published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Philosophy

Since the shortage of humanities Ph.D.s turned to surplus in the early 1970s, a full generation of students has passed through graduate school and into the job market. This study explores the strategic changes undertaken by humanities departments in response to the continued surplus and the resulting unemployment of graduates. To gather data for the study, telephone interviews were conducted with representatives from 86 departments of English, history, and philosophy. The respondents were first asked what they thought should be done to alleviate doctoral unemployment. Then they were asked 19 questions representing individual strategic change alternatives being carried out in their departments, as well as one question concerning future changes they had planned. Finally, they were asked four questions concerning their past and present enrollments and doctoral placement rates. Analysis of the survey results showed that departments did indeed respond consciously to the poor employment prospects facing their graduates: they took measures to reduce the numbers of doctorates granted each year; they changed faculty personnel policies; they changed academic programs to better prepare their graduates for employment; they provided direct placement services, and they planned future changes. The findings also indicated that several intervening factors were related to the responses of departments. For example, public institutions were more responsive than independent institutions, and growing departments were more likely to implement changes than departments with shrinking or static enrollments. Research institutions and large institutions tended to cut back the number of graduates they produced, whereas other doctoral-granting or smaller institutions were likely to make certain academic program changes. Finally, history departments tended to prepare students for nonacademic employment; English departments prepared students for employment in high schools and community colleges, and philosophy departments were the most active in promoting their students to potential employers, although they did not target a particular job sector. In all, the departmental changes most positively related to graduate employment were changes in academic programs, and these program changes seemed to be more successful in placing doctorates in nonacademic careers than in academe.

The problem of this study was to describe a conceptual design for general education with interdisciplinary qualities leading to student self-understanding and continuous self-development. This study emerged out of the need to gain some insight into the causes of decline and/or abandonment of general education programs during periods of social disorganization, and to determine whether a relationship.exists between mounting social problems and the more intense kinds of problems experienced by college-age youth during these periods.

Thong, Yan Yee. / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-222). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Advisor: John Fox. Includes bibliographical references ( leaves 240-250). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2009. / Title from title screen (viewed 7/30/2009). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-119).

The concept of teacher-activism is not new, but activism has generally been framed as human actions or characteristics. This study frames activist practices as non-material affective bodies, defined broadly as something with the power to affect and be affected by other bodies. This power to affect and be affected is what imbues a body with agency. Thus, activist practices are non-material bodies that have agency. The purpose of this study was to explore how the affective bodies of activist practices move across cultures, spaces, and places, and how the practices exert agency as they move. Using multisensory ethnographic methods, this study followed three teacher-activists in their classrooms and at other activist endeavors, in order to sense the effects each teacher’s activist practices had as they exerted their agential powers. Undergirded both by humanist ethnographic methods and post-humanist theories of affect that highlight the ordinary, this study acknowledges the need for the human, even as non-human bodies are the focus. Using an analytical process of rhizomatic mapping the affective forces of the activist practices, this study explored what the practices do to and for each teacher-activist. Information sources for this mapping process included ethnographic fieldnotes, observations and interviews, writing exercises, and voice memos. The findings of this study suggest that considering affects in teacher education for an activist identity may provide a more expansive definition for who constitutes a teacher-activist, spaces in which activism operates, and what actual activist practices can be. It also suggests that attention to affects may make tangible the intangibles of teaching; specifically, the ways in which students are moved by things that seem inconsequential, such as fleeting emotions, ideas, pedagogies, curricula, and classroom decorations. Methodologically, this study adds to an increasing body of empirical studies that support the notion that humanist and post-humanist methods can coexist, and that the contradictions can open, rather than foreclose, possibilities for thinking about what data can do

Using transcript analysis as a research methodology, this study investigated student course-taking patterns in general education at three community colleges in Virginia. The sample included three groups: completers and non-completers of associate degree programs and non-curricular students. A panel of experts determined which courses in the curriculum could serve as general education. One purpose of the study was to discover the number and kind of general education courses actually taken by community college students. This was accomplished by identifying the proportion of students' programs taken in general education; the curricular areas of general education in which students concentrated their course-taking; and the types of general education courses taken (basic skills, advanced skills, breadth, integrative, and laboratory or field study). Another purpose was to determine whether course-taking in general education was independent of sex, race, age, and enrollment status (part-time or full-time; daytime or evening). The data indicated that general education was not the"disaster area" described by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1979 in terms of the number of courses taken by students in the sample. However, the programs of many students were out of balance, specifically lacking in mathematics and science. Two types of general education were evident in student transcripts: one kind of general education course was taken by the occupational-technical student; another, by the transfer student. The number of courses taken in different curricular areas of general education was generally related to enrollment status, age, and sex; comparisons across types of students were drawn and recommendations were made. / Doctor of Education