As a teacher within a special needs classroom of students ranging in age from 13 to 22, I observed first-hand the outcomes of unhealthy habits, behavioural issues, and academic struggles. In response to these learning and behavioral difficulties within my high school classroom, I created and implemented a Movement Matters Program consisting of a combined exercise and academic program for my students. The program produced phenomenal results within its first year. This thesis is a manuscript style thesis consisting of two embedded papers as central themes. The first paper highlights the development of Movement Matters and the challenges and successes experienced by myself, the classroom teacher, and my students. The second paper is a narrative inquiry that shares the experiences of two students engaged in Movement Matters and myself, as their teacher, and graduate student researcher. Over the course of two months I inquired into the ways that their school experiences and their relationships with the teacher, classmates, and subject matter influenced the way they composed their stories to live by. Also threaded through this thesis is an abundance of data, such as anecdotal records, pre and post academic and fitness tests, and student journals. Field notes, taped conversations and observations with each of the two youth captured stories and realities of their experiences and are inter-twined with the literature and the theory. These experiences and relationships are negotiated carefully using Noddings ethics of care. Both my experiences and my students experiences are situated alongside Deweys Criteria of Experience within a narrative framework. Using research, I wanted to understand and retell their stories as well as link Clandinin and Connellys commonplaces of narrative inquiry: place, temporality, and sociality.

Programs that use the arts to engage older people promote health, foster community, and give voice and legacy to participants. Creative practice in health care settings facilitates emotional, mental, and physical wellness for participants and staff, while improving the culture of care. Yet there is resistance to arts-in-medicine as a legitimate tool of health care. The predominant biomedical paradigm privileges quantitative assessment methods over qualitative studies which may accept anecdotal, arts-informed, or “common sense” evidence. Successful creative programs face challenges translating their benefits when evaluated inappropriately. This arts-informed inquiry uses creative writing to address multiple dimensions of knowing, integrating autoethnographical insights from work as a caregiver, artist, educator, and administrator of collaborative art. Serendipity and imagination in research were employed to explore how collaborating artists can facilitate creative engagement for elders, embodying preventative, community-based medicine to successfully address and transform myriad challenges and opportunities as the population continues to age.

Undergoing a self-study using the method of currere (Pinar, 1976), I examine my own learning as holistic, embodied, and relational in the context of my mother’s garden. Specifically, I explore my mother’s garden as a site of relational learning that intersects with various classrooms that feature in my educational experiences. The garden and the classroom intersect with/in one curricular landscape, where self and other engage in an embodied process fostering connections and knowledges about each other and place. In bringing forth my narrative through currere, I engage in reflective and reflexive praxis through journal writing, poetry, meditation, and photographic collage. Using these forms of expression, I reflect upon my experiential learning process, analyze issues and concepts related to the body-in-movement, as well as focus on community connections and ecology-based learning as pedagogical praxis.

Programs that use the arts to engage older people promote health, foster community, and give voice and legacy to participants. Creative practice in health care settings facilitates emotional, mental, and physical wellness for participants and staff, while improving the culture of care. Yet there is resistance to arts-in-medicine as a legitimate tool of health care. The predominant biomedical paradigm privileges quantitative assessment methods over qualitative studies which may accept anecdotal, arts-informed, or “common sense” evidence. Successful creative programs face challenges translating their benefits when evaluated inappropriately. This arts-informed inquiry uses creative writing to address multiple dimensions of knowing, integrating autoethnographical insights from work as a caregiver, artist, educator, and administrator of collaborative art. Serendipity and imagination in research were employed to explore how collaborating artists can facilitate creative engagement for elders, embodying preventative, community-based medicine to successfully address and transform myriad challenges and opportunities as the population continues to age.

Undergoing a self-study using the method of currere (Pinar, 1976), I examine my own learning as holistic, embodied, and relational in the context of my mother’s garden. Specifically, I explore my mother’s garden as a site of relational learning that intersects with various classrooms that feature in my educational experiences. The garden and the classroom intersect with/in one curricular landscape, where self and other engage in an embodied process fostering connections and knowledges about each other and place. In bringing forth my narrative through currere, I engage in reflective and reflexive praxis through journal writing, poetry, meditation, and photographic collage. Using these forms of expression, I reflect upon my experiential learning process, analyze issues and concepts related to the body-in-movement, as well as focus on community connections and ecology-based learning as pedagogical praxis.

另類學校處於升學主義與考試中心的價值洪流中，不時地被添上許多莫須有的帽子，例如「另類學校畢業生沒有競爭力」、「另類學校是貴族學校」、「有問題的學生才需要另類教育」等罪名，這些問題必得由教育的主體─學生來發聲，根據他們的體驗與視角，來摘除上述種種對於另類教育的汙名。此外，為了探究不同體制的學校教育如何影響學生的自我形構，本研究嘗試以敘說研究的方式，來探究一位跨越教育體制畢業生的生命故事，從而瞭解其自我調適的歷程與自我形構的因素。自我形構是一個動態的未完成狀態，人的一生不斷的調整自我內在與外在環境至一個和諧的狀態，因此，外在環境對於自我形構的影響甚鉅，而對學生的自我形構而言，學校教育的環境便是一大重要場域。研究發現，開放自由的教育理念與方式培養學生建立較具正面與積極的自我圖像，而較保守封閉的教育理念與方式會使得學生對於自我圖像失去想像力空間，而創造性變得比較狹隘。藉由兩種教育體制的對照與激盪，不僅碰撞出教育本質之應然所在之處，同時也為另類教育學提供另一種論述基礎。 關鍵字：另類教育、全人中學、敘說探究、自我 / Alternative schools are usually misunderstood by people surrounded in the mainstream of credentialism, such as non-competitiveness, exclusive schools only for nobles or problem-maker students. In order to answer these questions raised above, it should be spoken by the narrative of students who had studied in a mainstream school and an alternative school to get rid of rumors. The purpose of the research is to deliberate the process of the self construction of students in different educational system of schools. Self construction is an ongoing process, and people would adjust constantly between inner self and outside environment to achieve a status of harmony. Therefore, school environment is one of the most important places for students. It finds that students grow positive self images easier in open and liberal school environments. On the contrary, students have lower imagination and creativity to their self images in conservative and closed school environments. The research is not only remind people what education is, but also provide a narrative for alternative schools. Keywords: alternative school, Holistic school, narrative, self

Face recognition is a popular research area where there are different approaches studied in the literature. In this thesis, a holistic Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based method, namely Eigenface method is studied in detail and three of the methods based on the Eigenface method are compared. These are the Bayesian PCA where Bayesian classifier is applied after dimension reduction with PCA, the Subspace Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) where LDA is applied after PCA and Eigenface where Nearest Mean Classifier applied after PCA. All the three methods are implemented on the Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) face database, the Face Recognition Technology (FERET) database and the CNN-TURK Speakers face database. The results are compared with respect to the effects of changes in illumination, pose and aging. Simulation results show that Subspace LDA and Bayesian PCA perform slightly well with respect to PCA under changes in pose / however, even Subspace LDA and Bayesian PCA do not perform well under changes in illumination and aging although they perform better than PCA.

As a teacher within a special needs classroom of students ranging in age from 13 to 22, I observed first-hand the outcomes of unhealthy habits, behavioural issues, and academic struggles. In response to these learning and behavioral difficulties within my high school classroom, I created and implemented a Movement Matters Program consisting of a combined exercise and academic program for my students. The program produced phenomenal results within its first year. This thesis is a manuscript style thesis consisting of two embedded papers as central themes. The first paper highlights the development of Movement Matters and the challenges and successes experienced by myself, the classroom teacher, and my students. The second paper is a narrative inquiry that shares the experiences of two students engaged in Movement Matters and myself, as their teacher, and graduate student researcher. Over the course of two months I inquired into the ways that their school experiences and their relationships with the teacher, classmates, and subject matter influenced the way they composed their stories to live by. Also threaded through this thesis is an abundance of data, such as anecdotal records, pre and post academic and fitness tests, and student journals. Field notes, taped conversations and observations with each of the two youth captured stories and realities of their experiences and are inter-twined with the literature and the theory. These experiences and relationships are negotiated carefully using Noddings ethics of care. Both my experiences and my students experiences are situated alongside Deweys Criteria of Experience within a narrative framework. Using research, I wanted to understand and retell their stories as well as link Clandinin and Connellys commonplaces of narrative inquiry: place, temporality, and sociality.

This essay tells about the meaning of eurhythmics for children’s development and why it is so difficult to draw attention to the value of eurhythmics compared to other activities in preschool. The essay builds upon a story that shows what consequences may follow when the meaning of the eurhythmics in the process of learning is not acknowledged. By looking at the relation between rhythm and human beings in a global perspective, I have examined the meaning of rhythm for the human well-being. The question I have researched is; why does eurhythmics appeal to almost every child in spite of being rejected by so many teachers? By researching the reasons behind these completely different points of views, I have tried to enhance the understanding for the different perspectives. I see a danger in the fact that the children lose a very important way to express themselves, as the eurhythmics in preschool and elementary school has to give way for other theoretical subjects. Despite the knowledge many of us possess regarding the development of children, we consent to the limitation of the different ways to express ourselves that we were born with. With my text, I want the reader to reflect over things that might otherwise have been unthought-of. The essay is a story that draws on my own experiences. I have during many years worked with eurhythmics groups in preschool and have been able to follow a positive development in the children whom have participated in my eurhythmics sessions. Yet, I have been experiencing a resistance from some pedagogues, which takes away the children’s opportunity to participate. Moreover, I have gained knowledge of the subject matter by having conversations with people who have long experience with working with children and eurhythmics/music. I have, during the process of writing, many of my thoughts confirmed; such as eurhythmics being one of the hundred languages Loris Malaguzzi talks about and how it is being jeopardized if not given attention and stimulation. By the help of literature, I have reflected over the subject and myself and my actions.

Purpose – Target of this study is to develop a social media framework, the essential “ingredient” for a social media concept for the destination Usedom. The following question is in the centre of this investigations attention:  How to create awareness and dialogue by using Social Media for the destination Usedom taking into account the new Usedom Welcome Visitor Centre that will be open 2011? Methodology/approach – Mainly, an observational approach as research method is used to answer the research question, collecting empirical data not by questioning respondents, but by observing different forms of activity. Writing about social media, to use the Internet for observational research is natural and can be further enhanced due to the accessibility and retrieval of information and cross-validation of the information available from several sources. Findings – Social media marketing eliminates the middlemen and provides destinations with the unique opportunity to have a direct relationship with their customers. In today’s knowledge-society where people want to engage – want to be active – want to create content on their own people talk: online and offline - positive or negative – with or without the destination NOT participating is NO option. In case of the isle of Usedom, the Social media concept should be of listening and outreach character. As a holistic marketing approach where “everything matters” is needed for destinations, online and offline activities need each other. In addition to social media marketing even search engine optimisation, ad words and target mails are important tools for a successful online strategy. Research limitations/implications – Most important is the time limitation. The validity period is limited. A Social Media framework of today is not the social media framework of the future. Social media is changing rapidly. New channels appear - others disappear. Moreover, another limitation is the subjectivity: the author of this study observes the Internet in accordance to the research question and allocates a sample pursuant to her knowledge and experience. Practical implications – Aside from the destinations’ website being adapted by social media elements, Facebook serves as ideal tool to nurture relationships between the customer and the destination by being creative, honest and assessing competitors as partners. As one of the easiest and most versatile social networks for professionals today, Facebook is a profile and presence aggregator, channelling all online activity through one main hub and combining almost every online social tool that can be used. Originality/value – Targeting the destination Usedom, but also being applicable for other German tourist destinations, this study provides both: a theoretical and with ideas filled framework to create awareness and dialogue by using social media as complement to traditional marketing activities. Being the first investigation that has been done for the destination Usedom in the field of social media, this study aims to inspire other tourist destinations as well as students to learn about social media and to further investigate in this field.