Most philosophers of education assume that the main aim of education is to endow pupils or students with ‘personal autonomy’: to produce citizens who are reflective, make rational choices and submit their values and beliefs to critical scrutiny. The underlying assumption is Socratic: that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that goods and forms of perception that cannot be articulated or rationally justified are not worthy of our consideration. The unstated assumption is Plato and Aristotle’s: that the good life is the life of the philosopher and politically active citizen. It is assumed, moreover, that all pupils should be so educated on egalitarian grounds. In this thesis, I dispute these assumptions. I argue that the good life should not be conceived in exclusively ‘intellectualist’ terms but that an ordinary life - an ‘unexamined’ life - is also worth living; that central to the good life in all its forms is the engagement in worthwhile activities or ‘practices’; and that the best way to prepare pupils for their engagement in these practices is to cultivate a range of moral and intellectual virtues. Instead of foisting on all pupils a universal academic curriculum that produces little more than ‘a smattering of knowledge’, I argue that pupils might (1) cultivate the intellectual virtues through early specialisation in at least one subject, academic or practical, that has the characteristics of a practice, (2) develop the capacity to make practical judgements through a study of rhetoric and the stories of human experience of the humanities, and (3) cultivate certain moral virtues through challenging activity and service learning outside the classroom.

This study analyses ‘Gifted and Talented’ (‘G&T’) identities in post-16 education, exploring ‘G&T’ identity construction processes and how students manage ‘G&T’ identities once labelled as such. Bourdieu’s work, social constructionism and identity theorising are used to analyse how ‘G&T’ labelling processes, arising from government policies, located within family, peer and school institutional cultures impact on students’ identities, and their responses to identification. Constructionist critical-realist epistemology is used, with data drawn from semi-structured interviews conducted with 16 post-16 students; 16 e-mailed questionnaires with their parents; and three e-mailed questionnaires with GATCOs (‘G&T’ Co-ordinators), from three schools in Eastern England. Eight follow-up informal couple-interviews were conducted with students and their parents. My data analysis of ‘G&T’-students’ subjectivities shows ‘G&T’ identification has repercussions affecting self-esteem, confidence levels, and other aspects of identity constructions. I identify varied ways in which ‘G&T’ post-16 students actively construct ‘G&T’ identities in family and school cultural contexts, using peer-subcultures to manage ‘G&T’ roles, and show how school institutions differ in ‘G&T’ emphasis. Students display agency in ‘choosing’ routes through their ‘G&T’-journeys, on a continuum ranging from ‘conformity’ through to ‘resistance’. Through my analysis of rich qualitative data, some consequences for students of ‘G&T’-identity construction are revealed to be: fear-of-failure, perfectionism, bullying, eating disorders, stress; as well as confidence, pride, motivation and satisfaction. I argue that what is constructed and identified as ‘G&T’ is the result of social class based cultural capital, as the middle-classes access ‘G&T’ provision disproportionately. I conclude that ‘G&T’ policies function as neoliberal educational differentiators, in further separating the advantaged from the disadvantaged, entrenching class divisions. Recommendations include inclusive, personalised provision for all students. Students, parents and teachers revealed how differentiation within classrooms is as necessary as provision allowing for meeting the ‘like-minded’ e.g. through vertical tutoring, leadership programmes and establishing ‘learning communities’ within schools. I argue that school and family cultures need to ‘scaffold’ developing identities of post-16 students ensuring their potential is reached in academic, confidence and identity domains. The label of ‘G&T’ is not needed in order to achieve these aims of ‘gifted’ education for all students to at least sometimes feel like they are ‘fish in water’.

This thesis explores ways in which practice teachers facilitate student learning on the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing programme. The knowledge they draw on and pedagogic practices they employ in the placement area seem obscure and difficult to articulate and, as a result, tend to be marginalised. A mixed methods approach is adopted drawing on three forms of data collection: semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and practice teachers’ summative comments on student portfolios. Twenty practice teachers from one university were interviewed and practice teachers’ comments in student portfolios in the same university were scrutinised. The information from the interview data informed the third data collection method, a questionnaire sent nationally to 115 practice teachers in 12 English universities. It aimed to establish whether views expressed in interviews were more generally applicable. The findings offer fresh insights into, and interpretation of teaching practice and the knowledge relied on. Learning in the practice placement becomes an amalgamation of complex professional knowledge, client narratives, and cultural artefacts. These become appropriated and reconfigured as new professional knowledge. This process may result in different acts of translation of the day-to-day realities of each practice teacher rendering the approach person-bound and context specific. The thesis concludes that drawing upon the above process the practice teacher’s individual approach to teaching and learning develops and then (having assessed the context within which she is working) she engages to help with students’ learning by using a mixture of formal knowledge and knowledge developed from practice. A model of responses and relationships has been developed involving complex professional knowledge and pedagogic processes. The study, therefore, sheds light on learning in the practice placement.

This thesis presents the first in-depth ‘home international’ comparison examining England’s and Northern Ireland’s policy processes with regard to making sex and relationship(s) education a statutory component of their national curricula for secondary schools. Drawing on policy network analysis, advocacy coalition and political decisionmaking literature more broadly, this study focuses on how policy actors in both regions conceptualise the debate around sex and relationship(s) education. It extends the ‘values in sex education’ discussion and focuses on the specific values informing policy discussions, as well as those embedded within/excluded from relevant policy texts, and the centrality of power around who or what groups are influential in shaping policy. Informed by a social constructivist epistemology and utilising a mixed method, case study design, this study’s data include Northern Ireland Assembly and Westminster Parliament Hansard transcripts, relevant legislation and statutory policy texts, and semi-structured interviews with 32 elected representatives, civil servants, third sector representatives, academics and local school practitioners. Employing thematic and content analysis to each text, a framework was created for both the England and Northern Ireland cases to determine how policy actors in both countries approach sex and relationship(s) education and the values driving policy development arguments. Cross-case comparisons indicate that SRE policy-making in England is primarily made through a closed, ‘top down’ policy strategy with the authoritative power of the ruling government overshadowing the perceived reputational power of those within the larger SRE policy network. Meanwhile Northern Ireland adopts a more open, partnership sharing, ‘ground up’ policy strategy toward RSE with relatively little influence from Members of the Legislative Assembly within the policy-making process. This study’s findings offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the different factors that shape the sex and relationship(s) education policy-making systems within both countries and provides a tool for possible policy learning in these countries more widely.

ABSTRACT KENNETH BURKE, MUSIC, AND RHETORIC by Joel Lane Overall, Ph.D., 2013 Department of English Texas Christian University Dissertation Director: Dr. Ann George, Professor of English Dissertation Committee: Dr. Joddy Murray, Associate Professor of English Dr. Carrie Leverenz, Associate Professor of English Dr. Gary Mabry, Associate Professor of Music My dissertation focuses on the important but largely unexplored intersection between Kenneth Burke's interest in music and his rhetorical theory. Throughout his life, Burke expressed a deep interest in reviewing, writing, and playing a variety of musical genres, and my examination focuses primarily on music reviews Burke wrote for The Nation in the 1930s, correspondence he kept with friend and musical composer Louis Calabro in 1961, and music journals and compositions Burke wrote throughout his life. Based on my analysis of these artifacts, my dissertation a) shows how Burke's interest in music substantially influenced his rhetorical ideas; b) reveals a Burkean theory of multimodality through the incorporation of recent multimodal scholars such as Kristie Fleckenstein and Richard Lanham; c) understands Burke's view on nonlinguistic language by aligning him with language theorists such as Susanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer; and finally, d) shows how Burke himself employed rhetorical principles in his musical and multimodal works. In Chapter one, I outline my project, which employs a rhetorical history methodology. This methodology allows me not only to examine historical approaches to multimodality but also to argue for its value in current approaches. Drawing on four of Kenneth Burke's music reviews in The Nation, I argue in Chapter two that the shifting music scene of the 1930s heavily influenced Burke's development of the key concept "secular conversion" in Permanence and Change. In Chapter three, I focus on Burke's later Nation reviews to recreate the important socio-political role music was serving in Burke's rhetorical theory as WW II approached. Chapter four more fully examines Burke's views on music as a symbol system through his 1961 correspondence with Bennington colleague and music composer Louis Calabro. In the final chapter, I shift from examining Burke as a music critic and language theorist to examining Burke the musician and multimodal composer. Burke's musical compositions reveal an enactment his rhetorical theory in a nonlinguistic symbolic system.

This work examines the entrée of American oil companies in the Persian Gulf in the late 1920s and early 1930s up to the formation of OPEC in 1960 and finds the present U.S. entanglement in the Middle East related to those first three decades of American oil exploitation. As American oil companies aligned with the British and their colonial history and the U.S. government and its increasingly hegemonic and pro-Israeli foreign policy, the industry came to represent a new American imperialism, which intensified anti-Western sentiment in the twentieth century. With the formation of OPEC and nationalization, oil-producing states gained control over the production and pricing of crude; however, those states assumed ownership of an industry that dominated their domestic economies and only functioned within the Western system. While oil provided regional leaders with economic and political power, it also linked them to the West and made them servants of oil.

The abortion debate in the United States today is considered, with a particular focus on the use of rights language. The methodology of interpretation is dimensional anthropology rhetorical criticism, an approach developed by the author, which focuses on nature, divine transcendence, society, and individuality as the key dimensions within which rhetorical arguments are made regarding abortion. The first part of the thesis demonstrates that the use of rights language in the abortion debate (and in Western culture more generally) is in disarray. The second part of the thesis argues that: (1) rights language is always rhetorical, (2) dimensional anthropology enables us to understand better why different people use rights language in the way that they do, (3) René Girard`s account of the historical roots of rights language in the West is important to consider, (4) the pro-choice position can be criticized from the pro-life perspective as a failure to maintain balance within the dimensions.

Cette recherche porte sur les utilisations de la visioconférence dans l'enseignement supérieur français, dans les années 90. Ces utilisations, généralement mises en œuvre grâce à des<br />partenariats entre des acteurs de l'offre technique et des acteurs éducatifs, participent à la fois à un processus d'innovation technique et à un processus d'innovation éducative. Nous montrons que le processus d'innovation technique, allant de la conception et de l'expérimentation de prototypes aux utilisations de réseaux techniques et de terminaux en série, se caractérise par la recherche de modalités de convergence multimédia selon les logiques sociales des filières dominantes (les télécommunications et l'informatique). En revanche, le processus d'innovation éducative, allant des expérimentations éducatives (visant le changement pédagogique, organisationnel ou institutionnel) aux usages, se caractérise par l'emprise de la communication comme idéologie et technique de gestion du social. Nous notons, dans le champ éducatif, l'émergence d'usages isolés et la généralisation des expérimentations – à la fois éducatives et techniques. Cherchant à expliquer cette généralisation, nous observons l'institutionnalisation de l'innovation éducative et la<br />professionnalisation de l'expérimentation technique. Celle-ci est due à des acteurs éducatifs, usagers-concepteurs participant directement au processus d'innovation technique.<br />Les utilisations auto-référentielles, dont le contenu porte sur le dispositif technique utilisé, sont symptomatiques de ces tendances. Leur essor témoigne de l'émergence d'une nouvelle<br />configuration éducative définie par la prévalence de la formation professionnalisante et de la recherche technologique, dans une optique de développement économique et d'aménagement du territoire. Ce sont d'ailleurs les collectivités locales qui ont rendu possibles les premières expérimentations techniques et éducatives de la visioconférence.

Constatant l'apparente contradiction entre l'affirmation régulièrement réitérée dans les textes officiels d'un enseignement de la physique proche de la science (en particulier dans sa dimension expérimentale) et les pratiques dans les classes (qu'elles soient classiques ou innovantes en matière d'introduction des instruments informatisés), nous avons élaboré notre projet de recherche en le centrant sur l'enseignant, notre objectif étant de comprendre quelle logique, quelle cohérence, est à la base de l'élaboration des activités quantitatives proposées aux élèves dans les travaux pratiques.

Cette synthèse d'HDR propose des clés de lecture des modes d'action et de réaction d'un système éducatif confronté au fait nouveau de l'informatique.