Thesis (M.Ed.) --University of the North, 1990 / Refer to the document

M.Ed. / This study is centered on the attitudes of the school managers towards the implementation of environmental education (EE) in primary schools. A qualitative method which involves the use of in-depth individual interviews and focus group interviews were used in this study. The study revealed that the managers have a positive attitude towards the implementation of EE in primary schools. They emphasised that EE will teach learners to look after the environment, learners will grow with the knowledge of protecting and caring the environment. Although the participants have positive attitudes towards the implementation of EE, they felt that it would not be possible to implement it as a subject on its own because of shortage of teaching and learning support materials and lack of well trained subject specialist. All these indicate that participants have an interest in implementing EE in primary schools.

[no abstract submitted] / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

M.Ed. / This study emanated from my observations and experiences as an educator into the teaching of Environmental Education at school. Environmental Education was infused into all Learning Areas, as per the Revised National Curriculum Statement. However, the teaching and learning of environmental issues and topics seemed to have been addressed very superficially. The indifferent attitude displayed by learners was also an area of concern. These observations were the motivation for this research. There is an abundance of research in support of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching Environmental Education. Research has also supported the use of a holistic and systemic approach to the teaching and learning of Environmental Education. This study attempts to report on the status of the integration of Environmental Education in the Revised National Curriculum Statement (RNCS) across Grades 7 to 9 in South Africa, through the lens of systemic and holistic thinking. Following a study of the different models available to depict the teaching and learning of Environmental Education holistically and systemically, I have elected to use the Van Rooyen Model as it supported a more holistic understanding of environmental issues, in accordance with global trends. The mixed methods research design was most appropriate to explore how Environmental Education was captured in the RNCS and to determine how teachers have interpreted these policies in classroom practice. The first stage of the sequential exploratory design was undertaken, informed by an in-depth qualitative study of the RNCS policy documents, learner textbooks and teacher’s lesson plans. An analysis of the RNCS policy documents in all Learning Areas in C2005 was carried out to determine how Environmental Education had been incorporated using the principles of systemic and holistic learning. Data that emerged indicated that there tends to be a disjuncture between the macro, meso and micro planning on the part of policymakers. The infusion of EE, which is done by policymakers (macro planning) and which filters through to the different Learning Areas (meso planning) and finally down to individual teacher’s (micro planning), has shown how Environmental Education content has become quite diluted. The teaching of environmentally related content was done according to broad umbrella topics, with topics being addressed very minimally in accordance to holistic and systemic teaching. The cross curricular approach to teaching Environmental education was implemented by curriculum planners with an assumption that teachers were equipped with the vi necessary knowledge, skills and values to teach Environmental Education effectively. This therefore informed the second stage of the sequential exploratory design within the mixed method framework. Taking into consideration the overall findings of this research, the study recommends that future curriculum planning to incorporate Environmental Education should be done with much more deliberation and in accordance to holistic and systemic principles. The study also highlights the need for Higher Education Institutions involved in teacher training to incorporate a compulsory Environmental course in their programme, thereby equipping all teachers, irrespective of subject specialization, with the necessary knowledge, skills and values to teach Environmental Education meaningfully.

Benjamin Britten wrote five pieces for the viola, the most well-known being the Lachrymae, Op. 48: Reflections on a song of Dowland written in 1950 for the Scottish violist William Primrose. Britten's other viola works were composed in 1930-1932 and were written for himself to perform as the violist. They were not published until after his death and have only recently been available for purchase. The intent of this treatise is to help make these lesser-known works to be more accessible for instructors in order to teach these pieces to young advancing violists. For the purpose of this study, advancing violists may be defined as students who generally are in high school or college with well-developed techniques such as vibrato, shifting, spiccato, and bow control. This document includes a short biography of Benjamin Britten along with a pedagogical analysis of the pieces Reflection for Viola and Piano (1930), Elegy for Viola Solo (1930), Two Portrait (1930) No. 2, and There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook. The author studied each piece and worked with a pianist to establish proper tempos and fingerings. For rhythmically challenging ensemble passages, the author created original exercises for piano and viola to be played together. The author also has created original exercises for practicing difficult passages and improving techniques such as shifting. Musical examples, with alternate bowing and fingerings, are also discussed in this study. / A Treatise submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Music. / Summer Semester 2015. / July 16, 2015. / Includes bibliographical references. / Pamela Ryan, Professor Directing Treatise; James Mathes, University Representative; Melanie Punter, Committee Member; Corinne Stillwell, Committee Member.

This dissertation investigates the resources that students use to learn new digital technologies to complete course assignments. This work is particularly important in a time when teachers are assigning more multimodal projects. If students are using and learning digital technologies to complete our assignments, we might argue that we should teach our students how to use the specific technologies they would use for the assignment. Yet, teaching students specific technologies is complicated for several reasons, including limited time and resources, numerous and quickly obsolete software, different levels of expertise for students and teachers, and more. Because of these complications, students may benefit from spending less time with instruction in specific technologies and more time considering practices for learning new digital technologies. This dissertation works to discover practices that teachers can use in the classroom to help their students learn how to learn new digital technologies in order to compose multimodal texts. To do this, I investigate how students are already learning technologies outside of the classroom and use this investigation to identify possible pedagogical directions. To gain a broader understanding of the resources students are using, I surveyed five sections of an upper-level composition course in which students completed at least one digital assignment. Then, to gain a more nuanced and richer description of resource use, I interviewed three of these students. To analyze the data, I used a framework adapted from Jeanette R. Hill and Michael J. Hannafin's components for Resource-Based Learning (RBL). RBL is a pedagogical approach that aims to teach students how to learn and to produce students who are self-directed problem-solvers, able to work both collaboratively and individually. Though RBL is a pedagogical approach, I used its values and parameters as a lens for understanding students' use of resources. RBL (as the name suggests) puts emphasis on the resources students use to facilitate their learning. Given the wide variety of resources and the ways in which they can be used in the classroom, few scholars articulate precisely what RBL may look like more generally. Hill and Hannafin (2010), however, list four components among which RBL can vary: resources, tools, contexts, and scaffolds. In this study, resource is an umbrella term for the tools, contexts, and humans students may use to support their learning. Tools are the non-human objects that students use to learn new technologies. Humans are the people from whom students seek help. Contexts are the rhetorical situations (specifically the audiences and purposes for composing) surrounding the technological learning, the students' past technological experiences, and the physical locations in which students work. An important element of this study is to identify not only what resources students use, but also how they use their resources; scaffolds are how the resources are used. The scaffolds in this study are as follows: conceptual scaffolds – resources help students decide the order in which to complete tasks, understand the affordances and constraints of the technology, and learn the genre conventions of a given text; metacognitive scaffolds – resources help students tap into their prior knowledge; procedural scaffolds – resources provide students with step-by-step instructions for completing tasks or with definitions of vocabulary; and strategic scaffolds – resources encourage students to experiment in order to learn and solve problems they encounter while learning the technology. In addition to addressing what and how students use resources to learn to perform tasks with the technology, I also examined how students used resources to learn the specialized vocabulary of the technology and the technology's affordances and constraints. The study resulted in eight findings about the ways in which students are using resources. These findings were then used to identify three areas for possible strategies teachers might consider to help students use resources to learn new technologies: 1. Helping students effectively choose technologies, which includes assisting them in (a) using resources to identify technology options and learn about the affordances and constraints of the options and (b) using the affordances and constraints, their composing situations, and the available resources to choose the technology that best meets their needs. 2. Helping students effectively use templates, which includes aiding them in (a) using templates to learn about the genres in which they are composing, (b) selecting effective templates, and (c) altering the templates based on their rhetorical situations and preferences. 3. Helping students learn the technology's specialized vocabulary, which includes assisting them in (a) identifying familiar visual and linguistic vocabulary, (b) making educated guesses about unfamiliar vocabulary, and (c) using resources to learn unfamiliar vocabulary. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 10, 2017. / Composing Technologies, Composition, Pedagogy, Resource Based Learning, Self-Teaching, Technology / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael Neal, Professor Directing Dissertation; Steven McDowell, University Representative; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member; Kristie Fleckenstein, Committee Member.

The purpose of this study was to determine the level of emphasis middle schools place on career awareness and exploration.

No description available.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Situated at the intersection of research on writing transfer, dual coding theory, and concept mapping, this empirical research study investigates students' representation, development, and transfer of conceptual writing knowledge across writing contexts, taking a 2000 level Teaching for Transfer (TFT) course (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak) as the site of study. In taking up students' use of prior knowledge—made explicit in their visual maps and represented through their key terms for writing and the knowledge structures linking them—this project continues a line of research that Kathleen Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak began in 2009 at Florida State University when they designed the TFT curriculum for first-year composition (FYC) courses and studied whether, and how, the course supported students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice from the TFT course to other writing sites. Carrying forward this line of research, this dissertation (1) documents, via a series of visual mapping assignments, the prior knowledge of writing that students bring with them into the composition classroom as indexed in their key terms for writing and writing knowledge structures, and (2) traces whether, and how, these visual mapping assignments, integrated into the TFT curriculum, can assist students in both developing new writing knowledge and transferring this conceptual writing knowledge from a sophomore-level writing course, ENC 2135: Research, Genre, and Context, for use in other post-TFT writing sites. Using deductive and inductive coding, descriptive analysis, scored compositions from TFT and post-TFT courses, and four single-case studies of writers, this mixed-methods dissertation identifies changes in students' representations of their conceptual writing knowledge and provides documentation of how this conceptual writing knowledge assisted them—or not—in composing across contexts. This nine-month research study resulted in the following four claims: (1) Participants’ model of prior knowledge use is visible in the conceptual writing knowledge structures represented in their visual maps: Remixers use a network knowledge structure comprised of a mix of their self-selected and TFT key terms, whereas assemblers use a chain knowledge structure onto which they have grafted selected TFT key terms. (2) Remixers can be differentiated based on the process by which they develop their networked knowledge structure—structural development or structural change—and the orientation of their knowledge structure—to concept or process. (3) Visual mapping can support writers in dually-coding their Theories of Writing (ToW) by helping them to “see connections” among concepts and to articulate their verbal ToWs, but having a dually-coded ToW does not necessarily guarantee that a writer can effectively use their ToW to frame new writing situations. (4) Participants who transferred their writing knowledge and practice from ENC 2135 TFT for use in other sites met the three conditions for transfer outlined by Yancey et al. As a result, this dissertation suggests that writing studies scholarship and pedagogy can benefit from additional research on concurrent visual and verbal reflective activities that enable writers to articulate and externalize their conceptual writing knowledge. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2017. / June 22, 2017. / Concept Mapping, Conceptual Writing Knowledge, Dual Coding Theory, Knowledge Transfer, Visual Mapping, Writing Transfer / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jennifer Proffitt, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kristie Fleckenstein, Committee Member.