Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-46).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-162). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ99400

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-169)

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 28, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 56 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-46).

Teaching has a primary focus on engagement with students, but paradoxically, it can be experienced as lonely, private work, in classrooms behind closed doors, with an accompanying sense of deep disconnection from peers. When six experienced teachers sought to counteract this isolation, they formed a group which embarked on a shared journey of reflection and conversation, with the purpose of increasing selfknowledge, clarifying a sense of self as teacher, extending understanding of the selfhood of other teachers, and exposing the deeper sources of meaning underlying the vocation of teacher. This study sought to describe the information, opinions and beliefs which were exchanged among participants within the group and to describe the dynamics within the group. Furthermore, it sought to identify and describe the self-perceived impact of the experience of such a group, on the vocational vitality of each of the participants. Within an interpretivist epistemology a qualitative phenomenological research approach was adopted for the study. Data were obtained from two sources, consisting of transcripts of conversations from the meetings of a collaborative reflective group and from semi-structured individual interviews with group participants. These were analysed using an inductive approach with the aid of qualitative data analysis software: Atlas ti®. Findings from the study show that a high level of trust and a sense of safety were created through the use of guiding principles for meetings. Content chosen for reflective conversations and the general experience of meetings was perceived as providing a rare opportunity for participants to discover their selfhood as teachers. They reported that this understanding was further broadened by exposure to the selfhood of other teachers. Furthermore, members of the talk group reported that participation had resulted in a lowering of their sense of professional isolation and a renewal of vitality in their teaching.

M.Ed. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.A. (Anthropology) / This study explores the role of four teachers’ communicative styles in a multilingual and multicultural classroom focusing on the role of gesture when teaching. To compare their gestural behaviour under similar conditions, I filmed four grade one teachers (two Setswana mother tongue and two Afrikaans mother tongue) teaching the mathematical concept of halving. I classified the gestures and their sematic relation to speech on ELAN using an adapted version of Colletta et al.’s (2009) coding scheme. I found gestures formed by the teachers functioned according to Tellier’s (2006) three roles of ‘teaching gestures.’ They functioned to explain, evaluate and manage. The teachers used mainly representational, performative and deictic gestures when teaching these lessons. They used similar types of gestures, but the manner in which they used their gesture as semiotic resources varied. It appeared that conceptually accurate gestures used at key stages in the learning process aided learning. When used in a conceptually accurate way gesture functioned to mediate the transition from objects to mathematical signs when testing the children’s halving skills using semiotic resources. Overall gestures functioned to integrate, supplement and complement teachers’ speech. The teachers varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds did not appear to influence their gesturing styles, but differences can be noted due to the subject matter, context and content, idiosyncratic styles (pedagogic styles) and the manner in which they structured their lesson in relation to the teaching aids used.

<p> This dissertation explores the ways that instructors at a community college perceive instructor-student rapport in online and face-to-face classes. While instructor-student rapport has been shown to play an important role in student retention and success (Benson, Cohen, &amp; Buskist, 2005; Granitz, Koernig, &amp; Harich, 2009; Murphy &amp; Rodriguez-Manzanares, 2012), it has only recently been examined in the context of online education, and generally only from the student&rsquo;s perspective and not from the point of view of faculty. This study utilized grounded theory methods to create a theory of online instructor rapport building to improve best practices in both online and face-to-face classrooms. Interviews with 22 instructors at a large community college indicated that online rapport-building is often more time-consuming and difficult than face-to-face rapport-building, with autonomy, media richness, and uncertainty reduction, all playing a role in establishing rapport between instructors and their students. Using the collected data, I built on Joseph Walther&rsquo;s Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) by placing it in the context of higher education, and created a Theory of Instructor-Student Rapport Online (TISRO) to explain what makes rapport feel strong, weak, or non-existent, from the perspective of instructors.</p><p>

This is a report of an ethnographic study of a graduate-level Methods course for ESL/Bilingual teachers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The course is organized around task-based, small group, collaborative learning. One of the intriguing aspects of the course is the opportunities it provides for students to learn about Whole Language teaching and collaborative learning both by studying about these topics as part of the course content and by experiencing them as students within the class. This study researched the enactment of collaborative learning by investigating the discourse of one of the course's small groups. My research questions revolved issues of voice--the conditions in which students are both able to speak and to be heard--in the small group. The structure and distribution of voice among group members was a primary research focus. A theoretical framework was developed which allows the concept of voice to be operationalized for purposes of discourse analysis. Voice emerges out of the social interactions of participants engaged in an institutionally situated activity and cannot be reduced solely to the characteristics or performance of an individual (cf. McDermott, 1986). The structure of the group's collaborative dialogue, a set of communal norms operating within the group, and the social context created within the course are investigated through a micro-analysis of the group discourse. The findings reveal a set of norms operating within the small group: active participation, students viewing one another as "resources," and the privileging of members' personal knowledge. These norms, among others, created the social conditions necessary for a truly collaborative dialogue. However, these norms also proved problematic as they fostered a set of communal tensions related to the educational ramifications of muting the instructor's voice and the ways that the discourse structure positioned a Japanese member of the group. Her minimal participation in the group's early meetings, the negotiations which took place to ensure that she would have a voice, and her own revealing views of collaborative dialogue provide rich insights into the complex nature of multicultural, collaborative learning.