The shift towards collegiality is a new setting for many teachers. Most teachers work alone, in isolation from their colleagues and collegial collaboration requires organisational structures. The aim of the study is to describe and analyse upper secondary mathematics teachers’ collective practice,developed in a professional development initiative. This study is a case study and the empirical data is generated through observations and an interview of a group of four teachers at a school who met on a weekly basis throughout a term. Their discussions focused on the mathematical concept of slope in a setting of learning study. This thesis is the case of when mathematics teachers focus discussions on slope and draws on Wenger’s Communities of Practice Perspective, as a unitof analysis, and addresses the question: What are the characteristics of practice when upper secondary mathematics teachers focus discussions on slope in the setting of a learning study? The analysis accounts for characteristics of the aspects of practice, through the coherence of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire in the community of practice. The teachers are engaged around finding small changes in their teaching that could give major effect in students learning. They negotiate what the students need to know in order to understand the relation between Δy and Δx. The characteristic of practice is a conceptual mapping of the concept of slope. It reveals students’ partial understanding of related concepts due to how they were given meaning through previous teaching. The conceptual mapping of slope goes back as far as to the student’s partial understanding of the meaning of subtraction. However, what emerges is in relation to the teachers’ experience of avoiding students’ difficulties with negative difference when teaching slope. It turns out to be a negotiation and a renegotiation of teaching slope for instrumental understanding or conceptual understanding. An overall characteristic of practice is that it develops in a present teaching culture.

Magister Educationis - MEd / The focus of the study is the teacher in the under-resourced schools in the townships of the Western Cape. The purpose is to discover how teachers learn to cope under adverse working conditions. In a systematic way, we try to uncover what workplace stress is, how it is defined and manifests itself. It also deals with the specific reasons why teachers in South Africa, and especially in poorer schools on the Cape Flats, suffer such heavy stress. A convenient way to examine issues of stress was to approach it from different angles or levels: the classroom level, the staff/relationship level, the organizational level and the Departmental (Governmental) level. At these levels the causes, manifestations and solutions to workplace stress were researched. A qualitative study was done to ascertain first hand from the experiences of affected teachers themselves, how they learnt to cope, how this learning came about and what the specific methods or strategies are which they employ to deal effectively with stress. The study concludes with a general summary of the most salient coping strategies that seem to work for most teachers. Recommendations to address stress at the four levels mentioned are finally made. / South Africa

Technology enhancements of the past two decades have not successfully overcome the problem of low motivation in Kindergarten through Grade 12 (K-12). Motivation and math achievement have been identified as major factors contributing to the high school dropout problem (30-50% in traditional/online programs). The impact of extrinsic rewards on achievement and the dropout problem, however, remains a subject of debate. This dissertation seeks first to address this debate, through an investigation of reward system effectiveness in the blended learning environment, on at-risk students with varied intrinsic motivation factor scores. Next, the dissertation explores the importance of fit between students' reward perceptions and reward values when motivating student progress. To this end, the author has developed a new 6-factor motivation orientation model for students in blended learning environments, and a learner-configurable progress-based reward system (PBR) for Learner Content Management Systems (LCMS) based on this model. The hypothesized model was tested for fit with a sample of 353 at-risk high school math students in Miami, Florida. The PBR was developed based upon the findings from interviews with subject matter experts and students, factor and regression analyses used to test hypotheses about learner motivation and predict learner progress. Conclusions from the study informed the design of an integrated PBR. A 6-factor motivation orientation model was found to explain more of the variance (74%) in student motivation than earlier models. Contrary to Deci et al. (1999), hypothesis test results did not confirm adversarial extrinsic rewards/intrinsic motivation relationships. Furthermore, consistent with person-environment fit theory, learners demonstrated superior progress and achievement when extrinsic reward perceptions and values were well aligned. With critical input from flexible learning theorists, teachers, and students, the emerging PBR design may ultimately be integrated through mobile learning applications and social media, within LCMS solutions such as Blackboard, and systems commonly used in K-12, such as Apex. Although beyond the scope of the dissertation, the emerging Web-based design promises to play an important role in engaging a K-12 Community of Practice (CoP), consisting of telecommunications partners, game developers, retailers, and education stakeholders sharing a significant interest in future innovations that address the dropout problem.

This qualitative naturalistic descriptive case study provides an understanding of the characteristics of a community of practice within a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute. This study utilized naturalistic, descriptive case study methodology to answer the research question: What characteristics of a community of practice are revealed by the perceptions and experiences of the fellows of a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute? Data were gathered in the form of interviews, focus group, observations, field notes, and participant reflective pieces. Peer debriefing, triangulation, thick rich description, as well as member checking served to establish credibility and trustworthiness in the study. Bracketing, a phenomenological process of reflecting on one's own experiences of the phenomenon under investigation was utilized as well. The findings of this study point to five analytic themes. These themes, ownership and autonomy, asset-based environment, relationships, socially constructed knowledge and practices, and experiential learning, intertwine to illuminate the three essential components which must be present for a community of practice to exist: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire. Participants' portraits provide a description of their unique experiences as they moved fluidly between the periphery and core of the community of practice.

A great deal has been written in the management literature concerning the field of knowledge management. Some of that literature has focused on the use of stories and storytelling, including for the sharing of knowledge. However, the field of knowledge management is relatively immature in South Africa. In particular within that field, there is not a clear understanding of the use of stories and storytelling for knowledge sharing within the country. The purpose of the study was to improve that understanding through research into a case study within the South African mining industry, with a focus on world-class performance. To assist in the performance evaluation of the case study organisation, a framework for world-class performance was developed and used as an analytical tool in conjunction with a research instrument that was based on the findings of the non-empirical research into the fields of knowledge management and stories and storytelling. The empirical research then focused on the activities of a particular community of practice within the case study organisation and sought to understand the way in which stories and storytelling were used to support the sharing of knowledge in the organisation, as a contributor to world-class performance. Whilst conducting the empirical research, assessment and analysis, it was identified that the case study organisation made use of a number of practices and tools to support the use of stories and storytelling, in particular graphical representations (storyboards) of the stories to complement their oral delivery. The analysis of the case study data indicated that a significant opportunity existed to improve the extent of world-class performance for the use of stories and storytelling and a number of recommendations were made in that regard. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Information Science / unrestricted

abstract: ABSTRACT Faculty and staff can create barriers by not understanding their role in student success. This study began with an artifact analysis of 20 documents to better understand how faculty and staff at Concordia University Texas were operationalizing student success. The results of the artifact analysis showed a lack of recorded dialogue around student success at regular business meetings, as well as pattern of deficit language approach to policy and procedure in the student handbooks Next, this study evaluated the impacts of using a Community of Practice as a change agent to help faculty and staff better understand their roles in student success and specifically to establish a definition of student success. Using a mixed method, action research approach, results showed that the Community of Practice was successful in terms of transfer or knowledge and creating a sense of purpose for participants regarding their role in student success. Results showed that participating in a Community of Practice was successful in helping faculty and staff not only understand their own role in student success, but understand their place among others in the unified goal to help students succeed. The Community of Practice participants completed the research with a better understanding of how and why collaborating with different departments enables faculty and staff to better help students. Additionally, the participants concluded that a visual reminder of student success (figurines, students stories, student pictures) ensured that student success was the first thing they thought about when completing their daily work. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2020

WhatsApp’s growing presence in the developing world has led to a grassroots movement of messaging groups designed to serve relevant needs for small scale farmers in Kenya. These groups provide the means for as many as 256 members to ask questions, share experiences and solutions, gain access to information, and access markets for their products. This research project examines the use of these WhatsApp groups for agriculture in Kenya. The project seeks to understand the existing barriers to participation, and the use, benefits, and shortcomings of these groups for their members. Research findings indicated that farmers’ overall access to smart phones is a substantial barrier to their participation in groups for agriculture, and these barriers are expectedly more difficult for the poorest and most vulnerable (in which intersectional poverty creates additional barriers). However, while each group can vary significantly, members report that WhatsApp groups as a whole overwhelmingly benefit their livelihoods and practice. Systemic and societal change occurs when the experiences and successes of one individual are shared with a larger group – leading to rapid and shared prosperity. As each individual learns a new skill, technique, or input, the group must also learn and benefit from that knowledge. WhatsApp provides the means and the platform for this type of information exchange to occur at scale, and with individuals who would otherwise be unlikely to communicate. This research project examines the emerging use of grassroots WhatsApp groups as a potential example of this positive and inclusive approach to extension and development in agricultural communities.

Today linguistic hybridity is often conceptualized as translanguaging. The present study of translanguaging was a linguistic ethnography, which meant investigating cultural issues as well as linguistic practices. The focus was on bilingual speakers of Vietnamese and English, two "named" languages that differ considerably in morphology, syntax, and orthography. This study, conducted over four and a half months, was situated in the Vietnamese Student Organization of a U.S. university, and it included 37 participants. The research was intended to answer two questions: what forms of translanguaging did these bilinguals use? and what reasons did they provide for instances of translanguaging? In capturing the language use of this community, my role was participant-observer, which entailed observing and audio-recording conversations in three kinds of settings: group meetings, social gatherings, and Facebook communications. Additional insights came from discourse-based interviews, focused on instances of translanguaging by 10 individuals. In the group meetings and Facebook conversations, it was conventional for the major language to be English, whereas in the social gatherings it was Vietnamese. My attention in analyzing these interactions was on patterns of translanguaging that occurred within sentences and those occurring outside sentence boundaries. Overall, most translanguaging occurred intra-sententially, as single words from one language were segmented within a sentence being spoken or written in the other. As to extra-sentential forms, this translanguaging in the group meetings mainly took the form of Vietnamese honorifics, and Facebook conversations included some extra-sentential double postings. Participants provided reasons for translanguaging that included community factors, discourse-related factors, and individual-related factors. This inquiry provides further insights into the multi-competences of bilingual individuals. The Vietnamese-English bilinguals drew flexibly from their linguistic repertoires, merging two languages that are quite different. Use of hybridized language was conventional for them and was central to their practices. This linguistic hybridity was a mutuality—one of the ways in which these students were, in fact, a community.

Denna studie har syftat att bidra med en förståelse av arbetsplatskonflikters socialiserande funktioner samt belysa konflikter som en vardaglig handlingsrepertoar inom organisationer. Jag ämnade att undersöka hur anställda socialiserades in i de konflikter som uppstod på arbetsplatsen och vad dessa konfliktförlopp hade för betydelse för delaktiga individer. Studiens empiriska material har bestått av semistrukturerade intervjuer, i vilket målgruppen har varit kvinnor tillhörande kvinnodominerade serviceyrken i Sverige. De kvinnor som intervjuats har berättat om egenupplevda konflikter på deras arbetsplatser. Analysen har bearbetats med utgångspunkt i Wengers (1998) teori om praktikgemenskaper samt Hochschilds (2012) studie om känsloarbete. Resultaten visade av de normer och värden som fanns inom arbetsgruppen var avgörande för kvinnornas sätt att agera i konflikter. I de arbetsgrupper där arbetsrelationer hölls på en formell nivå och emotionella band inte var framträdande förekom få meningsskiljaktigheter samt neutrala konfliktageranden när diskussioner uppstod. I de arbetsgrupper där emotionella band mellan kollegor var starka utagerades konflikter mer irrationellt och det fanns en rädsla för att ifrågasätta sociala strukturer inom gemenskapen. Detta resulterade i att konflikter ofta undveks och att individer istället använde ett selektivt utagerande av emotioner, förmedlade till specifika kollegor. Resultaten visade att den strategiska kommunikationen som förekom på samtliga arbetsplatser både hade en sammanhållande funktion samt skapade grupperingar och osäkerheter inom arbetsgruppen. Slutligen visade resultaten på att en specifik hantering av emotioner påverkade ageranden i konflikter negativt samt att det fanns starka behov av att ventilera emotioner i samband med konflikter. I de arbetsgrupper där emotioner visade sig framträdande flydde man från konflikter med orsak av att nära relationer gjorde konflikter med kollegor mer komplexa. När konflikterna sedan iscensattes blev emotionella uttryck dominerande i konflikterna. / The aim of this study was to contribute to an understanding of the socializing functions of workplace conflicts and illustrate these conflicts as everyday repertoires within organizations. I intended to research how employees could be socialized into conflicts in the workplace and what these conflicts meant for the individuals involved. The study's empirical material consisted of semi-structured interviews, in which the target group has been women belonging to women-dominated service professions in Sweden. The interviews focused on their personal experiences of conflicts in their workplaces. The analysis has been based on Wenger's (1998) theory communities of practice and Hochschild's (2012) study on emotional work. The results demonstrated by the norms and values ​​that existed within the working group were crucial to individual’s way of acting in conflicts. In the working groups where relationships were held on a formal level and the relationships between colleagues were not personal, the conflicts were few and small conflicts did not grow into major conflicts. In the working groups where emotional ties between colleagues were strong, conflicts became more irrational and there was a fear of questioning social structures within the community. As a result, conflicts were often avoided and individuals instead used a selective expression of emotions, conveyed to specific colleagues. The results showed that the strategic communication that went on in all the workplaces had a cohesive function but also created groupings and uncertainties within the workgroups. Finally, the results showed that a specific way of handling emotions affected conflict behavior negatively and that there was a strong need to ventilate emotions related to conflicts. In those working groups where emotional relationships between colleagues dominated, they often escaped from conflicts because close relationships made conflicts more complex. When conflicts took place, emotional expressions became dominant in the conflicts.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine brought the intensifying interest in open science to national attention when it joined enthusiastic scientists to introduce and host an Amazon-like rating forum on PubMed—the world's largest database of indexed biomedical and life sciences literature. The result was PubMed Commons. In June 2013, the commenting forum was introduced for open discussion about published scientific literature as part of a three-pronged approach to improve research rigor, reproducibility, and transparency. In Feb. 2018, the forum was unexpectedly discontinued. This retrospective explanatory case study research asked the question, "What happened on the way to the forum?" Answers came from a variety of resources using multiple methodologies for data collection and analysis. Historical data from PubMed Commons' 7,629 comments and 1,551 commenters; key informant interviews with PubMed Commons editors; and a systematized search for published articles, gray literature; and social media content about PubMed Commons were analyzed using computer-mediated discourse analysis and a social network analysis. Results from the quantitative content analysis described a forum with little participation, and the qualitative content analysis demonstrated that active forum members were focused primarily on providing links to other information resources and discussing aspects of post-publication peer review. The social network analysis revealed a disconnected network, which was supported by a sociogram showing a community of independents with only seven small clusters. Findings pointed to 11 factors that affected the forum's adoption and use. Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory scaffolds a forum innovation agility model developed from this work to offer a better understanding of organizational processes and to aid organizations interested in introducing and managing a similar forum. PubMed Commons was a missed opportunity. No comparable alternative is available to promote open science and serve as a tool for the expected paradigm shift in the way we do scholarly communication in science.