Echoes of Experience: The Narrative Forces of the Qu’Appelle Valley explores the possibility of playing on the picturesque notion of a ‘folly’ within this Southern Saskatchewan valley. By incorporating an understanding of the physical and narrative forces that have shaped the valley as both place and space, speculative interventions are proposed that generate an awareness of past conditions in order to provide some trace of those narratives within the future of the valley. This practicum endeavors to use landscape narrative inquiry as a tool that helps one to understand the landscape experience by harkening to the ‘echoes’ that beckon people to the Qu’Appelle Valley’s hills and lakes. The valley is a setting for exploration and for experience. Working within a narrative when designing allows those key experiences to be extracted, along with subsequent narratives, and developed into a three-dimensional space. This results in a meandering yet defined direction of thought and reflection during the course of design. By revealing what was once previously hidden within the landscape, the spirit of place reemerges, and the new design becomes integral in the experience and understanding of self and of place.

Consolidation of Acute Care Surgical Services (ACSS) as a response to multiple challenges in providing timely and high-quality emergency services is a growing interest among healthcare policymakers. However, very little is known about patient experiences within this system. This study explores patient perceptions of their acute care surgical experiences within a consolidated ACSS program. A qualitative study guided by the tenets of Appreciative Inquiry was conducted. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews and personal stories. Thirteen participants were involved, seven females and six males of varying ages; all underwent emergency surgeries including appendectomy, cholecystectomy, and small bowel obstruction surgery. Findings suggest that clear and effective communication, excellent nursing care, timely access to surgical services, continuity of care, patient safety, transfer to an Acute Care Surgical (ACS) site, communication regarding transportation, and process of admission to an ACS site play important roles in patient experiences within a consolidated ACSS.

The steady increase of technology has become particularly ubiquitous in environments of heart surgery. Patients in these environments come into close contact with technology in its many guises. Often, practitioners may be deterred from engaging with patients because technology and the associated routines of care become the focus. As a result, it is important to understand how patients make sense of the technological situations encountered during treatment and recovery with attention to the constitution of identity and emerging moral issues. A narrative methodology was employed to examine patients’ experiential accounts of the technological in open-heart surgery and recovery. Sixteen patients were interviewed 3-4 days after surgery and 4-6 weeks after discharge, in addition participant journals were employed. Study results pointed to the technological as the dominant discourse in heart surgery and recovery, strongly organizing health care practices and patients’ recovery. These discursive influences shaped participants’ stories resulting in two temporal shifts of authorial voice. Authorial voice reflects the dominant discourse and structured how stories unfolded. The first temporal shift exhibited how technology acted as the authorial voice, structuring stories of the preoperative and early postoperative period. Although participants were the narrators of their own stories, they were strongly influenced by the dominant discourse of the technological and its associated dimensions of care. Participants’ stories revealed how patients were at the centre of activity, but passive, universal and undifferentiated. Although technology continued to influence stories of the later postoperative period and recovery at home, there was a shift of authorial voice to participants. Narratives reflected how the technological was incorporated into participants’ daily lives, but their stories included more personal elements rooted in their own particularities. Study implications involve a critical uptake of technology that emphasizes the balance between technologically- and humanistically-focused practices in heart surgery and recovery. A key implication is the critical need to encompass affective and social dimensions of patients within the technologically-driven practices of heart surgery. Of great significance is how practitioners, particularly nurses, can act as supporting characters in helping with transitions of authorial voice from the technological back to the participant.

The steady increase of technology has become particularly ubiquitous in environments of heart surgery. Patients in these environments come into close contact with technology in its many guises. Often, practitioners may be deterred from engaging with patients because technology and the associated routines of care become the focus. As a result, it is important to understand how patients make sense of the technological situations encountered during treatment and recovery with attention to the constitution of identity and emerging moral issues. A narrative methodology was employed to examine patients’ experiential accounts of the technological in open-heart surgery and recovery. Sixteen patients were interviewed 3-4 days after surgery and 4-6 weeks after discharge, in addition participant journals were employed. Study results pointed to the technological as the dominant discourse in heart surgery and recovery, strongly organizing health care practices and patients’ recovery. These discursive influences shaped participants’ stories resulting in two temporal shifts of authorial voice. Authorial voice reflects the dominant discourse and structured how stories unfolded. The first temporal shift exhibited how technology acted as the authorial voice, structuring stories of the preoperative and early postoperative period. Although participants were the narrators of their own stories, they were strongly influenced by the dominant discourse of the technological and its associated dimensions of care. Participants’ stories revealed how patients were at the centre of activity, but passive, universal and undifferentiated. Although technology continued to influence stories of the later postoperative period and recovery at home, there was a shift of authorial voice to participants. Narratives reflected how the technological was incorporated into participants’ daily lives, but their stories included more personal elements rooted in their own particularities. Study implications involve a critical uptake of technology that emphasizes the balance between technologically- and humanistically-focused practices in heart surgery and recovery. A key implication is the critical need to encompass affective and social dimensions of patients within the technologically-driven practices of heart surgery. Of great significance is how practitioners, particularly nurses, can act as supporting characters in helping with transitions of authorial voice from the technological back to the participant.

This thesis examines the role of epistemic cognition within the context of a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) curriculum for secondary science. The study employs a new form of design-based research, called Model-Based Design Research (MBDR), which first maps a formal pedagogical model onto the curriculum design, and then assesses how the enacted curriculum adheres to the design. The curriculum design was a ten-week Grade 11 Biology unit that met the Ontario Ministry requirements for evolution and biodiversity, and included activities situated within a unique immersive environment called EvoRoom. The thesis includes an assessment of students' epistemological views about science and science learning, and evaluates the epistemic commitments of KCI using a relevant theoretical framework of epistemic cognition. The analysis reveals the complex interconnections amongst the epistemological, pedagogical and technological elements of the design, resulting in recommendations for future design iterations as well as theoretical insights concerning the KCI model.

Through narrative, poetic, and visual inquiry, this arts-informed thesis reclaims the silenced voices and life histories of both our elderly farmers and of our elderly architecture--the barn. Using the life history model of research (Knowles & Cole, 2001), I engage in informal "chats" (Archibald, 2008, p. 377) with my elderly father to seek out the meaning and significance of his life spent on the farm--and his emotional response to the taking down of his two bank barns after the sale of his farm. What results is a "responsive" (Knowles & Cole, 2001, p. 10) representation of data, an alternative type of meaning and knowledge that is known as arts-informed qualitative representation.

This thesis comprises an exploration of the practice of Holistic Massage, working across the sociological areas of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM), body work, emotional labour, sociological phenomenology and narrative inquiry. Holistic Massage is one of a plethora of practices encompassed by the field of CAM. While there has been steadily increasing sociological interest in CAM in recent years, much research has treated this diverse group as relatively homogeneous. This thesis looks at one practice in depth, in order to address issues specific to Holistic Massage – including what ‘holism’ adds up in to in practice, and the devaluation of knowledge based on touch(ing) – as well as those concerning CAM more broadly. Hence, whilst drawing on existing research on CAM, this research also addresses a lacuna within it. This thesis employs the conceptual tool of ‘touching work’, which brings together the concepts of ‘emotional labour’ and ‘body work’ in a way that draws out relevant aspects of each around the fulcrum of touch, thus accounting for the latter in both its sensory and emotional meanings. In so doing, it also contributes to the recently burgeoning literature on the senses in sociology, and to an embodied sociology more generally. The thesis also draws on sociological phenomenology, in particular the notion of the intersubjective ‘stock of knowledge’, and the understanding of talk as constitutive of the everyday social world. The overall methodological approach taken brings together phenomenological theory with narrative inquiry, and specifically with the analysis of the form and content of talk. The analysis presented is based around data from loosely-structured interviews with ten women who do Holistic Massage. The interviews were analysed in terms of their overall shape and distinctive features (Chapter Three) and, in subsequent chapters, with respect to both what was said and how it was said. This analysis examines the constitution of a Holistic Massage stock of knowledge (Chapter Four) and how the practice is bounded (Chapter Five), and concludes in Chapter Six by taking a step back from the detail of the data to look at what can be known from it about Holistic Massage and touching work Piecing together the constitution by practitioners of a stock of professional Holistic Massage knowledge makes a significant contribution to the sociology of CAM. Also, by uniting phenomenological sociology and narrative inquiry, it provides a novel perspective on a form of work which is part of a small but significant contemporary occupational field in the UK. In particular, it draws out the multiple aspects of touch which can in fact be known and articulated through talk and challenges ideas about the supposedly ineffable character of touch. In this regard, it points to similarities between how practitioners talk about this and the Foucauldian challenge to the ‘repressive hypothesis’, which sees people as in fact talking readily and in detail about matters where they claim silence prevails.

The purpose of this study was to explore the selected middle years teachers’ experiences of promoting student learning in student-centered classrooms, and how these recalled experiences might affect their own future teaching and assist other teachers to promote student learning. Based on social constructivism as the epistemological foundation, I chose Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as the research methodology. AI values people’s positive experiences and emphasizes the importance of the positive core of change (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2000). In total, there were 53 middle years teachers in China and Canada who responded to an online survey. Four Chinese education experts were interviewed online, and 12 Canadian education experts participated in an interpretation panel. The findings showed that both Chinese and Canadian participants believed that engaging students in their learning was the core of creating student-centered classrooms. They regarded group study as the most popular instructional strategy that was used to promote student-centered learning. Most participants stated that they had changed or planned to change their teaching practices because they had positive teaching experiences in student-centered classrooms. Chinese participants stated that they had shared their positive teaching experiences with other teachers at three levels: school divisions/districts, schools, or grades/subjects. The main activities for communication among Chinese teachers included group discussion, collective lesson planning, and classroom visits. Canadian participants reported that they usually shared their educational ideas and teaching experiences with other teachers in both formal and informal ways, such as chatting with each other during breaks, developing learning projects together, and communicating with each other through school networking websites. In addition, findings also showed that most Chinese middle years teachers teach a single subject, but many Canadian middle years teachers teach multiple subjects. Based on this research, I suggested that teachers should apply multiple instructional strategies in their classrooms, serve students, and collaborate with parents/families. School boards and schools should make more efforts to encourage their teachers to communicate with each other, formally and regularly by providing policy, technical, and financial supports for relevant programs and activities. Teachers should choose either a single subject or multiple subjects to teach according to their own willingness and abilities. Future researchers may benefit by using Appreciative Inquiry to explore people’s positive experiences in education, and should be more open-minded by conducting cross-cultural and inter-cultural research to facilitate educators to communicate with each other and learn from each other.

This narrative inquiry began with queries into the identity-making experiences of two teachers, Anna and Penny, at the beginning of their careers. Through weekly research conversations over 2 years, they told stories of their experiences in school. Over time, it became clear that their personal experiences with their families outside school shaped who they were in their classrooms with children. Their professional identities—their stories to live by—began on personal knowledge landscapes and then were recomposed into professional knowledge landscapes. They experienced tension when their familial stories of what it meant to be a teacher were interrupted or challenged. From the midst of teachers’, children’s, and families’ lives together in schools, Anna and Penny worked to make sense of these tension-filled experiences. Travelling between each others’ worlds was complex. Their personal experiences helped them make sense of difficult situations in their classrooms and contributed to their teacher knowledge. Connelly and Clandinin refer to this form of teacher knowledge as “personal practical knowledge” (1988, p. 25). The research presented in this dissertation attends to the personal practical knowledge, the intellectual work, that Anna and Penny used as beginning teachers. This research contributes to the larger practical and social aspects of beginning teachers. Stories of attrition and retention, struggle and survival, have iii shaped previous research literature as well as the professional practical landscape where beginning teachers work. Attending to ways beginning teachers make sense of these stories around them, and the stories of tension in their first classrooms, opens possibilities for teacher educators, administrators, policy makers, colleagues, families, and students to create spaces for new stories to be told. In any new situation uncertainty will occur. This research acknowledges that tension is inherent in any new situation and emphasizes the possibility of sustaining beginning teachers in their stories of themselves as teachers in the midst of that tension. This inquiry makes openings for conversations about the importance of acknowledging familial and personal stories as part of what sustains a person at the beginning of a teaching career.

The purpose of this study was twofold: to find out how teachers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) conceived curriculum, teaching and learning and to examine how professional learning and development (PLD) might impact on changes in the teachers’ thinking and approaches. The research was spurred by my own involvement in the revision of the national New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and interest in the contested nature of curriculum related to English language learning. EAL teachers face challenges addressing the cross-Learning Area positioning of EAL and, at the same time, are afforded significant autonomy. PLD is needed to support teachers to make curriculum decisions that support English language learners’ (ELLs) to develop competency in English language with urgency. This is because ELLs need to manage the English language demands as they engage in the complex learning that is articulated in the NZC, along with their peers. I adopted an action research methodology to explore both how EAL teachers conceived curriculum and how PLD about EAL teaching and learning might impact on shifts in teachers’ understanding. I was a practitioner-researcher as I carried out PLD for two teachers over a period of six months. Those teacher-participants were teachers of EAL from different secondary schools with different professional contexts. Teaching-as-inquiry was the predominant approach of the PLD. This approach was consistent with my action research. The PLD comprised of a range of interruptions to teachers’ everyday work that assisted them to explore their own practice. The research drew on records of these interruptions to provide evidence of changes in teacher-participants’ thinking. The recorded conversations were captured through semi-structured interviews, video-stimulated recall and ‘learning conversations’. This qualitative data was analysed in one cycle which explored teachers’ thinking and actions about EAL curriculum. A second cycle focused my recorded reflections about my practice and on the impact of particular forms of PLD facilitation on shifts in the teachers’ thinking and actions. I created a review of literature for each cycle. This recursive process allowed me to reflect on my role as a PLD facilitator in action. Several themes emerged as the cycles were drawn together to examine how PLD impacted on shifts in teachers’ understanding of curriculum for EAL. One theme that emerged was the value of a culture of inquiry, where my action research was linked with the participants’ teaching-as-inquiry cycles. Another theme related to how PLD could influence teachers’ reconceptualising of curriculum for teaching multilingual English language learners. A third theme was how my PLD facilitation could impact on effective teaching and learning for Pasifika learners. Findings can be drawn from my study for both teacher practice and for PLD facilitation. This research adds to New Zealand research about teaching ELLs, and Pasifika students in particular. It shows how giving attention to both students’ home language strengths and academic English language learning needs can change the way teachers see pathways and work towards improved outcomes for students. The value of inquiry for teachers was confirmed in this action research, as a useful approach for bring about change in teachers’ thinking and approaches to teaching. The PLD interruption process, which included analysis of rich information about students, challenging conversations and the maintenance of respectful relationships was confirmed as an effective combination for engaging teachers in shifting their foci. Self-reflections on my PLD facilitation role, using an inquiry approach, assessed through adult learning principles, provided a useful stocktake which I would recommend for other PLD facilitators.