A presente investigação se vincula à pesquisa do Projeto Observatório da Educação/CAPES intitulada: Educação matemática nos anos iniciais do Ensino Fundamental: Princípios e práticas da organização do ensino\", sob responsabilidade do Grupo de Estudo e Pesquisa sobre Atividade Pedagógica GEPAPe/FEUSP, cujo objetivo principal é investigar as relações entre o desempenho escolar dos alunos, representado pelos dados do INEP, e a organização curricular de matemática nos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental. Nossa participação dá-se em um núcleo da pesquisa, o Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisa do Ensino e Aprendizagem da Matemática na Infância (GEPEAMI), que realiza as ações de investigação junto a um município do interior do estado de São Paulo. Disso depreendemos nosso objeto de pesquisa: investigar os princípios e propostas sobre o conhecimento matemático nas avaliações externas. Nossa base material de pesquisa congregou instrumentos de avaliação de caráter mundial, nacional e municipal, respectivamente: o Programa Internacional de Avaliação dos Estudantes (PISA), a Provinha Brasil e a avaliação municipal intitulada Olimpíadas de Matemática. Buscamos, primeiramente, apresentar o contexto histórico de modo a situar a implementação de avaliações em larga escala alinhada a determinado projeto educativo, em uma sociedade organizada pelo modo de produção capitalista. Em seguida apresentamos características, abrangência, finalidade e composição dos instrumentos de avaliação: PISA, Provinha Brasil e Olimpíadas de Matemática, com o intuito de discutir como instrumentos de diferentes âmbitos se relacionam e se fundamentam em determinados princípios acerca do conhecimento matemático. Por fim analisamos o eixo matemático de Grandezas e Medidas em itens das avaliações externas do PISA, da Provinha Brasil e das Olimpíadas de Matemática, com o propósito de compreender como o conhecimento matemático é proposto em tais itens. Nossos resultados indicam que documentos de âmbito internacional influenciaram a concepção de educação existente no Brasil, que passa a considerar elementos como qualificação dos sujeitos para o trabalho. Desse cenário eclodem diferentes instrumentos de avaliações externas, sustentados pelo discurso da garantia da melhoria da qualidade da educação: o Sistema de Avaliação da Educação Básica (Saeb), o Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM) (1998), o Exame Nacional do Desempenho dos Estudantes (ENADE) (2004), a Provinha Brasil (2008; 2011) e a avaliação Olimpíadas de Matemática (2012) de um Município do interior do Estado de São Paulo. Os itens do eixo de Grandezas e Medidas analisados, carregam o entendimento de letramento matemático assim como o de que o conhecimento matemático deve voltar-se para situações da vida real dos sujeitos e para isso eles devem ser capazes de conseguir resolver problemas cotidianos, fazendo uso do conhecimento matemático. Compreendemos, a partir dos postulados da teoria histórico-cultural, que os instrumentos de avaliações externas analisados possuem caráter medidor do processo de ensino-aprendizagem e atuam, muitas vezes, de maneira perversa, enquadrando o aluno, desde os anos iniciais, em uma matriz produtora de sujeitos dispostos com competência para atender à demanda do mercado. / The present research lies under a wider research of the Education Observatory Project named: Mathematical Education in the Early Years of Elementary School: Principles and Practices of the Teaching organization\". The latter is taken forward by the Educational Activity Study Group GEPAPe/FEUSP and investigates the relationship between the students school success, represented by data available from INEP, and the Mathematics curricular organization in the early years of the elementary school. Our participation gives up on a core of the research, o Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisa do Ensino e Aprendizagem da Matemática na Infância (GEPEAMI), which performs the investigative actions with a town in the state of São Paulo. Our researchs object of study is precisely taken from there: to investigate the mathematical knowledge principles and propositions that are present at external evaluations. Our research material basis is formed by evaluation instruments at global, national and municipal levels, respectively: the PISA, Provinha Brasil and the municipal assessment entitled Olimpíadas de Matemática. We seek, first, to present the historical context in order to situate the implementation of large-scale assessments aligned to a particular educational project, in a society organized by the capitalist mode of production. The analysis of the external evaluations instruments was made by presenting its characteristics, outreach, goals and composition, and was intended to discuss how instruments from different contexts can relate to each other, and how they are based in certain principles of the mathematical knowledge. Finally, we analyze the mathematical axis of Quantities and Measurements in external evaluations of items in PISA, the Provinha Brazil and Mathematics Olympics, in order to understand how mathematical knowledge is proposed in such items. Our results indicate that the international documents influenced the conception of education existing in Brazil, which shall consider factors such as the qualification of subjects for the job. Different external evaluation instruments appear in this context, and are sustained by the guaranteed improvement of the quality of the Education: Sistema de Avaliação da Educação Básica (Saeb), Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM) (1998), the Exame Nacional do Desempenho dos Estudantes (ENADE) (2004), Provinha Brasil (2008; 2011) and Olimpíadas de Matemática (2012) of a certain town in the state of Sao Paulo. The analyzed activities in the Grandezas e Medidas axis that were evaluated, materialized in the items of the evaluation instruments, lead to the understanding of mathematical literacy as well as the understanding that the mathematical knowledge should be directed to ones real life situations and because of this, one should be able to solve problems that are present in real life, making use of this mathematical knowledge. We understand, based on the historical-cultural theory, that the external evaluations that were analyzed have a mediator profile in the teaching and learning process and they mostly act in a perverse manner, offering the students an alienated education, making them incapable of comprehending scientific knowledge trends and framing them into a matrix that produces people that are all the same, and competently willing to supply the markets demand.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine teacher perceptions of the effectiveness of the Response to Intervention (RtI) framework with students who are acquiring English as a second language. Students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have been disproportionately represented in special education programs for decades (Artiles & Trent, 1994; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Heller, Holtzman, & Messick, 1982). Legislators responsible for the authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act in 2004 (IDEIA 2004) allowed state education leaders the option to use RtI as an alternative identification method. RtI was believed to be a framework through which the number of inappropriate EL referrals for special education services could be reduced. Ten elementary teachers in a small/medium sized rural school district in East Tennessee participated in semi-structured interviews intended to examine their perceptions of the effectiveness of the RtI framework when implemented with ELs. The researcher analyzed the responses for emergent themes. These themes included knowledge about the purpose of the framework, the impact of leadership upon implementation of the framework, training and professional development around teaching ELs and responding to their unique needs, and understanding differences between challenges arising from language acquisition versus those arising from a learning disability. Findings and recommendations for practice are included.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, establishing climacteric concepts for psychoanalysis and creating a structure upon which he built the theory and his career. 20 years later, he had entirely revised these concepts that solidified the foundation of psychoanalysis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud notably theorizes the ‘death drive’ for the first time, a radical but necessary break from the economics of the pleasure principle. Often, the death drive is taken to be the most important contribution of this essay, but I argue that the lasting message to be gleaned from Freud is what he concludes Beyond the Pleasure Principle with: “We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views.” In this thesis, I argue that we can develop a necessary Ethic from this way that Freud approached the formation of his work. Drawing on the further developments from Jacques Lacan, I claim that one can take theory of the gaze as an ethical moment: the point at which one is faced with a disruption that they are tasked to carry out “to see where it will lead,” as Freud puts it. Further, I utilize this formation of the Ethic to read the films of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy” to highlight the points at which we can locate the characters, form, and content of these films as realizations of such ethical moments.

This dissertation addresses two problems with advanced academic writing pedagogy. First, doctoral students must participate in academic discourse communities, yet they report being underprepared to do so (Boquet et al., 2015; Caplan & Cox, 2016). Second, studies (e.g., Curry & Lillis, 2004; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) suggest that L1 and L2 voices are not well integrated in the institution and that this lack of integration systemically privileges the dominant culture. The purpose of this research is to investigate the role relationships play in helping culturally and linguistically diverse doctoral students negotiate and acquire advanced academic discourse. I pose the overarching research question: Given a discipline-specific writing center for graduate students in a College of Education, what role does interaction play in helping students to participate in academic conversations? The two papers in this collection employ qualitative classification and discourse analysis to investigate writing-related interactions among peers. Data include audio-recorded writing consultations and interviews, post-session reports, field notes, and artifacts. Taken together, findings from this research highlight the role interaction can play in writing support, development, and research. This research has implications for developing writing pedagogy and support programs to facilitate productive academic socialization. In response, the researcher calls for more robust academic writing support in order to improve access and resources for diverse student populations and decrease attrition and time to degree for all students.

The recent inclusion of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) within the International Classification of Diseases, eleventh edition (ICD-11) prompted scholars to re-evaluate treatment guidelines for traumatic disorders. The present study aimed to conceptualize dyadic, community, and systemic connections within the context of ICD-11 traumatic disorders and investigate unique associations between factors capturing relational quality. The current study additionally utilized a novel network modeling approach to explore the CPTSD symptom network structure using a college sample of trauma survivors. Consistent with generations of theory and research, relational quality factors associated with the disturbances in self-organization (DSO) symptom cluster, and anticipated discrimination associated with both relational disturbance and sense of threat. Affect dysregulation, re-experiencing, and relational engagement emerged as most central within the CPTSD symptom network, providing evidence towards the role of affect regulation in relational functioning, while intersectional discrimination associated with both the PTSD and DSO symptom clusters. Findings from the present study provide context to the potential application of a relational and systems focused intervention.

This research study takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, using critical discourse theory, transactional communication theory and cross-cultural theory to contribute insight into the experiences of alternative entry students as they strive to access and participate in higher education. The study seeks to determine how these students learn to persevere: how they construct their means of succeeding in the university culture. The methodological structure of the research comprises a collective case study design, encompassing critical ethnography, action research and reflexive approaches to guide a deeper understanding of the experiences of studying at a regional Australian university. The reflexive nature of the research facilitated the development of an original theoretical construct, the ‘deficit-discourse’ shift, which challenges higher education policy and practice, in particular, in relation to academics’ roles in making their discourses explicit and in collaborating with students to facilitate students’ perseverance and success. The research has also generated two models: the Framework for Student Engagement and Mastery and the Model for Student Success at University. The Framework re-conceptualises the university as a dynamic culture made up of a multiplicity of sub-cultures, each with its own literacy or discourse. The Framework recasts the first year experience as a journey, with students’ transition re-conceptualised as the processes of gaining familiarity with and negotiating these new literacies and discourses whereas perseverance is viewed as the processes of mastering and demonstrating them. The Model provides a three step practical strategy (incorporating reflective practice, socio-cultural practice and critical practice) for achieving this engagement: for empowering students to negotiate, master and demonstrate their mastery of the university culture’s multiple discourses. Together, the two models provide students with a means of succeeding in the new university culture.

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left"><font face="Arial">The study analyses the relationship between experience, participation and learning and seeks to establish how the experience of adult learners can be mobilised through active participation and how situational conditions can either facilitate or inhibit participation and learning amongst the learners. Another dimension of the study seeks to establish what caregivers learn and the processes through which they learn and how such learning contributes to changes in behaviour and relationships. In this study, the nature and dynamics of learning amongst adult learners in the NCTP programme at community level is explored as an example of socio-cultural theory and situated learning which hold that learning results from participation in various socio-cultural situations &ndash / the act of participation is seen as crucial in the learning. The study focused on a group of 10 learners in the National Certificate Training Programme for community health workers who are also caregivers in the Nokuthembeka Home-based Care Programme in New Crossroads in the Cape Town metropole and used a qualitative research design and interpretive approach to understand the situations in which they learn. An interpretive approach allowed for deeper insight into the socio-cultural contexts that influence the social interactions of caregivers with peers as well as their learning. In the study I argue that the experience of caregivers forms a critical resource and the foundational basis for learning.</font></p> <p>&nbsp / </p> </font></p>

 The majority of Americans profess to hold pro-environmental attitudes and intend to engage in environmentally friendly behavior. Yet their actions tell a different story. The goal of this study was to explain the gap between widely held pro-environmental attitudes and the lack of corresponding individual and collective behavior. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods and applying the principles of grid-group cultural theory, cognitive sociology, and identity theory I examined the meanings people ascribe to the environment, how they think about behavior relative to the environment, and justifications for the performance of environmentally significant behavior. I administered an on-line survey to a nationally representative sample of individuals. By applying grounded theory methods to the textual data generated by open-ended survey questions I developed a model of environmentally signficant behavior which describes the underlying factors that influence the performance of pro-environmental behavior. Individuals develop environmental socio-cognitive schemas based on the ways in which they use the six cognitive acts (perceiving, focusing, classifying, signifying, remembering, and timing) in thinking about the environment. They use these environmental socio-cognitive schemas to filter and interpret environmental discourse, construct a body of environmental knowledge, and guide environmentally significant behavior. According to this study, the explanatory link between pro-environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behavior lies in the concept of proximity. Performance of pro-environmental behavior is driven by the distance individuals perceive themselves to be from environmental issues. Attitudes toward the environment remain abstractions whereas behavior is situational. Individuals from different cultural groups hold different ideas about the relationship between humans and nature, the extent and severity of environmental issues, and how those issues should be addressed. The findings from this study provide a foundation for developing effective strategies for influencing environmentally significant behavior. This study is important because environmental issues are real, their potential impact is substantial, and time is of the essence in addressing them.

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice.

In this thesis I outline my theory of translation as an interpretive tool. I undertake an analysis of the concepts of heteroglossia, hybridity, and positionality, as conceived of by Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi K. Bhabha, and Linda Alcoff, respectively. These ideas function similarly: heteroglossic forces are constantly being brought to bear upon languages, the hybrid nature of culture is continually being rearticulated, and the positionality of the interpreter is always subject to change. I establish a theory that allows for translation to remain open, a theory that sees all incarnations of a text (the source and all of its translations) as being perpetually discursive, rather than fixing upon one version as the definitive or “correct” rendering. Translations occupy a fluctuating, unstable, and therefore creative location; they provide an ever-shifting temporal and spatial perspective. I translate excerpts from texts written by the Afro-German poet May Ayim and the Turkish German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar from German into English. This brings my theory into application and demonstrates both the fluidity of translation and the depth of interpretation to be found within this process. / Graduate / 0311 / 0679