In my clay, mixed media, and photographic work I present vignettes of my life and aspects of my heritage to the viewer. While working with clay, I create houses that personify different aspects of my personality, depending on what was happening in my life at the time. I also make pots that reflect elements of my environment. My mixed media and digital photography work is a more intimate look at my Middle Eastern heritage from belly dancing to snapshots of my family.

This report involves a proposed study that intends to examine the effects of mindfulness training for graduate students in the helping profession. The study aims to examine a possible complement to psychology graduate education that may enhance well-being and prevent deleterious consequences of stress, as well as provide students with knowledge and skills to better prepare them for their future roles as practitioners. The study will empirically investigate the efficacy of a mindfulness-based intervention to enhance well-being, benefit the therapist-client relationship through the cultivation of empathy, and promote clinical training progress via enhancing skills rated by clinical supervisors. Additional goals include examination of whether mindfulness training increases mindfulness levels and clarification of the relationship between amount of mindfulness practice and mental health outcomes. This report provides an integrated analysis of relevant current literature related to these research goals, including an overview of mindfulness, outlining its origins and defining the construct. After providing this basis for understanding, this report describes mindfulness practice, with particular focus given to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which is the intervention to be utilized in the proposed study. Following a brief review of empirical findings that summarize the effects of MBSR found in the literature, mental health providers are discussed as a particularly at-risk population for experiencing stress and its deleterious effects on personal and professional life. The relationship, overlap, and similarities between mindfulness and psychotherapy that have been suggested in the literature are then described, with consideration given to the particular elements they share. Literature which describes a gap in psychology graduate school curricula that neglects self care and clinical skills training, and research that indicates that beginning helping professionals may particularly benefit from self care training is discussed. This report then suggests that mindfulness training may uniquely and efficaciously complement psychology graduate school training, with respect to the enhancement of well-being of therapists in training, their ability to cope with graduate school, and their development of clinical skills. The proposed study is then presented, describing methods and expected results, finishing with a brief discussion. / text

The National Writing Project (NWP) conducts four and five-week professional development summer workshops that K-16 expert teachers consistently praise as transformative. The central question posed in this dissertation focuses on whether the NWP workshop, based on a teachers-teaching-teachers design, could also serve as an effective professional development vehicle for transforming and preparing graduate student instructors (GSIs) to teach first-year composition. This question arises out of the need for knowledge-building graduate student preparation programs that keep pace with the increased demands of the first-year composition course and of the first-year composition students. Methods used to explore the feasibility of the NWP to prepare GSIs involve an analytic autoethnography and two survey research instruments. In the autoethnography, the researcher views the various processes experienced throughout the NWP workshop through the twin lenses of Transformation Learning (TL) theory and constructivist learning pedagogy. In the survey research, the researcher investigates the GSI participants' and local site directors' perceptions concerning the value and benefits of the NWP workshop to prepare GSIs for teaching writing. The researcher's analytic autoethnography reveals the transformative effects of the NWP experience on the teacher-frames of the researcher and of those peers attending the same NWP institute, while the surveys of the GSI participants and the local site directors reveal similarly positive effects of NWP pedagogy for preparing GSI for teaching writing. Based on these findings, combined with foundational support from the NWP meta-analysis of student writing outcomes of NWP participating teachers generated by the Local Sites Research Initiatives (LSRI), along with the independent Inverness Associates' studies focusing on the perceptions of teachers involved in the NWP's New-Teacher Initiative (NTI), the researcher recommends a pilot project involving a NWP designed pre-semester workshop for graduate student instructors prior to teaching first-year composition.

Our nation’s first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, has said that “technology in education is less about hardware and software and more about what we teach, the method in which we teach it, and professional development and support for educators” (Fletcher, 2009). While technology reform continues to provide schools and colleges with hardware and software (Kern & Warschauer, 2000; Kessler, 2006), the amount of technology teachers use remains low (Barron et al., 2003; Cuban et al., 2001). If our efforts are to reform, as Chopra suggests, what we teach and how we teach it, our instructional technology research must incorporate the voices of teachers who determine what happens inside the classroom. One theory regarding limited technology use has been that teachers’ beliefs and their relationship to practice might provide us with insight that will allow us to aid teachers in their craft (Becker & Riel, 1999; Ertmer, 2005). This qualitative case study examines three Spanish teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and how those beliefs relate to their instructional technology use. Data include interviews, observations, field notes and documents analyzed using a constant comparative approach (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Findings show that beliefs about the classroom environment most influence their choices regarding instructional technology. / text

This practicum focuses on the issues of the overlapping boundaries between Student housing and downtown redevelopment. Can graduate students find a place in the downtown to meet their need for off-campus housing, and simultaneously help build a healthy, vibrant, downtown community; ensuring the housing facility represents a quality space for both graduate students and the local community? The following is an investigation of related issues including: Richard Florida’s notion of the Creative Class, multi-purpose development, the university as an urban catalyst, and adaptive reuse. The combination of graduate housing and the city’s downtown redevelopment will create new design typology that benefits both graduate students and downtown community. The practicum project consists of a live/work space for Winnipeg in the Waterfront area by adaptively reusing the James Ave Pumping Station building. The renovated building includes a bookstore, a coffee shop, a daycare, and an urban grocery store. However, the design focuses on the informal learning space and the quality of graduate students’ living experience through aspects such as accommodation, study space, meeting and casual spaces.

This practicum focuses on the issues of the overlapping boundaries between Student housing and downtown redevelopment. Can graduate students find a place in the downtown to meet their need for off-campus housing, and simultaneously help build a healthy, vibrant, downtown community; ensuring the housing facility represents a quality space for both graduate students and the local community? The following is an investigation of related issues including: Richard Florida’s notion of the Creative Class, multi-purpose development, the university as an urban catalyst, and adaptive reuse. The combination of graduate housing and the city’s downtown redevelopment will create new design typology that benefits both graduate students and downtown community. The practicum project consists of a live/work space for Winnipeg in the Waterfront area by adaptively reusing the James Ave Pumping Station building. The renovated building includes a bookstore, a coffee shop, a daycare, and an urban grocery store. However, the design focuses on the informal learning space and the quality of graduate students’ living experience through aspects such as accommodation, study space, meeting and casual spaces.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF SAMANTHA OKON for the MASTERS OF SCIENCE degree in Communication Disorders and Sciences, presented on April 5, 2010, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: GRADUATE STUDENT PREFERENCES OF SOCIAL POWER USE IN CLINICAL SUPERVISION MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Linda McCabe Smith, C.C.C. SLP The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the preferences and perceptions of graduate student supervisees when rating the five bases of social power use of their supervisors in clinical speech-language pathology. When used in supervision, the supervisee may perceive some bases to be positive in outcome and some to be negative. Social power refers to the ability of one individual to influence the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of another individual. French and Raven created the five bases of social power in 1959 in order to describe how individuals or groups interact with one another (Raven, 2008). The five bases of social power include coercive, reward, expert, legitimate and referent. Results indicated that graduate supervisees preferred more referent power, reward power and expert power than was used by their current supervisor. Results also demonstrated graduate supervisees would prefer less coercive power and legitimate power to be used by their supervisors in clinical supervision.

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The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the Miller Analogies Test scores of graduate school students and their undergraduate grade-point averages, as well as to find the relationship between Miller Analogies Test scores and the grade-point averages in graduate school of these students. A secondary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between each of the following variables: sex, age, curriculum and the performance levels of the subjects.

The primary aims of this study are two-fold: (a) to understand what role the racial identity of African American graduate students plays in how they perceive the multicultural competence of their faculty mentor; (b) to understand how both the racial identity of African American graduate students and their perception of their faculty mentors’ multicultural competence play in their overall satisfaction in the mentoring relationship. African American participants who are in cross-racial faculty mentoring relationships—will be recruited from programs in rehabilitation counseling, counseling psychology, clinical psychology, and counselor education. The instruments for the study will include the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS), the Alliant Intercultural Competence Scale (ACIS), and the Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS). It is hoped that this study will begin to address current gaps in the literature concerning what constitutes a culturally competent mentor and satisfaction from the protégé’s perspective.