Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed September 26, 2006. Dissertation Committee: George Padavil, Dianne Gardner (co-chairs), James Palmer, Norma Kelly. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-198) and abstract. Also available in print.

One way critical educators can understand and orient to Paulo Freire's work and the tradition he inspired is by turning their attention to the alienation and affirmation of what he describes as the "ontological vocation of being human." In this dissertation, I read across Freire's work in order to synthesize what I argue are three central commitments of his ontological vocation: 1) that the self/world are sociohistoric and 2) unfinished, and 3) that the human presence is historic. Next, I read Paulo Freire's more famous "banking" and "problem-posing" models of education through the lens of these commitments in order to demonstrate each as metonyms that stand in for his larger interests in alienating and humanizing cultural action. Finally, I argue that Deanna Fassett and John T. Warren's critical communication pedagogy can be a generative framework through which teachers and researchers can recognize and arrest the alienation of the ontological vocation.

In this study, I explored critical approaches to social justice in student affairs. I sought to understand how student affairs administrators understand and communicate about social justice. Furthermore, I studied how a critical paradigm informs the work of student affairs practitioners in their everyday lives, and what we might learn from the experiences of professionals who ground their work in such paradigms. This was a qualitative study, in which I used snowball sampling as the method for recruiting participants. I conducted semi structured interviews with 14 full time student affairs administrators, who I refer to as critically-oriented student affairs administrators. Consistent with critical theory, I employ a language of critique and a language of possibility in this dissertation. The findings in this study suggest that there is much work to be done in more productively addressing social justice in student affairs. The lived experiences the participants in this study shared provide insight into living out critical commitments to social justice in the student affairs field. Furthermore, there is space in the student affairs field for more in-depth analysis and consideration for what it means to be "critical" in the student affairs profession.

Critical illness is typically associated with a catabolic stress state in which patients commonly demonstrate a systemic inflammatory response that brings about changes in their body systems. Changes in the body systems make the critically ill dependent on mechanical ventilation and inotropic support for longer periods in order to survive. However, this inflammatory response can be attenuated by the timely introduction of nutritional support to provide energy and nutrients to diminish catabolism and promote anabolism. The result could be a decrease in the morbidity and mortality rates, as well as the financial burden on the patients, institutions and the state. Since registered nurses initiate and utilise feeding protocols to achieve target goals, there is a strong need for nurse-initiated feeding protocols. These protocols should be coupled with a comprehensive nurse-directed nutritional educational intervention that will focus on their safe and effective implementation. This focus on nursing nutrition education represents a major shift away from traditional education which has focused on dietitians and physicians. Evidence suggests that incorporating guideline recommendations into nurse-initiated protocols for starting and advancing enteral feedings is an effective strategy to improve the delivery of nutritional support. The study was aimed at exploring the provision of nutritional support to critically ill hospitalised patients by registered nurses to identify and describe possible gaps in the practice, through determining the potential relationship between the provision of nutritional support and characteristics of its providers. A quantitative, descriptive correlational study was undertaken. Seventy registered nurses working in neonatal/paediatric and adult critical care units in two public and three private hospitals in East London in the Eastern Cape participated in the study. The sample also included public critical care students. The results showed that registered nurses in private hospitals have more knowledge about the importance of nutritional support than their public hospital counterparts and students. The mean score was on the question was 80.3% with the highest score of 91% which was for the private hospital nurses, followed by 77.2% for public and 71.4% for students. Again, the mean score for knowledge on timing of initiating nutritional support was 48%, the highest score being 69.4% for students followed by private hospital nurses with 49.6%. Close to 63% (n = 44) of these nurses were either unsure about the availability of nutritional protocols or clearly attested to their non-availability. This is seen as an issue of concern because a protocol is meant to be a standard document with which all members of the ICU should be familiar. It is meant to guide and facilitate the manner of working in the unit. While facilitation of maintenance of nutritional support to patients is the responsibility of registered nurses, according to Regulation 2598(1984) section 45 (1) (q) of the South African Nursing Council, 68% (n = 48) of the respondents felt that this was in the practising scope of doctors and dietitians. The study concluded that the nurses are knowledgeable about the importance of nutritional support but knowledge gaps have been identified as far as the timing of initiating nutritional support is concerned. Some attested to unavailability of standard guidelines that are tailored into protocols guiding the provision of nutritional support by registered nurses in the critical care units. Nutrition should be prioritised as an important therapy for improving the outcomes of critically ill patients. Nurses need to analyse its provision, identify barriers to nutritional strategies and engage in nutritional education to empower themselves regarding the practice. Most importantly, there is a need for nurse-initiated nutritional protocols that are tailored from the broad nutritional guidelines and aligned with the local context and ways of practising. Nutritional support should be included as a key component of the curriculum in academic programmes that specialise in critical care nursing.

A graph G is diameter 2-critical if its diameter is two, and the deletion of any edge increases the diameter. Murty and Simon conjectured that the number of edges in a diameter 2-critical graph of order n is at most n2/4 and that the extremal graphs are complete bipartite graphs with equal size partite sets. We use an association with total domination to prove the conjecture for the graphs whose complements have diameter three.

A set S of vertices in a graph G is a total dominating set of G if every vertex of G is adjacent to some vertex in S. The minimum cardinality of a total dominating set of G is the total domination number γt(G). The graph G is 3t-critical if γt(G)=3 and γt(G+e)=2 for every edge e in the complement of G. We show that no bipartite graph is 3t-critical. The tripartite 3 t-critical graphs are characterized. For every k<3, we prove that there are only a finite number of 3t-critical k-partite graphs. We show that the 5-cycle is the only 3t-critical K3-free graph and that there are only a finite number of 3t-critical K4-free graphs.

A graph G is diameter 2-critical if its diameter is 2, and the deletion of any edge increases the diameter. Murty and Simon conjectured that the number of edges in a diameter 2-critical graph of order n is at most n24 and that the extremal graphs are complete bipartite graphs with equal size partite sets. We use an important association with total domination to prove the conjecture for the graphs whose complements are claw-free.

The effect of teaching critical thinking as part of a continuous progress packet in American history was studied at Cedar High School during the 1969-70 school year. An experimental group using the critical thinking packet was compared with a control group that used a continuous progress packet that taught only American history. The dependent variables for the study were the STEP (Sequential Test of Educational Progress), Social Studies portion, and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. No statistically significant differences were found between the groups in either American history or critical thinking. Differences in critical thinking ability, though not significant statistically, seemed to indicate the desirability of further research in this area. It was also recommended, as a result of this study, that further research be conducted to develop and evaluate new methods of assessing student competence in seminar situations.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Aubrey A. Huber, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Speech Communication, presented on March 29, 2013 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: HELP AS COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICE: A CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A TEACHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Nathan P. Stucky As a scholar studying critical communication pedagogy, I am interested in the ways help is produced in communication by future educators. I take Stewart's (1995) claim seriously that words are not merely representational, but instead produce reality. Working from this paradigm, I examined help-producing communication and its implications to theorize help and generate strategies to improve help practices, specifically between teachers and students. To collect data for this project I conducted an ethnography of the teacher education course, "Schooling in a Diverse Society," EDUC311. I was interested in future teacher discourse because teaching often is articulated as a helping profession. For example, a common argument from my research was that to teach is to help students learn content, skills, and particular worldviews. Schein (2009) argues that help is a process that cannot be easily explained. He asserts, "Helping is a common yet complex process. It is an attitude, a set of behaviors, a skill and an essential component of social life" (p. 144). However, very little work has been done to theorize or analyze the implications of help, particularly in terms of communication and educational contexts. In this dissertation, I examined how future teachers articulate and produce help in and through communication. In my experience as a former teacher education student, I found that the help articulated in teacher education classes, that focus on democracy and social justice was remarkably different than the help articulated in everyday experience. Hunt (1998) resolves, "A focus on teaching for social justice reminds us that our children need not only a firm grounding in academics but also practice in how to use those academics to promote a democratic society in which all get to participate fully" (p. xiii). Social justice educators recognize students have the ability to enact change. They recognize inequity and actively work with their students to understand their subject positions in order to work against systems of oppression. In social justice education, help is a process "with" students instead of "help for" students. EDUC311 explores the relationship between social justice and democracy. As a required course for all teacher education students at Southern Illinois University, this course provided me with an ideal population of future educators. By studying the communication of future educators in a course that emphasizes social justice, I analyzed the ways they produced notions of help, generated a definition of social justice-oriented help, and provided strategies that current and future educators could use to better help their students.

Introduction: Improvements in the delivery of intensive care have led to a growing number of children with chronic medical conditions at significant risk of recurrent and prolonged critical illness. These patients are increasingly described as having pediatric chronic critical illness (CCI). To date, pediatric CCI is without an accepted consensus case definition. Objective: To evaluate how pediatric CCI has been defined in the current literature, including the concept of prolonged PICU admission, and describe the methodologies used to develop any existing definitions. Secondary aims included describing patient characteristics and outcomes evaluated in included studies. Methods: We searched four electronic databases for studies evaluating children identified with “CCI.” We also searched for studies describing prolonged PICU admission, as this concept is related to pediatric CCI. We developed a hybrid crowdsourcing and machine-learning (ML) methodology to complete citation screening. Screening and data abstraction were performed by two reviewers, independently and in duplicate. We completed data abstraction including details of population definitions, demographic and clinical characteristics of children with CCI, and outcomes evaluated. Results: Twenty-eight reviewers from 11 countries performed citation screening, with a mean sensitivity of 92%. Of 24,729 unique citations assessed for eligibility, 453 full-texts were reviewed and 67 studies were included. Of these, 12 studies (18%) defined CCI, most commonly by a prolonged PICU length of stay (LOS), either in isolation or in addition related to medical complexity patient characteristics and/or readmissions rate. The concept of prolonged PICU admission was defined in an additional 55 (82%) studies by a median of 14 days (range, 1 day-6 weeks). Conclusion: To our knowledge, this scoping review provides the most comprehensive epidemiologic evidence addressing pediatric CCI. Our results suggest a uniform consensus definition is needed in order to advance this emerging and important area of pediatric critical care research. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)