This dissertation documents the joys and terrors of caring for my father throughout my twenties and early thirties. The story is autoethnographic and demonstrates the value of narrative research in fostering understandings of self, other, and the world around us. I call this reflexive practice of writing narrative education because as I engaged in it, I learned what it means to care, and how mental health and illness factor into the ways in which care is expressed and provided in my own relationships and beyond. In addition, throughout the story I was a member of the academic community, which makes caring more than an act or behavior, but a concept to unpack, an ideograph. This dissertation begins with the goal to write my story and learn from it so others might learn from it as well. While the narrative portion of my dissertation focuses on story and the craft of creative nonfiction, the final chapters present a discussion of narrative ethics and the writing process. I also delve into concepts of care, family, and community to shed light on the narrative and create a space for reflection.

This narrative inquiry explores the process through which a combination of coursework, field experiences, and experiential classroom activities engaged pre-service teachers with opportunities to expand their perspective upon culturally normative conceptions of values, beliefs, and worldview. Due to the current racial and ethnic demographic gap separating the professional ranks of the teaching force and the increasingly diverse population of students in the United States, cross-cultural awareness is imperative for both teacher education programming and membership in a culturally pluralistic society. Drawing on multiple data points, the narrative illuminates the participant voices, context, and dynamic social process of teaching and learning. The findings comprise a heuristic portrait that describes the process of how the instructor, students, and the researcher approached cross-cultural awareness from within the walls of a university classroom. The findings demonstrate how normative frames of reference in the class were meaningfully and experientially contrasted through a purposive curriculum under the guidance of an exemplar instructor. Findings included that cognitively dissociative cross-cultural simulations, with attendant debriefings, were effective means for engaging students in reflecting on culturally normative cognition and behaviors. This in part was due to the curricular decisions of an experienced instructor – students for the most part felt comfortable in reflecting and challenging their cultural assumptions and experiences. Not as effective was the engagement of guest speakers as a means for students to reflect on their cultural selves and others. These findings help inform and guide educators seeking to engage issues related to cross-cultural awareness, and offers new directions for future research.

The aim of this dissertation is to develop and illustrate a spiritually centered narrative method for transforming disorder into agency and action. I use my own position as a second-generation Hispanic female immigrant to show how training in a spiritual practice that mirrors my ancestral traditions helped me productively move through a sense of displacement, illness, and lack of purpose. My research includes travel to Havana, Cuba, and immersion in a five-week shamanic counseling training program in Tampa, Florida, during which I learned how to narrate my experiences as I engaged in shamanic journeying. As I reflect on these experiences, I explore three questions: How can second-generation immigrants 1) overcome family histories of displacement to create a sense of home? 2) engage in self-care practices that promote healing and nourishing relationships? and 3) create healthy identities and a sense of purpose within their communities? Through the process of writing my own story, I move from individual pathology toward communal creativity and tap into the burgeoning activist movement of bruja feminism.

This capstone project was part of a group project completed by five school and district administrators in Hillsborough County, Florida. The project began because of our passion for teachers who are able to establish a culture of care in their classrooms that support students academically but transform their learning through experiences that enable them to be more highly engaged and productive students, regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, perceived academic abilities, and backgrounds. My focus in this group project was an exploration of how Walker Middle Magnet School became more diverse while increasing student achievement during the conversion to a ‘reverse magnet’ and subsequent authorization as an International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program. It explores the challenges in building a positive and equitable learning environment. Selected literature was reviewed that concentrated on traditional schools, magnet schools, ‘reverse’ magnet schools, equity, local transportation, magnet transportation, International Baccalaureate-Middle Years Program, Appreciative Inquiry, and Appreciative Organization. Key findings in my area of focus included increases in student diversity and achievement, identification of gaps in students’ affective experiences in the school, importance of shared narratives to build community and address implicit biases, and the role of the principal in shifting culture.

Scientific literacy is concerned with the informed citizens' ability to negotiate scientifically-related societal issues. The suite of skills necessary to negotiate these complex issues is referred to as Socioscientific Reasoning (SSR). SSR requires, among other things, perspective-taking abilities in order to consider the multi-faceted nature of these open-ended, debatable socioscientific issues (SSI). Developing interventions and instruments to foster and measure perspective taking in support of SSR is therefore critical to the promotion of functional scientific literacy through both research and practice. Although widely studied in many disciplines, perspective taking is a particularly tangled construct that has been used to describe a range of activities representing different psychological domains and applied interchangeably with related constructs such as role taking, empathy, and theory of mind. This ambiguity makes it difficult to ensure construct validity and prevents science education researchers from honing in on the precise skills they wish to study and promote. To clarify the construct of perspective taking, this study undertook a conceptual analysis to operationalize perspective taking, drawing comparisons and distinctions between it and related constructs. Further, by applying a method known as conception development, perspective taking was positioned in the context of SSR, particularly as it relates to moral development, in order to devise a more precise construct relating perspective taking to SSR called socioscientific perspective taking (SSPT). It is asserted that SSPT requires engagement with others or their circumstances, an etic/emic shift, and a moral context comprised of reflective and reflexive judgment. Finally, in order to identify promising interventions for promoting SSPT in the science classroom, the newly-developed SSPT construct was applied to a series of extensively researched curricular frameworks that promote perspective taking in three non-science disciplines including historical empathy (social studies education), method acting (theater education), and autism intervention (special education). The aim of this theoretical inquiry was to translate successful perspective-taking interventions into SSI contexts, yielding an array of promising approaches for fostering SSPT while assessing the feasibility of each of these fields as potential sources for novel and expansive work in SSI to promote scientific literacy. Implications for science education research and practice are discussed.

In the US, an estimated 25% of four-year college students and up to 80% of community college students suffer from a moderate to high degree of mathematics anxiety (MA) (Chang & Beilock, 2016). Many scholars have noted that mathematics anxiety can be regarded as a significant factor in determining a student's achievement and mathematics related jobs. In the existing literature body, many researchers noted that MA may stem from teaching methods that are more conventional and rule-bounded such as lecture-style classroom models. On the other hand, MA can be mitigated by inquiry-based learning classroom models where students construct knowledge through inquiry, communication, critical thinking, and group work. However, the current literature has not built the connection between different teaching styles and students' individual differences with respect to MA. The individual differences are associated with the personality of the learner, learning styles, learning speed, and needs and interests of the learner. Depending on a student's learning style and a compatible teaching style, the student may actively participate in their own learning with less mathematics anxiety. Thus, the purpose of this study is to determine the influence of different teaching styles on MA, when interacted with Kolb’s and Gregorc’s (1984) four different learning and thinking styles. The research questions investigated in this study are: 1) What is the difference between a lecture classroom model (LCM) and an inquiry-based learning classroom model (IBL) on students’ mathematics anxiety levels over a fifteen-week semester of a college-level remedial mathematics course?; 2) What is the difference between a lecture classroom model (LCM) and an inquiry-based learning classroom model (IBL) on mathematics anxiety levels for students with different learning and thinking styles (as defined by Kolb’s and Gregorc’s learning styles) over a fifteen-week semester?; and 3) What aspects of instructional approaches (LCM and IBL) do students with different learning and thinking styles report as being related to mathematics anxiety? The abbreviated version of the mathematics anxiety rating scale (A-MARS), Kolb’s learning styles inventory, Gregorc’s thinking styles, and Written questionnaire were used to measure students’ MA levels and identify their learning and thinking styles. The results provided evidence that IBL instruction is beneficial for the students with MA, especially with mathematics test anxiety and mathematics course anxiety. Only numerical task anxiety was not significant. Thus, student-centered learning pedagogies turned out to be an effective and engaging method for lowering MA. However, there was no evidence to support the overall relationship between the constructs of learning and thinking styles and MA levels, above and beyond the instructional approaches. Classifying students according to learning and thinking styles did not influence students’ MA levels in this study over the 15 academic weeks. Moreover, after a 15 academic weeks, students in both LCM and IBL classes responded positively to key components of LCM and IBL classroom models. This implies that both LCM and IBL approaches still are important models regardless of students’ MA levels.

Gay identity is inextricably tied to the metaphor of the closet. This tie is best exemplified by the act of "coming out of the closet," an act when a person discloses a gay identity to another, an act of self-identification and confession that others can motivate but never force, an act typically thought of as necessary, dangerous, and consequential, and an act often viewed as a discrete, linear process. Gay identity is also frequently framed as a self-contained trait thus making coming out a one-sided, personal affair. In this project, I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry, life story interviews of four gay men, life writings by gay men, mass mediated accounts of the closet, and my personal experience to describe three epiphanies-interactional moments that significantly change the trajectory of a person's life-of gay identity: (1) "Learning the Closet," a moment when a person first becomes familiar with the metaphorical space; (2) "Living the Closet," a moment when a person privately acknowledges a gay identity but publicly discounts this identity by saying and acting as if it does not exist; and (3) "Leaving the Closet," a moment when a person discloses gay identity to others. I conclude by describing the "double-bind of gay identity"-the dilemma that forms when a person cannot escape the closet-and argue that once a person identifies as gay, the closet becomes a formative influence on her/his life; a gay person can never live outside of the metaphorical space again, can never live as an out gay person everywhere. I also use a relational perspective to understand how gay identity and the disclosure of this identity implicate others in a gay person's social network. A relational perspective removes gay identity it from the individualistic realm and situates it among beings-in-interaction. In so doing, the experience of the closet becomes removed from the exclusive burden of the self-contained gay person to one in which coming out becomes a shared responsibility by all individuals involved in a relationship.

The science education literature was examined in order to identify the methodologies that various authors considered to characterise inquiry teaching. On the basis of this examination, a new classroom environment instrument, the Is This an Inquiring Classroom or ITIC was developed. The final version of the ITIC contained forty items in five different scales, Freedom in Practical Work, Communication, Interpretation of Data, Science Stories and Uncertainty in Science.The Actual and Preferred Forms of the ITIC were administered to 2,207 Grade 7-12 students and 65 teachers from 15 different schools. The results of this investigation showed that both students and teachers would prefer there to be higher levels of inquiry behaviours in Tasmanian science classrooms, with teachers indicating a preference for significantly higher levels than students. The perceptions of different sub-groups within the student population were also analysed.An examination of the Tasmanian curriculum documents showed that they supported the use of inquiry teaching methodologies, as defined by the ITIC scales. From the above investigations it was concluded that it would be desirable for there to be higher levels of inquiry methodologies in Tasmanian science classes, and that the production of the ITIC provides a means of monitoring and measuring any change.

This thesis sets out to examine the capacity of new governments to influence partisan-based policy and legislation. It examines two newly elected Queensland governments - the Nicklin Country-Liberal government in 1957- 1961 and the Goss Labor government in 1989- 1990 and analyses the introduction by those governments of major industrial relations legislative reform. The Nicklin Coalition government was elected to the Queensland parliament in 1957 after the collapse of the Gair Labor government. The Coalition was committed to extensive industrial relations legislative reform but had not prepared for, or anticipated the constitutional, administrative and legal problems associated with such reform. Nor had it taken into account the concessions that would need to be made to the state's trade unions in order to effect its reforms. Consequently it was not until 1961 that it found the time was propitious for the introduction of its major legislative reforms and the restructuring of the state's principal industrial relations legislation. By contrast, in 1989 the Goss government elected as a consequence of the National Party's collapse in the face of the Fitzgerald Inquiry of 1987 had prepared itself for government. As a result it was able to take advantage of its newly elected status and the existence of the Hanger Report (1988) to introduce its legislative intentions quickly, in such a way that it did not alienate the business community. Preparation and circumstances therefore allowed Labor to repeal earlier legislation supported by business and introduce its own changes with little or no opposition. The thesis concludes that their political and economic inheritance and the existing policy environment will in varying degrees limit new governments. But their ability to introduce partisan-based legislative change quickly is also determined by the degree of preparation for the process of government, undertaken prior to their election. This thesis demonstrates that new governments can make a difference and effect changes to the industrial relations environment. However if this potential is to be realised and new governments are to take advantage of their newly elected status it will require a significant degree of administrative preparation or a considerable period of acclimatisation to the rigours of office.

<p><strong>This essay reflects on the thoughts and experiences of social workers in child protection agencies when it comes to talking about sexuality with teenagers, age 13-20, who is being subjected to inquiry. The research is qualitative and based on five semi-structured interviews. It has a phenomenological position and has been analyzed hermeneutically through cognitive and gender theory. Previous research shows that youths who get in contact with child protection often have issues about their sexuality. This study show that social workers in the agencies lack knowledge about this issue and that they seldom talks about it with the teenagers or their own colleagues. They are however aware of risks involved with the youth’s sexual activities and the problems that may evolve from it. Despite this they sometimes avoid the subject. Their reason is that they are afraid of investigating more than necessary and by doing so offend the clients. Sexuality for them is a private area and they feel that they need motivation for asking certain questions. The study also shows that they find it easier to talk with teenagers of the same gender as themselves. The teenagers therefore get varied help and treatment. </strong></p>