No description available.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This inquiry is about the sense-making of students in a technology education class as they build a prototype electric car in a secondary school manufacturing shop. I make sense of their sense-making by examining their talk and interaction in the interplay of the social, material, institutional, and organizational resources constituting what I call "distributed practice." This involves a move away from defining understanding and learning as self-contained structures in the minds of people, but instead sees learning as spread out in the broad social context of activity and participation. Distributed practice theorized in this way is about the interplay among "complex social relations, technologically constituted." Technologies and their use in practice provide us with a realm through which we can discuss issues related to the understanding of learners. In many respects, this dissertation is an exploration of how "the way things are done" becomes understanding and alternately, how understanding becomes "the way things are done." The analysis moves towards a social and cultural practice view of learning I call "practical negotiation."

Social change strategies grounded in theory help change agents to be more effective in their efforts. This study attempts to make explicit the links between public education efforts and the social change goals of non-profit organizations through an examination of both radical humanist thought and various social change theories. / This thesis maintains that public education is an essential component of lasting change, serving eleven identifiable roles in the social change process. Of particular note, education can serve to challenge the dominant corporate paradigm and to develop an informed, critical, and more active citizenry. Education can also help create an environment conducive to achieving systemic changes. It is argued that civil society organizations are well situated to play a leading role in the creation of a more just and healthy society. Public education is proposed here as an approach that shows considerable promise to move us in that direction.

In this conceptual inquiry, I argue how and why homework contributes to inequality. Homework contributes to inequality systemically, as schools continue to rely heavily on it. Homework continues to contribute to inequality discursively and psychologically, as parents and educators encourage homework without fully realizing the consequences of homework for those students who have difficulty completing school tasks at home. The inequalities maintained by homework often persist unnoticed. This persistence is an example of a broader persistence of sociological problems even as technological advances are made. This imbalance in the two domains of society and technology is due partly to the differences in the nature of the knowledge content. Therefore, educators and policy makers must be vigilant against tendencies to be blind to possibilities for improvement. One such improvement is a ban on mandatory homework, which implies more school responsibility to enable student achievement in the school.

Many claims have been made about the potential of Lifelong Education, when implemented as a social policy, to bring about a more just society. However, the assumptions underlying these and similar claims have seldom been critically scrutinized. For this reason, there is in the literature a concern that the concept of the "learning society" simply means lifelong schooling and is the rhetoric of social control. In this view, the potential of Lifelong Education as a transformative force for the development of a participator}' democracy and a more equitable distribution of resources remains a Utopian vision. In this work, an analysis of the assumptions, it was expected, would bring to light the ideological position embedded in Lifelong Education as a social policy tool. This research therefore, offers a systematic critical analysis of the expected outcomes of Lifelong Education policies. This required the development of a theoretical framework which built upon: 1.) Paulston's model of social change; 2.) Rawls' and others' concepts of justice and equality; and 3.) perspectives on the role of education in society outlined by Aronowitz and Giroux. This framework was employed to analyze 1.) selected publications of UNESCO on Lifelong Education, 2.) Canadian Association for Adult Education and Canadian Commission for UNESCO documents, and 3.) contemporary Canadian federal and provincial education policies. The findings of this analysis were compared with various models of social policy. Five principle findings emerged from the study. First, the literature, for the most part, reflects a view of society characterized by homogeneit3' and consensus. The model of social change is evolutional, and avoids the structural conflict perspectives. Second, a number of assumptions are made concerning some elements of a theory of justice, but no unified comprehensive theory of justice supports the literature's claims. Third, adopted in the literature is an ideal view of the role of Lifelong Education as a means of producing change in society. The absence of a critical perspective leaves Lifelong Education in the role of reproducing inequalities in society, vulnerable to application as a mechanism of manipulation rather than emancipation. Fourth, the social policy models implied by the literature are not models which are significantly redistributive in their aims. Finally, projected normative outcomes such as "the good society", "improved quality of life", and "a more just society" lack precise definition thereby leaving unexpressed the ideological position on which they are premised. This deprives the field the means of evaluating these policies. It is argued that if the role of educators in the development of democratic active participation of citizens in the collective formation of public policy is to be taken seriously, the ideological position of Lifelong Education must be more carefully defined and developed so that citizens can reflect on its principles, compare them with alternate ideological positions, and make their choices from this more informed position. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Master / Master of Philosophy

The character of the professional socialization experience is a subject of debate in the literature; one of the primary issues being the relative contributions of trainees to the nature of their socializing experience. As crucial as the clinical education experience is to the educational and professional development of medical students, it has received relatively little attention in the literature on professional socialization of physicians. The goals of this research were to understand, from the students' perspective, the character of the first clinical learning experience in the medical school career of a group of medical students and, given the character of that context, the role of student negotiations in their own education and professional socialization. This study employed a symbolic interactionist framework and the data collection methods of participant observation and unstructured interview. The data collection was conducted over a six-week period during which time the researcher experienced along with a group of six medical students their first clinical learning experience. These students perceived the clinical learning environment to be challenging, complex and frequently too busy to easily accommodate their learning needs. They recognized the enormity of their learning task and of their own incompetence. These were the basic perceptions that prompted the students to negotiate their clinical learning experience. Student negotiations took three basic forms: the creation of new learning opportunities, the manipulation of existing learning resources, and interpretation of events and behaviors. Students' negotiations were constrained by the structure of the education program and the students' own assertiveness. The study's findings indicate that the students were active negotiators of the content and the conduct of their own professional education and professional socialization. Even in the face of overwhelming demands on their intellectual and emotional resources, the students expressed their individual and collective intent for their educational experience. The study findings were similar to those of earlier studies of professional socialization, although new behaviors and behaviors inconsistent with those found in previous research were uncovered. Contributions to the literature on professional socialization and to an understanding of this phenomenon were made through the explanation of these inconsistencies.