with another intervention artist, and with natural scientists and farmers. This is a collaborative knowledge project with small-scale urban as well as rural farmers in Tanzania who have created an online community archive of their farming practices by using mobile phones to upload images and sounds onto a website. The research uses an open-ended participatory methodology that gives the participants as much creative agency as possible within the given power structures and practical and technical parameters. A second work examined is the Climate Hope Garden, an installation by the author in collaboration with ecologists and climate scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ). The installation consisted of a garden grown in climate-controlled chambers based on the climatic conditions proposed by IPCC climate scenarios. The project aimed to enact these scenarios on a spatial and temporal scale to which visitors could relate. Transdisciplinary research has become a key reference point in funding proposals. Despite many references in the literature, and calls for research involving both the natural sciences and humanities to solve complex world problems such as adaptation to climate change, there seems to be little consensus about exactly what kind of knowledge might be produced from such projects, and how transdisciplinary research proposals might be evaluated, especially those at the interface of art and the natural sciences. Several theoretical frameworks have been suggested for designing transdisciplinary research between and within scientific disciplines, or between the natural and social sciences and humanities. The present study applies the framework proposed by Christian Pohl and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn (2007) to a real-world transdisciplinary art-science project in a development context in order to examine the balance between the collective, locally embodied experience and the nomothetic knowledge that arises from it. This thesis found that transdisciplinarity is a different question from that of types of knowledge on the nomothetic-idiographic scale. Transdisciplinarity is a pragmatic question of definitions and inherited boundaries of disciplines. The framework categories do not differentiate between nomothetic and idiographic, just to which part of the problem-solving puzzle they fit. This is perfectly valid for goal-oriented, problem-solving research and can be applied to art-science research, but there are other ways of describing this work, such as using a philosophical description of the knowing process which comes closer to encompassing the richness of the knowledge produced. It is in this sense that the new type of knowledge generated by the transdisciplinary projects required an expansion of the given theoretical framework.

No description available.

Engineering educators have called for research on how best to foster and assess the development of collaborative expertise, particularly around engineering design. Mental models are internal representations depicting understanding. The quality of mental models and their similarity amongst group members have been found to influence performance and group processes in a range of disciplines: For example, flight, military, medical, and business teams. The purpose of this thesis was to examine three attributes (content, structure, within-group similarity) of the mental models of first-year undergraduate engineering students hold about both collaboration and engineering design in the context of a course-based engineering design project. Participants were 251 undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a first-year engineering course. Mental models were measured using relatedness ratings. This exploratory study drew upon network analysis indices and used descriptive, correlational, and comparative statistical techniques. Findings indicate (a) monitoring was viewed as the least central collaborative idea represented in the engineering students’ mental models, (b) quality or expertise is indicated by the level of connection pruning in students’ mental models, (c) performance and the quality of mental models of collaboration are associated, and (d) within-group collaborative mental model compatibility was more related to performance than mental model overlap. This study contributes to engineering education by suggesting mental models of the collaborative process are an essential factor to consider when preparing undergraduate engineering students to engage in collaborative engineering design. / Graduate

Modern software organizations produce increasingly complex and sophisticated products that build on the effort of multiple individuals and teams. This reality highlights the critical importance of collaboration and the support of its various facets, which are still central concerns for software engineering research and practice. Software organizations also aim to motivate their developers and teams and help them be productive. Knowledge work research highlights the importance of autonomy in work design for satisfaction and happiness. The now pervasive adoption of agile methods and advocacy of self-organization have made autonomy and its challenging practical application a mainstream focus for software engineering research and practice. Employee autonomy and effective collaboration are thus essential for software companies to motivate developers and help them deliver successful software products. Yet, essential as it might be for organizations to combine them, autonomy and collaboration seem conceptually and practically at odds with one another; is it possible for people or teams that are working together on something be autonomous? One can imagine teams finding it challenging to organize the development work of autonomous developers. Furthermore, on the organizational level it can be difficult to align autonomous agents towards a desirable company strategy. Finally, management may need to be revisited as a function when individuals or teams have autonomy in their work. Given the complex landscape that software teams are part of in today’s mod- ern organizations, we need to understand how they collaborate in the context of their environment. This dissertation builds on three substantial, diverse case studies based in industry, capturing various ways that several software organizations organize collaborative development work. In the first study I examined how 24 commercial software teams in di↵erent companies organize their development work through their use of GitHub. In the second study I probed how Atlassian scales the practices of its rapidly growing development teams and enacts a culture that keeps them aligned to the strategic goals. In the third study I explored the role of engineering managers at Microsoft and how they support software developers and teams to organize their own work and generate quality outcomes that meet organizational goals. The studies are primarily qualitative and I have used a variety of data collection methods including interviews, observations, documentation review, and surveys. Tension between autonomy and collaboration surfaced in the studies and it be- came the central challenge I investigate in this dissertation. By understanding the meaning of autonomy for the studied organizations, the definition and characteristics of autonomy evolved and, upon synthesis of the findings, I argue that autonomy is not incompatible with collaboration but rather that the two concepts build on each other. I articulate and propose a conceptual framework of collaboration via aligned autonomy for software companies in this dissertation. This represents a holistic view of organizations and includes four areas to consider when making autonomy the foundation of collaboration: team collaboration practices, scaling strategies, cultural values, and manager roles. The framework has implications for the study of collaborative software development by proposing to look beyond the combination of independence and coordination as the basis of collaboration. At the same time, the framework can guide commercial software teams and organizations on how to empower development teams, yet not compromise strategic vision. / Graduate

Les perspectives de collaboration sont aujourd’hui démultipliées par l’irruption des nouvelles technologies dans nos sociétés. Mais dans le domaine de la recherche, des solutions tardent encore à émerger. Par exemple, les outils spécialisés d’assistance à l’Analyse Comportementale (AC) par codage vidéo ne tirent pas parti d’un déploiement en ligne. C O LAB , qui prend la forme d’une application web, offre à divers chercheurs la possibilité de collaborer autour d’un ensemble de données d’expérimentation récoltées en appartement « intelligent ». Dans un premier temps, l’approche privilégiée est l’AC, mais la plateforme se veut évolutive et capable d’accueillir, à terme, des modules supportant un vaste champ d’expertises afin de constituer un cadre fécond pour l’interdisciplinarité. Un modèle de gouvernance inspiré du coopérativisme des plateformes est adjoint à C OL AB pour proposer une exploitation semi-commerciale dont les bénéfices sont mécaniquement réinjectés dans la recherche. L’identification du périmètre du problème et sa décomposition sont l’objet du chapitre 3, dans lequel nous proposons d’étudier les processus associés à l’AC et les expérimentations en environnement intelligent. Le chapitre 4 présente les prototypes réalisés dans une démarche exploratoire ainsi que certains résultats de mesures ergonomiques. Enfin, des spécifications partielles sont offertes dans le chapitre 5 pour projeter la solution dans une forme plus complète.

Abstract The research study discussed in this doctoral dissertation illuminates the interpretative repertoires used by teachers when describing collaborative team work. The focus of the study has been guided by an interest to investigate the ways in which teachers interpret and conceptualise their team work experiences. The topicality of the study is related to current conflicts found between the importance of professional collaboration in todays schools and the challenges of productive teacher collaboration. The theoretical framework of this study approaches teacher team work from three dimensions, namely from the viewpoint of current changes in educational policy, the working culture of teachers, and from the viewpoint of productive teacher collaboration. In this research study, teacher team work is defined as a process during which teachers work together as a team in order to plan, carry out and reflect on their classroom practise. The methodological basis of this research study is based on the social constructionist theory of discourse. This approach has been applied in order to identify what kind of discursive repertoires teachers use when describing collaboration in their team. Repertoires are seen as culturally and socially constructed discourses that specify the possibilities of relevant interpretation in a particular social organisation. The interpretation of repertoires involves the investigation of functions, contexts and dynamics of teachers verbal language. The main goal of the analysis is to clarify and model the complexities of teacher collaboration. Five interpretative repertoires defining teacher team work were identified in the empirical data of this study. These are defined as collegial, practical, group, organisational and hurry repertoires. These repertoires describe the main contents of teachers collaboration of which construction appears to be based on the dynamics between and within them. A joint feature across the repertoires seems to be in an orientation towards an interpretative conflict between restricting and progressive reasons. The different repertoires and their dynamics form an interpretative model of teacher team work through which the teachers interpretations on team work can be evaluated. The challenges of teacher collaboration appear to arise from a disintegration of teacher goals and incentives during team work. Critical incidents of teacher team work seem to be found in collaborative problem solving situations during which cultural assumptions and the meaning of reform efforts are often evaluated. Discrepancies between the teachers interpretative repertoires lead easily to narrow and restricted solutions that can be in conflict with the reform efforts linked to teacher team work. Furthermore, the discrepancies in repertoires appear to strengthen group dynamics that orient towards restricted teacher collaboration. The conflicts in repertoires appear to increase the need to emphasise alikeness, unity and stability among teachers, despite the fact that the potential of team work is usually found in distributed expertise, the construction of global views and in creative learning. This research study suggests that teacher team work is best supported by activating teachers to create joint conditions and possibilities for collaboration. On the basis of this study, positive results in teacher team work are related to teachers active role in solving emerging conflicts and to the adjustment of strong oppositions in teachers targets for collaboration. The lack of community structures in teachers profession and the tendency towards contradiction appear to support dynamics that effectively restrict teacher collaboration. The theoretical model build in this research study on teachers interpretative repertoires of team work serves a good starting point to develop and support teacher collaboration efforts in future studies.

Magister Scientiae (Physiotherapy) - MSc(Physio) / In South Africa, the Education White Paper 6 on Special Needs Education (2001) Building an inclusive education and training system stated that the special schools would be resource centres for ordinary schools that admit learners with disabilities. Occupational therapists,physiotherapists, speech and language therapists (collectively called therapists) had previously been employed in special schools, but under the new structure, would form part of the district-based support teams to provide their support to ordinary and full service schools.Therapists working in an inclusive education system would need to change the focus of their model of support from a medical model of direct support to a health-promoting model of indirect support. The aim of the current study was to determine whether therapists are changing their model of support in building inclusive and health-promoting schools and also to determine the barriers and facilitators they experience in providing their support in an inclusive education system. This study used both qualitative and quantitative methodology.The quantitative component was a non-experimental, descriptive, cross-sectional design,using one questionnaire in a survey. The questionnaire was used to determine the type of support provided to schools. In total, 97 therapists, who worked at special schools in the Western Cape, participated in the study by completing the questionnaire. The test-retest results of the questionnaire indicated that most of questions (63%) showed perfect agreement (Kappa 0.81-1.0). Quantitative data analysis was done by descriptive statistics, using SPSS.The results indicated that therapists were using the medical model of support combined with a more holistic approach using the principles of the health-promoting framework. The qualitative component involved three group interviews, which were held at three different special schools, in three different education districts, with a total of 12 therapists. The group interviews were used to determine the barriers and facilitators that either prevent or promote provision of support. Qualitative data analysis was done by using content analysis with codes and themes to determine barriers and facilitators. The barriers included the following: therapists’ uncertainty about roles; lack of networking, lack of certain competencies and training; delayed response from district; lack of policy;autocratic leadership styles; exclusion from the district-based support team; concern to support learners at special school; therapists being based at the special school; lack of human resources; insufficient time; cost of therapists’ training; education department circuit boundaries affecting communication;negative attitudes of principals and educators; and parents’ non-involvement. The facilitators included therapists’ competencies to fulfil roles; educators’ positive attitude; meetings; training to improve therapists’ skills; the co-ordinating role of the district-based support team;and the supportive role of learner support educator and the principal. This study provides evidence concerning therapists’ roles and the barriers and facilitators which therapists experience regarding their support provision in an inclusive education system.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Ways of enacting effective professional development (PD) and professional learning (PL) of teachers are diverse and often contested and therefore needs sustained inquiry (Schuck, Aubussona, Kearney, & Burden, 2013). The “quick fix” mentality that is endemic to most including those aimed at educational systems leads to very superficial implementation of improvement strategies, including teacher development. These strategies are usually bureaucratically mandated and superficially implemented in a top-down manner. One of the critical drawbacks of such superficial implementation of top-down improvement strategies is that it fails to appeal to teachers because of their historical experiences of such short term and intermittent improvement interventions. This study focussed on the development of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) as a possible continuous professional teacher development (CPTD) model with a promise to deliver effective CPTD. Literature in this regard indicates this model of CPTD as highly effective to support sustained teacher development. The efficacy a PLC is predicated on a collaborative and relational approach to teacher development and professional learning underpinned by a microclimate of commonality. The initiation of PLCs is a complex task. It requires a deep understanding of the processes involved in orientating teachers to processes that involve reflective dialogue and collaborative inquiry. Hence this study sought to investigate experiences of teachers in a PLC established through an alliance involving teachers, didacticians and education officials. This study found that the PLC signifier conveys significant meaning for teachers in terms of their engagement in the PLC. Moreover, teachers’ experiences of the PLC model confirmed the generally accepted features of a PLC. The importance of having a common vision, norms and standards was shown to be an important dimension of the PLC. Besides the fact that the active promotion of this shared vision by the PLC leadership and other education administrators was highlighted, teachers in general accepted the importance of being reflective practitioners. Despite this belief in the value of collaborative reflection, this study found that it does not take place as often as one would expect. This is, to some extent, due to the timetabling arrangements at most schools in the sample. Findings of this investigation provided evidence that it is possible in a PLC to effect a shift from professional development to professional learning. This is consistent with literature in this regard, for example, Benken & Brown (2010) support this argument by indicating that CPTD should be viewed as professional learning that is sustained over time. However, the issue of sustainability is an important challenge. This study revealed that teachers see sustainability as a function of three important variables, namely, recognition by school leadership and administrators, support from the organised teacher movements and subject organisations, and teacher commitment. Important affordances of a PLC identified through this study are relational agency, epistemic agency and a micro-climate of commonality. These affordances are viewed as important enablers of collaborative inquiry and reflective dialogue and underscores the community aspect of a PLC.