Margaret Pfluge / Typescript / M.A. Florida State College for Women 1932 / Includes bibliographical references

Typescript / M.S. Florida State College for Women 1914 / Includes bibliographical references

The inspiration for this thesis is rooted in the desire to challenge and exploit antiquated mainstream conceptions and practices of conservation in South Florida through the exploration of architecture as media. It is driven by the urge to be a part of the larger, more complex discussion regarding ecological restoration in the state. My desire to explore a relationship between architecture and conservation stems largely from personal experiences in Rookery Bay, the Everglades National Park, and adjacent estuaries. Experiencing the space on a tactile and interactive level provides perspective which both furthers and contradicts preconceived notions on conservation. It is important to note that the scope and commentary of this thesis includes all affected ecosystems in South Florida, as each is as important as the next in face of remediation. Degraded conditions in Everglades National Park, The Ten Thousand Islands, Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Bay, Rookery Bay, the Florida Keys, and a number of the ecological regions comprise the larger dilemma in South Florida. The bulk of my personal experience takes place in Rookery Bay, just South of Naples and North of Everglades National Park. As an intermediate estuarine zone, Rookery Bay begins the transition of coastline from gulf beach to dense wetland which thickens down the west coast of Florida, through Everglades National Park, and into the Florida Keys. Rookery Bay is the most accessible effected estuarine ecosystem in public proximity to a populated and expanding metropolis. The rapid expansion of Naples in the past decade renders the city an ideal location for an intervention poised to furthering environmental awareness. Thereby subject to great discovery and interaction, Rookery Bay provides greater opportunity for public exposure than the largely isolated expanse that is the Everglades National Park. Accessibility and visibility are identified as part of both the problem and the solution to the rehabilitation of an estuarine ecosystem. A think tank w ch embodies these characteristics can begin to facilitate change by addressing the issue, furthering its awareness through education, and providing opportunity for research. Architecture as media is investigated as a means by which place can be given to the largely invisible issue plaguing South Florida. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Public officials at the state level currently are called upon to create, evaluate, and implement policies that assess the effectiveness of teacher performance and hold teachers accountable for student achievement. Therefore, understanding the social construction of the teaching profession among those public officials is crucial to understanding the impact of the policy agenda on the work of teachers as well as being essential to exercising influence on the policy process itself. This study was an analysis of legislation regarding teacher accountability in an effort to provide insight into how the Florida State Legislature socially constructs the teaching profession. This study used a qualitative methodology to place teachers, as a group, in Schneider and Ingram’s (1993) typology of target populations and made use of historical analysis to trace the changes that have occurred in the social construction of teachers during the period from 1984-2015. In doing so, it found teachers are negatively constructed with a positive power component, correspondingly labeled contenders, on Schneider and Ingram’s typology. Ultimately, the effect of the pressures placed upon teachers has been to create projections of ongoing teacher shortages and to discourage potential candidates from pursuing the profession. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Feral pigs (Sus scrofa) are considered to be among the world’s worst invasive species due to their successful invasion and ecological and economic impact to native and agricultural plants and animals around the world. Feral pigs are significant disturbance agents that destroy plant communities, change soil characteristics, alter nutrient cycling, and create open sites for colonization of both native and non-native plant species through their foraging behavior called rooting. In contrast to native animal disturbances, rooting is a striking feature in the landscape that varies in space, seasonal timing, frequency (number of times rooted), and intensity (depth of rooting). During this study, feral pigs rooted 7.7% of the search area, which increased to 12% when abandoned patches (baseline patches that were not rooted during this study) were included. Overall, feral pigs rooted and re-rooted habitats along roads and trails significantly more than wetlands. Rooting also varied temporally with the most rooting occurring during July-November, which also corresponds to the peak in rooting intensity. Implications to land managers include avoiding the installation of roads and trails near wet to mesic habitats or other habitats that contain species of concern in order to conserve habitat quality and recreational value. Despite less rooting activity, feral pigs still pose a significant threat to wetlands as evidenced by the large amount of abandoned patches documented. In order to conserve natural areas, effective management and development of efficient control methods is needed to keep feral pig populations in check. As a large opportunistic omnivore, feral pigs have the potential to be important vectors for endozoochorus seed dispersal of a variety of plant species. Feral pigs can travel long iv distances and have a gut retention time up to 49 hours, therefore seeds can be deposited throughout the landscape far from the parent plant. Over the course of this study, feral pigs dispersed 50 plant species from a wide range of ecological and morphological characteristics, though the majority were native, small seeded, wetland species. For most plant species, location of deposition matched their habitat preference and suggests a high probability of survival. Feral pigs disperse mainly wetland plant species, which has important implications for wetland conservation. However, feral pigs also deposited unwanted species into wetlands and predated the seeds of important wetland canopy tree species.

The attempts to reform general education programs in higher education have been applied and studied throughout the history of higher education in the United States, but with even greater frequency and urgency over the past fifty years. Countless studies show the high percentage of institutions participating in these efforts and further studies lament the state of general education both as a reason to initiate reforms and as a result of the reforms. This effort is difficult enough for universities, but is further complicated when the curriculum for general education is part of a community college degree program. A grounded theory study was conducted to identify the underlying understanding of general education at one community college as well as the process for implementing and reforming the curriculum, especially the general education curriculum. Members of the curriculum committee as well as other administrators and faculty at the college who have a voice in the curriculum were interviewed and their responses were coded following classic grounded theory methodology. The resulting theory showed a divergence of understanding of general education when speaking about it abstractly and when speaking about the process to change the college’s existing general education program. The abstract understanding of general education is very consistent with the stated purposes of general education and the educational goals of the college. The practical understanding, however, indicates that the work of curriculum reform is compliance with guidelines from legislation and accreditation requirements. Thus, any efforts to establish a model of general education that would be more consistent with the understood purpose of general education that would require modifying the existing structure would meet great iv resistance because of the perceived need to comply with the existing model. Further studies concerning the same issue at other community colleges within the state, as well as the understanding of general education within the university system would contribute to a better understanding of the role of general education at the college and throughout the state system of higher education. The use of grounded theory as a methodology to achieve this reform provides a way to engage everyone involved more openly and to permit the efforts to be far more intentional.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke. Elevated blood pressure is often a silent process affecting multiple organ systems. Risk for heart disease is associated with poorly treated or unrecognized hypertension that is more common among women than men. Non-adherence to prescribed treatment regimens has been identified as a major reason for inadequate hypertension management. This exploratory descriptive qualitative study using narrative inquiry investigated adherence practices among Caucasian women with diagnoses of hypertension from a rural area of Florida. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding from women who had been diagnosed with hypertension about the challenges of living with and managing this chronic condition in their daily lives. Participants included Caucasian women (n = 11) recruited from a Federally Qualified Rural Health Center in Florida. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. Content analysis procedures were used to analyze the interviews. Emergent themes included: work stress affecting health and leading to high blood pressure; silent ―sneaky, gradual‖ onset of mild to moderate symptoms leading to high blood pressure; and strong influence of family members with high blood pressure and related complications that instilled fear in participants to adhere to their prescribed treatment plan in some, or in others to non-adherence. Social support from friends and coworkers was a repeated theme supporting adherence. Minor themes associated with non-adherence included fear of potential side effects of medications, challenges of daily living caring for family, fatigue from high blood pressure and medications affecting daily work, poor food choices due to finances and availability of high sodium and fatty foods at work and home, stress and time demands affecting iv ability to exercise to control high blood pressure, and focus on family forgetting self-needs. Limitations of the study included a small convenience sample with findings that may not be applicable to a population of hypertensive women from different rural settings. Future nursing studies in similar populations may contribute to improved adherence practices, leading to reduced complications from poorly controlled hypertension.

The focus of this research was to investigate and clarify the work lives of middle school literacy coaches in central Florida by studying their backgrounds and experiences before assuming the role of literacy coach. Additionally, the beliefs of literacy coaches on what factors influence reading achievement were examined. The responses of 44 participating middle school literacy coaches were used to investigate (a) the academic and professional experiences of each coach, (b) the percentage of time spent in 13 literacy coaching activities, and (c) the working factors related to student reading achievement as evidenced on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Data from a web-based survey and personal interviews were used to collect pertinent data to create an awareness and understanding of the work lives of middle school literacy coaches. Descriptive statistics were used to present demographic information regarding the coaches. Exploratory regression analyses were performed using time devoted to coaching activities and school performance data to determine existing relationships. Qualitative analyses were used to determine emergent literacy coach themes from survey responses. All data were triangulated to develop case studies for a group of 10 literacy coaches. Narrative descriptions of all coaching and individual school data were presented in the context of schools‘ percentage of student subgroups that attained Adequate Yearly Progress in 2010. The results of the study indicated that, although literacy coaches believed that modeling lessons was the most influential activity in positively affecting reading proficiency, very little of their time was spent in that activity. Recommendations iv included professional development for administrators on the use of a literacy coach and for literacy coaches on their usage of time.

Founded on the importance of the imagination according to Greene (1995) and set by the Executive Summary of the 911 Commission Report, the mixed methods grounded theory study looks at a correlation between a set of instruction practices recognized by Egan (2008) for nourishing and developing the imagination and low-progress adolescent students’ comprehension. Descriptive data are provided on the school, students, teachers, and district where the study was conducted to illustrate the limitation and delimitations of the study. The study is limited to low-progress adolescent students as identified by the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and uses pre and post Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) mandated and administered by Orange County to establish comprehension and determine statistical significance. Participant and non-participant observations are used to triangulate and co-triangulate data to determine the correlation between the frequency of select instructional practices and students’ comprehending as evidence by their FAIR reading and Maze scores. Observation of student performance suggests that attention to the implementation of the instruction practices of using poetry, text sets, and sensory stimulation has potential in nurturing low progress adolescent students’ imagination and strengthening their cognitive feed-forward mechanism. The data adds to the existing body of work on the interactive nature of reading (Rumelhart, 1994) by elaborating on low progress adolescent students’ ability to predict and anticipate; concluding that convergent and divergent thinking, making inter-textual connections, and creating mental models are necessary sub-factors to nourish the imagination and need to be taken into account in instruction to assist low-progress adolescent students in comprehending and developing a defensible interpretation

This study sought to determine how external influences designed to improve student achievement and school performance such as No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, The Florida A+ Program, and the Differentiated Accountability model impacted Florida school superintendents’ prioritization of the Florida Principal Leadership Standards. In the study, major questions addressed concerned (a) the demographic characteristics of the school principals and superintendents involved in the removal of a school principal within the state of Florida; (b) the relationship between the problems a principal encountered and the Florida Principal Leadership Standards; (c) the Florida Principal Leadership Standards that were most often cited and rated most important by school superintendents when determining reasons to remove a school principal within Florida; (d) principal’s years of experience as a predictor of principal competence; (e) sources of information that were most important in providing awareness of principal problems; (f) interventions, if any, that were provided to principals to assist them in improving prior to the decision to remove them; and (g) principal career outcomes that were most to likely occur following a superintendent’s decision to remove a school principal. Utilizing a previously researched survey, the 67 Florida public school superintendents were asked to prioritize the Florida Principal Leadership Standards related to the removal of a single principal from the position and provide pertinent demographic information related to this individual. The following principal leadership standards were most commonly identified as important to the decision to remove a school principal: (a) human resource management, (b) decision making strategies, (c) iv instructional leadership, (d) managing the learning environment, and (e) community and stakeholder partnerships.